Are our children under stress over studies?

With parents chasing their children towards higher marks, constantly reminding them of better grades, injecting a sense of fear and anxiety of exams in them and so on and so forth... Are we stressing out our children?

While our children are living in a world of gizmos empowering themselves with literally any information in the universe at the click of a button, are they lacking the ability to cope with modern day stress?

Experts opine that while children can be trained to handle a certain level of stress, they need not be grown in pods and grown just for exams. It’s not them but the parents who are stressed out and sharing the same with them making them look blank.

Commonly the stress is carried by the parents and transferred to children by them due to lack of awareness of their children’s strengths and limitations, lack of proper goals and dreams for their children, lack of proper awareness of the duties and responsibilities as parents, and preparing the home environment for the upcoming exams, according to psychiatrists and counsellors who deal with children.

“Every child is an individual. He or she should be understood with his/her strength and limitations. They have a dream, the dream with a goal as a child which may be true or false and depends on the maturity of the child”, says Dr Benny Varghese, CBSE Student Counsellor.

He further said that no individual wants to be a failure. Failure occurs due to their limitations of which they are not aware, did not get a chance to work upon or fear to face the consequences. For a child to accrue a strong individuality, the environment where the child lives should be child-friendly, and the factors of the environment should be with positive vibes like parents and home, teachers and school, colleagues and classroom and subject and their life goals.

According to psychiatrists, stress is excessive worrying about upcoming exams, fear of being evaluated or an apprehension about the consequences. Stress is our mind and body’s response or reaction to a real or imagined threat, event or change. A minimum degree of stress is important for any organism to act upon. If it exceeds, it breaks.

According to Dr Amira al Raidaniya, Head of Psychiatry at Al Masarrah Hospital, the most common stress signs are related to physical, behavioural, emotional and cognitive ones.

“The physical signs are increased breathing, increased heartbeat, muscles tightening, cold and clammy hands, hands shake, fatigue, sleeplessness, dry mouth, headache, increased sweating, and restlessness,” she said.

Additionally, the behaviour signs are hostility, irritability and under/over eating while the emotional signs are anxiety, depression/feeling low, being easily upset, short temper, poor self-confidence, feeling tense, hopelessness and helplessness. Parents should watch out for such symptoms or cognitive signs which impair cognitive function, misinterpretation of information, reduces the ability to concentrate, reduces the ability to think clearly, reduces the ability to remember accurately, affects attention and bring the child to a

specialist.

However, some experts say what our children lack in today’s world is the ability to face challenges of life with a positive attitude.

“I don’t believe modern day children are stressed, but I believe the ability to cope with adversity and stress is impaired”, says Dr Gerry D’Costa, specialised psychiatrist at Badr al Samaa.

“The sheltered life of children and parents’ intolerance to failure prevent people from developing resilience. Children must get a clear message that to fail is human, and every failure is a challenge to be faced rather than the end of life”, adds Dr Gerry.

According to P M Jabir, a social worker, says one should not let children grow not seeing the life outside their homes.

“In many families, I’ve seen children are grown like broiler chickens by feeding them with school notebooks and growing them just to face exams. But in real life, they fail miserably and often try to run away from life”, said Jabir.

With this in mind, India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), a system to which the largest student population in Oman is registered to, has begun a free counselling campaign for higher secondary students.

“We, at CBSE, will provide free of cost pre-examination psychological counselling to the students taking X and XII exams in 2020 as part of the board’s outreach programme which caters to students’ and parents’ population and vast geographical network of schools in and outside India,” Rama Sharma, Head of Media and Public Relations at the CBSE, told the Observer.

“Life will bring stress and failure. But true success is facing life and dealing with both victory and defeat alike”, experts said unanimously.

Dr Muna al Shekaili, Consultant — Child Psychiatry, admitted that there has been a great amount of stress among children and parents, and unwittingly the reason behind it is they pin high hopes beyond their capacities and capabilities and not knowing the skills of their children.