Balancing School, Homework And Sleep

Once, I met a child who was brought in for counselling by a very concerned father suspecting that his son had developed an addiction to adult media. The father told me that his son’s grades had dropped, he was up late nights, mostly stayed in his room with the laptop and didn’t participate in any outdoor activities.

- Pashmi Khare

When I spoke with the child, he told me that he felt pressured by his parents’ expectations for admission into a good university. He had a lot of homework from school and went to preparatory classes for different subjects; hence, he had no time or energy for anything else.

The child loved football and had a blog on the topic, but his parents believed that there was no real career option in that field and directed towards studying instead. He had a good number of followers on his blog encouraging him to keep it going, but was afraid that his parents wouldn’t approve and so he hid his blog-related activities from them.

In this case, the child had to juggle between school work, preparatory classes and his interest in football – which left him very little time to take a rest or do anything else. The exhaustion was settling in, making him less and less capable of staying focused and feeling more and more tired all the time. Thus, there were three of us in that room.

As children grow, they often start taking charge of their lives in many ways, which is wonderful, but it’s crucial that we help them learn the skills required to have a balanced life. With school, different challenges come up, such as:

Expectations from family, teachers and peers