For over six months last year, Avira*, a brilliant Class 10 student in Tiruchi, stopped attending school, saying she was afraid of failing the model tests being held in the run-up to the board exams in February this year. “After cajoling, counselling, alternative therapy and even violent arguments, we finally realised that Avira had been subconsciously affected by the constant threats of her teachers and peer group of dire consequences if she didn’t do well in the public exams,” says her father. “Avira has resumed school, and we hope she will be able to cope with the board exams. Perhaps my daughter reacted to stress in a very extreme manner, but I wonder how many children are forcibly suppressing their fears and attempting these exams every year. It’s a kind of mental harassment that is very hard for adults to understand.”
This week, the Tamil Nadu State government decided to cancel a proposal to hold public exams for Classes 5 and 8 in March and April, bringing much cheer to the children, parents and teachers, but senior school board exams, scheduled to start in mid-February, are still very much a part of the academic calendar.
Stressful experience
Every year, a familiar drama plays out in homes where children are attempting their Class 10 or Class 12 exams: panic, followed by months of fast-forwarded learning through coaching centres (usually begun the year before), model tests, and then the final event. The board of certification hardly matters – every school makes higher- and higher secondary education as tense and performance-driven as possible.
Competitive examinations such as the recently-introduced National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for Medicine have only added to the anxiety levels among school children.
“Exams are stressful, irrespective of your age. When someone is assessing your performance, it is a stressful experience,” says R Karthik Deivanayagam, District Mental Health Programme Officer, Pudukottai.
Dr Karthik sees at least one child daily with school-related stress problems per week. “Children learn by observing their parents and they should know that education is a tool to acquire knowledge and also to understand society,” he says.
When the sole responsibility for success or failure in an exam is laid on the student, parents fail to realise the extent of stress that a child undergoes to fulfill their expectations, adds Dr Karthik.
Fear of failure
The demand for some courses (Medicine/Engineering/Civil Services) over others, has boomed because it plays up to the dream of every parent for their child to be employed in a lucrative career.
Parents who graduated from school in more relaxed times, may be unable to understand why their seemingly well-adjusted children score low to poor marks in public exams despite extra tuitions.
- Mental illness and mental health problems are often confused, which leads to misinformation, says R Karthik Deivanayagam, District Mental Health Programme Officer, Pudukottai.
- “Mental illness/disorder, refers to a category of illnesses listed in the International Classification of Disorders. There are a cluster of symptoms that must be observed over a period of time for it to be labelled as a mental illness. This is essentially a clinical diagnosis, and there is no laboratory test to substantiate it,” he explains.
- In mental health problems, a person may exhibit only a few of the symptoms similar to a mental disorder, but in varying degrees, and not serious enough to be labelled a full-blown illness. “When a person has a mental health problem, he or she has a functional impairment in carrying out their role as a family member, student or employee. That’s when we should think of getting help from outside,” says Dr Karthik.
- Children exhibit their response to stress in different ways, he says. “Even high achievers in class start hating their school or classwork; some children can become insomniac; or start overeating or starving themselves; they have palpitations or panic attacks; they can be irritable or throw violent tantrums. Parents should realise that every child has some special talents that need space to be developed. Just focusing their day on studies is not healthy," Dr Karthik cautions, adding that all children need at least 8 hours of sleep for ideal growth.
“To clear board or competitive exams, you need to know the underlying principles. But our system of schooling, especially in small cities, is still oriented towards rote learning of answers. Lateral thinking and deeper perceptive understanding of concepts are not part of our educational curriculum, so children feel at a loss during external assessment,” says M Arulsubila, founder of Abi’s Psychological Counselling and Research Centre in KK Nagar, Tiruchi.
The certified counsellor says that though demanding parents create anxiety among their school-going children, they are reluctant to seek therapy. “For children, education means marks, while for parents, it is about the money they have spent on fees, and the prospect of a good job at the end of it. Though children are very creative today, they are also overly sensitive to defeat and rejection. Their stress-tolerance levels are very low, because they haven’t been taught to empathise with others and or analyse their own behaviour,” says Arulsubila. “Though my work is primarily with children, very often, I end up counselling the parents too.”
Race to the top
Private schools in Tamil Nadu continue to advertise their toppers on banners and billboards despite the practice being banned since 2017 and the emotional distress among students who don’t make the cut is high. Many institutions also ‘weed out’ slow learners or children with medium-range scores in the higher or higher secondary classes by issuing them Transfer Certificates to other schools so that their 100% pass percentage record will remain unaffected, say many parents and counsellors.
“I am not a parent who likes to give too much importance to marks over knowledge, but in the real world, these numbers do make a difference,” says Manushi*, a Tiruchi-based financial consultant who is also a mother of two. “Children these days are either too stressed out or too easy-going with regard to schooling. I feel my own kids are too laidback about their studies, so there’s always a difference of opinion between me and them when it comes to academics,” she says. “I suppose we must learn to appreciate that people who don’t do well in school can do well in life.”
(*Names have been changed to protect privacy)
