Today’s children meet academic, social and commercial pressures. What do you think are the causes and what solutions are possible?

Civilization has brought about scholastic, interactional and materialistic pressures that today’s children undergo. As opposed to the seeds of the plight seeming quite evident, the resolutions are by no means going to be simple; nevertheless, they exist. Seeing a child heading to school with a bag almost twice as heavy as a child himself is already oppressive. This is because parents have unrealistic expectations from their children. They want them to excel in every field, thus not letting them bring out their hidden talents and find their niche. This complication in itself gives rise to many other corollaries. The root of all of these mishaps is that today’s child competes with a child not of his neighborhood, but of a ‘global village’. This means that globalization may be another cause of the predicament. This all becomes a setback in both physical and mental developments of a child. Not only do academic pressures come out of globalization, but social and commercial ones, too, stem from this. While parents goad their children into advocating their inherited rites and rituals, or customs, the entire world coerces them into assimilating into a globalized world; hence, a child is in a muddle over the mishap. This is likely to bring about a horrible scenario - a child chooses neither and prefers individuality, therefore becoming a person far from being a community one. As far as commercial tensions are concerned, causes are various. Some of them, in my personal view, are globalization, up-to-date technology, and above all, peer pressure, which is positive if peers can differentiate vice and virtue, and rather negative if they cannot. Consider a child walking with his friends and see them use gadgets that his parents cannot afford to buy. Naturally, a child gets depressed. For the world has changed dramatically, such issues were not seen heretofore. More precisely, the solutions are not going to be easy-to-approach. Parents had better have realistic expectations from their children, and a child has to be handled with great care and love. However, the main onus is on teachers. A child has to learn not to compete, but to co-operate; more vitally, a child has to have no hurdle on his route to finding himself. Summing up, I reiterate my opinion that a child must be shielded from today’s pressures. Challenging though the solutions to the hitch are, they are realistic, at the very least.