What Junior isn’t telling you Saritha RaiPosted: Sep 05, 2010 at 1952 hrs IST
Children in Indian metros are reaching out to school counsellors to make sense of their increasingly complicated, increasingly lonely lives. A nine-year-old is no longer too young to have a problem — or even know what a problem is. The sullen and forlorn third grader at Sri Kumaran’s Children’s Home in a Bangalore suburb was having frequent weeping bouts at school. The child told the school counsellor that she rarely got to see her overworked mother, who had a frantic career at a call centre. The mother then quit her job but turned resentful and bitter towards the child. Welcome to the harsh realities of student life in a middle-class school in urban India. To help cope with the new dynamic of society and the complexities of modern-day childhood, even regular Indian schools have child counsellors. At the Gundecha Education Academy in Mumbai’s Kandivali suburbs, counsellor Ekta Dharia recounts the case of a bright eight-year-old, who aced her class but steadfastly refused to mingle with her peers. After much drawing out, Dharia discovered that the girl was not shy, it was far more complicated. The girl’s parents were divorced, and her newly single mother was struggling to provide them with a comfortable living. The child started blaming herself, felt she was a burden on her mother and retreated into a shell. There was a time, not too long ago, when a couch and a therapist used to be the staple of sappy American soap operas. But in recent years, confidential counsellor-therapists are becoming increasingly commonplace in middle-class Indian schools. Raking together their experiences is like shining a light on a shifting, rapidly westernising middle-class India. It is a glimpse into how childhood in Bangalore or Mumbai is slowly becoming as complex as it is in Boston or Miami. New Delhi’s Shri Ram School offers counselling services to its students and goes a step beyond. There are workshops on cyber-bullying and drug abuse. Counsellor Gloria Burrett says interventions are critical because of multi-fold factors like peer pressure and family problems. Schools are having to step up and step in. “Families are growing smaller, divorces are getting bitter and kids are traumatised when parents don’t see eye to eye on child-rearing,” says Deepa Sridhar, principal of the Bangalore-based Kumaran’s, on the changing order in a country where marriages and family relationships used to be considered sacrosanct. At Kumaran’s, post the summer-break, academic sessions have begun only a couple of months ago and counsellor Maullika Sharma says she is amazed at the steady stream of eight- or nine-year-olds coming in to seek confidential counselling sessions. “One assumes that these kids are too young to have a problem or even know what a problem is,” says Sharma. A whole cohort of children is growing up at a time when childhood is shrinking and exposure to the wide world and adult problems is escalating, says Radhika Lobo, principal of another middle-class Bangalore school called New Horizon. “Childhood is become distilled into fewer years and young kids are coping with a lot.” In contrast, their parents graduated from school without ever having access to the sounding board and confidant that the school counsellor is. At best, schools had part-time ‘career counsellors’, those know-it-alls who advised tenth graders on the wisdom, for instance, of choosing sciences over humanities in college or vice versa. "Schools and parents are more understanding that children have their own specific problems that need to be dealt with sensitively”, says Dharia of Gundecha Academy of Mumbai. A nine-year-old student in Delhi’s Shri Ram School faced bullying and had receded into a shell. He was suffering from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; but teachers, unfamiliar with the condition, found him difficult and were dismissive of his mother’s concerns. “I had given up hope,” his mother says. Counsellor Burrett met the boy in the basketball court, and got him talking about his problems. She then approached the teachers, told them about the disorder and how to deal with it, and then made the boy part of a social skills group where a few children would interact with each other and discuss issues that bothered them. “My son was very awkward. He still is but he is improving,” his mother says. “In India, there is not much awareness about this learning disorder and I am happy the counsellor intervened and acted as a bridge.” Counsellors say nine- and ten-year-olds come up with innocuous-sounding problems like, “I cannot concentrate in class” or “I cannot study at home”. At Pune’s Dastur group of schools, counsellor Vaishali Billimoria says real issues surface after much probing in repeated sessions. Among the problems she frequently encounters — self-image concerns with even pre-teen kids participating in ‘beauty contests’, cyber-bullying and hostility between parents. Symbiosis Primary School in the same city appointed counsellors two years ago and found that domestic circumstances had a direct impact on its students’ performance and grades. “More than students, there is a need to counsel parents,” says school principal Leena Chaudhari. The counsellor often draws parents into the sessions as well. The school’s counsellor Sheetal Karkare says many students are brought in with issues of abusive language and behaviour. “It all boils down to lack of attention from parents,” she says. The child is often left alone at home and the parents make up for it by giving in to the child’s every want. “The easy life at home makes it difficult for