Fully Loaded
I was recently with two school kids on a jeepney. Each carried a big bag, no smaller than the type a returning balikbayan would tug along after decades of being away from home. Put one over the other, the boys’ bags almost reached the ceiling of the vehicle.
The boys were returning home from school. One asked the other what he was doing that night. The response was a litany of subjects to study. I was amazed to hear, since both of them already looked tired and sleepy.
Childhood, in my time, meant playing or doing nothing. When I was a small boy, my parents asked me to be good and well-behaved. If I excelled in school or won in a neighborhood race, they considered it a bonus. The few minor tasks I was made to do were meant simply to teach me responsibility.
Times have changed, I know. Today’s children are under pressure to be smart, to be popular, to be star athletes if they are boys or to be beauty queens if they are girls. To achieve all these, young people – from pre-schoolers to teenagers – are expected to work hard, so hard, and to compete intensely.
We are now training our kids to take grown-up goals very early on. In return, we have kids that act like grown-ups but do not even know yet how to tie their shoelaces. Children today are being prematurely forced into a world of adult pressures and responsibilities.
School is one of the common places where special pressure is placed on young children. Teachers hold children for long hours in class, and still give them homework to do. The kids are busy from morning till night with all other things, like athletic practice, tutorial sessions, doing class projects, researching class assignments. If these were not enough, children are demanded to come for extra days of special activities.
At home, parents set the bar very high for their children’s academic performance. It is becoming common nowadays to see an irate parent storming the principal’s office if his child gets a failing grade. Sometime ago, a neighbor’s child altered the grades on his report card. He didn’t have a failing grade, but he was afraid to disappoint his father’s expectation of a straight As.
Furthermore, many parents simply cannot wait to get their little kids started in school. They cheat about their tiny ones’ ages just so they can get them enrolled. But children who are forced to start school before reaching the prescribed admission age may not yet be up to the learning capacity of their older classmates. Thus, they may feel inferior when participating in class.
We are fondly amused to see small children laboriously carry heavy backpacks of books, as if they have a whole library on their backs. We forget that children don’t have the physical strength of grown-ups. The incidence of scoliosis among today’s young people is on the rise.
Another problem is that young children have a special sense of time. Their minutes seem like hours. That’s why children have a short attention span, they easily get bored.
When a child is subjected to adult clockwork, time becomes excruciatingly slow and long to him. Then, his activities begin to lose the sense of appeal or excitement. When young people do not have time to pursue their real interests because they are too busy with things they don’t care much about, they become frustrated. And frustration is one of the breeding grounds for rebelliousness.
A psychologist friend of mine interestingly relates the early sexual awakening among today’s young people to the pressures they go through. He says, “Our teenagers are gasping for breath amid the bland activities that we adults force them into. And the raw excitement of sexual relations is fresh air to them.” As they are subjected to adult pressures, young people begin to view themselves as adults, so they do things that adults do. Sex is one of those.
Of course we understand that, to some extent, children have to learn to live under pressure. The world is becoming more and more competitive. Obviously, one needs to acquire more and better skills these days. Fortunately, children have a tremendous natural capacity to learn and to cope.
It is important, however, that adults distinguish between what is really necessary and what is not to require of young children. There are certain normal, inherent pressures that every child must meet. He must learn to be punctual at school, to learn table manners, to be respectful of elders, to get along with other children. These are all within a child’s normal capacity at one stage of growth or another.
While it is important for adults, especially parents, to encourage the child to accept competition as a fact of life, it must be done only gradually, to allow the child to gain enough strength to stand under the pressure. To place the child under abnormal pressures – to be brilliant beyond his capabilities, to excel beyond his talents – can break the child. It is cruel, no matter what good intentions lie underneath.
The child who cannot constantly measure up to adult expectations will soon lose his self-confidence, lose the feelings of self-worth that enable a mature person to face life with enthusiasm.