By Meer Mudasir

The other day, I was walking past a coaching centre when I overheard a mother scolding her nine-year-old son. Her words cut through the corridor:“You let eight students go ahead of you, that's murder.”

Murder. Neither failure, nor carelessness. Not even underperformance. Murder.

I stood there stunned, thinking about how a simple slip in rank could be framed as a crime. If childhood is a crime scene, then who exactly is guilty?

This is what parenting has come to in Kashmir. It has turned into a high-stakes tournament where every exam is a final.

Children are no longer seen as individuals with their own character and curiosity. They are treated as carriers of parental ambition, shaped less by love and more by unresolved ego.

The obsession is everywhere: homes, classrooms, and conversations at dinner tables. Parents who once drifted through their own studies now treat their child's second rank as a humiliation.

Marksheets are read out like judgments in court. Uncles and aunts join the chorus. The child is reduced to a stage where adults play out their anxieties.

The consequences are visible in facts and figures. A 2022 study by Child Rights and You (CRY) found that more than 70% of children in Jammu and Kashmir experience academic stress, most of it from parental pressure.

A 2023 survey by Save the Children showed that one in four students between the ages of eight and fourteen report symptoms of anxiety, sleeplessness or self-doubt directly linked to school expectations.

These are children still learning multiplication tables.

The competition starts long before school feels like school. Parents chase admission into“elite” kindergartens as if the rest are wastelands. They measure toddlers by how fast they can recite poems or how many English words they can pronounce.

Four-year-olds are expected to stand on stage and demonstrate knowledge they barely understand. Childhood is turned into a performance long before it has had the chance to be lived.

I have seen how damaging this becomes. Children begin to internalise the message that love is conditional, that joy only counts if it comes with a grade.

A girl who proudly brings home 92% learns that the missing eight marks matter more than the ninety-two she earned. A boy who shows his art is told,“Fine, but why didn't you top maths?”

Their lesson is clear: effort is invisible, only absence matters, the absence of perfection, and approval.

Some children carry this burden in their bodies. They develop stomach aches before exams, because tests have become linked to terror. Others stop trying altogether.

One child I knew tore up his own homework because he had learned that effort would only end in humiliation. These are patterns forming across classrooms.

The weight seeps into teenage years, where children learn to fake smiles, suppress breakdowns and pretend resilience. It travels into adulthood, where success feels hollow and failure feels fatal.

The result is a generation of adults who never believe they are enough, even when they are thriving.

MENAFN02102025000215011059ID1110140155