the child to face the world and its challenges,” she says. Though the government mandates that schools appoint qualified counselllors, very few actually do, says Dr Avdesh Sharma, consultant psychiatrist at New Delhi’s Parivartan Centre of Mental Health. “For a population of 1.2 billion, we only have 3,500 psychiatrists registered with India’s professional body,” says Sharma. Having therapists in every school is essential, but not every school has them. Counsellors cite emotional alienation from parents among the top causes of children’s problems. There are other manifestations that counsellors see — in the form of prickly issues like eating disorders and, increasingly in teenagers, sexual promiscuity. So, schools like the reputed Kumaran’s in Bangalore or Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Kolkata could be a microcosm of urban middle-class India, its students grappling with changing family structures alongside newer hazards. About 15 kilometres from the manicured lawns of La Martiniere school in Kolkata (recently infamous for the suicide of teenager Rouvanjit Rawla after allegedly being caned at school), stands the modest building of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan School at Salt Lake. About a year ago, this school too would have been in the news for all the wrong reasons but for the intervention of its student counsellor. The classmates of a quiet teenage student in the school complained that she had stolen their money and valuables. When the grievance was investigated, it came to light that the girl was actually the victim — of blackmail. The girl had befriended a few youths on a social networking site. They invited her over, took pictures of her and then threatened to post the revealing pictures on the site if she did not pay them. “The girl was suicidal when she came to me,” said counsellor Shovana Mukherji. The matter has since been sorted out and the girl is a well-adjusted, responsible student today. A scared and nervous pre-teen came to Kumaran’s Sharma last year to discuss her parents’ ongoing acrimonious divorce. Over the next dozen sessions, as proceedings unfolded in the court, the girl gradually opened up about her abusive father and her anxieties. “What do I do if the court insists I spend time with my father?” she asked. “My mother works so hard but what if we don’t have enough money?” she worried. The confidential sessions were the girl’s safe haven, buffeting her against the acrimonious relationship between her parents. Counsellors say they never take any child’s concern lightly. “I cannot stop the divorce or the animosity but I can prepare the child to deal with it,” Sharma says. There are many different layers to students’ problems in an urban environment where parents are working in a globalised world, according to counsellors at Kumaran’s. Children are despondent that both parents work late, are incessantly on their phones even when at home in the evenings, and barely spare time even during weekends. Since competition in every sphere from pre-school admissions to college seats and jobs is so fierce, pushy parents over-schedule activities while demanding that the children excel in every sphere. “There are children who jump off a horse and into the swimming pool for their next lesson,” says Sridhar, who describes that stress inevitably catches up with the child. It is normal for very young children to be restless but a hyper-active nine-year-old at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Kolkata raised counsellor Mukherji’s antennae. The boy could not sit still for a minute and teachers were exasperated. When she took on his case, Mukherji found the reason. “His parents would not even give him an hour of ‘own time’. He was shepherded from tuition classes to swimming to tennis…” said Mukherji. On the other hand, the percentage of children left to their own devices at home after school hours has risen sharply, the school says. The pressure of belonging, whether in a group in class or some “inner circle”, has acquired new dimensions with children texting each other on cellphones after school or meeting on weekends to hang out. “There are many newer ways of groupism and bullying, what with cellphones, Twitter and Facebook,” says Sumana Moudgal, a counsellor, who recently moved from Kumaran’s to a school in Atlanta in the United States. Neo-materialism in families brings about its own set of challenges for children at school, says Sridhar. “More has become the new minimum,” she says, adding that showy affluence is beginning to impact children. For schools like Kumaran’s, rooted in middle-class values, the most challenging of all is how to deal with situations that transpire beyond the school’s boundaries and hours and invariably creep back into the classroom. Last year, a student was the victim of a vicious Facebook rumour campaign. The school has a stated policy banning the use of cellphones, and has firewalled Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and other websites on school computers. Parents often land at the school’s doors looking for justice and safeguards in cases of cyber-bullying. They ask that the school ban after-school student activities such as logging on to Facebook, sleepovers and late-night partying. “It is heartbreaking to spell out to parents that I am not in charge of what happens to their kids after 4 in the afternoon,” says Sridhar. http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/What-Junior-isn-t-telling-you/676869/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Mental Health Advocacy (News 'N Views) India" group. 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