MY TAKE
CARRYING THE BURDEN OF PARENTS’ DREAMS
Image credit: MONSTERA on Pexels.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
Many years ago, India was ranked as the student suicide capital of the world – followed closely by Japan, if I recall correctly.
Unable to handle the immense pressure imposed by parental expectations to do well and land a high-paying job, students were killing themselves in droves.
A 2008 article published in the Hindustan Times refers to the time when exams are held as “suicide season”.
Recent statistics and reports in Indian media show that things have only gotten worse.
In a podcast published in May 2019 in The Quint, Vishnu Gopinath shares heartbreaking details from a 14-year-old’s suicide note.
She had failed two subjects in her grade 8 half-yearly exams and was one of thousands of students who take their own lives in India every year. He quotes a 2014 report from the Indian government according to which exam-related pressure was the largest cause of suicide in India’s youth.
Between 2014 and 2016, nearly 6,500 students in India committed suicide, according to data recorded by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Academics, psychiatrists and social workers alerted the nation to the dangers. In the Hindustan Times article, psychiatrist Samir Parikh is quoted as saying, “Teenage suicide (over exams) is a national disaster”.
Parents were crying out for change. But those who were not directly impacted looked at the statistics differently. In a bizarre interpretation of the data, they wore the stress almost as a badge of honour, seeing it a single-minded focus on getting ahead. Those who buckled under pressure were collateral damage. They were weak. Look at all those who went on to brilliant careers at Stanford and MIT! Look at Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadela! Look at Indira Nooyi! Products of the same system, they weren’t fazed by exam pressure.
It was the whole tiger mom thing. On steroids. A tiger mom is described as a strict or demanding mother who pushes her child to high levels of achievement using methods regarded as typical of child-rearing in China and other parts of East Asia. You only have to see the downcast child in the Netflix series Away telling his mother, astronaut Lu Wang, that he scored a mere 98 per cent in his math exam to understand this mentality. That this particular parent encouraged him to take some time off to paint, was, one hopes, a message taken seriously by parents across the globe pushing their offspring to achieve ever-higher scores. But I’m not holding my breath, reminded as I am of the teacher who called the parent of a high-school student at a prestigious school in India. The girl was “wasting her time reading for pleasure,” she said. Time that could be put to use to prepare for exams.
This is not an indictment of parents, who, mostly, only want the best for their offspring. This is about dangers of a super-competitive mindset that asks a child what happened to the remaining two per cent. Or why Mr Ahuja’s son scored higher. Desi stand-up comedians have based routines around this, but take a moment to consider what the mindset can lead to and you realize it’s no laughing matter.
And when immigrants bring this mindset to new shores, the pressures go up exponentially. As many struggle to establish themselves, often taking low-paying jobs to put food on the table, suppressing their ego and trying to forget the status they enjoyed back home, they place all their dreams on the fragile shoulders of their children. Their children will succeed where they couldn’t. They will have a bright future in the new country.
Some children are able to navigate the pressure, some are not.
This was brought home in the devastating case of a young man who killed his entire family to prevent them for discovering that he had dropped out of school.
The horrific, tragic incident was reported in the media. Menhaz Zaman came from your average immigrant family. Parents, grandmother and a sister. His father drove a taxi and his sister was studying science, with dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon. Zaman himself was enrolled in an engineering program. His parents believed he was about to graduate in 2019, whereas in reality, he had failed a program in 2015 and had been leading a double life since. He’d pretend to leave to attend classes, but spend his days at the mall or at the gym.
One can’t begin to imagine what thoughts and feelings coursed through the tortured young man’s mind as he pictured their shame at discovering his truth. What inner demons he must have wrestled with as he convinced himself that it was better to kill them than have them experience that shame.
In an article in the Toronto Star, there’s a chilling description of how he peered out from an upstairs window when the police arrived at the door, alerted by a friend Zaman had been chatting with. He opened the front door to let them in.
In another article in the Toronto Star dated November 7, 2020, Betsy Powell quotes Steve Joordens, a psychology professor at UofT: Chronic stress begins to affect the way our brains function. “Less blood flows to the frontal lobe which handles abstract thought and more goes to the limbic system which handles emotion.” This can make focusing on complex activities such as reading or planning meetings more difficult. It can also make it easier to feel overwhelmed by anxiety.
I recall the story of another young man in India who dropped out of high school. His high-achieving parents dealt with the log-kya-kahenge (what will people say) syndrome by making him leave the house whenever they had visitors.
“I used to leave and return, as though from university,” says the man. “I get it now, that’s the only way they could save face.”
This man went on to achieve phenomenal success in his chosen field, but not everyone is so blessed.
There are countless young people who tear themselves apart to “save face”. Just think how this fractured existence might become magnified in a socially-distanced world with most avenues of escape shut. When they can’t even pretend to go to school or follow an acceptable routine, there’s nowhere left to run, nowhere to hide.
It’s time to talk to parents about the dangers of living vicariously – of attempting to realize their own unfulfilled dreams through their children – because children have their own dreams and aspirations.
Not all success looks the same. Not everyone has to have the same markers of success. One can be happy and content in a myriad ways – and not all of them involve becoming a doctor or an engineer.