Phew!!! They're finally over! Finally, our town (alongwith half our country!) can breathe a sigh of relief. Life can go on as usual now. We can step out of our houses now and then, and guests are once more welcome now! The Tvs can be on all day again, and children can again talk and play with their friends! What am I talking about? The half-yearly exams, of course! The biggest event this time of the year in our side of the country! And we're only just warming up for the BIG ones in March, the FINALS! Once again life will come to a standstill, parents will lose their appetites and their precious sleep, and exams will haunt us in our nightmares! In our country, our children's exams are bigger than natural disasters, terrorist attacks, budget statements, elections, dowry deaths, murder trials, satellite-launches, everything! For exams, not only do parents put their lives on hold, but make their children's lives miserable! Scoring the highest marks in all subjects becomes the only thing worth achieving, everything else becomes worthless or secondary. The tension in the air is palpable, the stress is visible, and even children as young as 4-5 years old are made to study for as long as five hours or more! What is going on?!
The marks they score in exams are the parameter by which the children's achievements are judged. They are not 'good enough' if they score anything less than 95% marks! The expectations from children are so high, they have become ludicrous! And this is when the children are not even preparing for their exams on their own. Their parents, especially the mothers, sit with them, go through each chapter with them, make them memorize the answers, word-meanings, diagrams, etc., painstakingly making sure that the child knows everything ever written in his/her notebooks during that year “by heart”, so that he/she is capable of reproducing every word on the sheets of exam-paper word-for-word! Amazing effort and hard work on your part! It would all be good though, if all this was not making the child incapable, under-confident and irresponsible! What?! How? It's true though, because during this whole process, year after year, the children are not studying to achieve their personal or academic goals, they are studying to achieve yours! That's because they have no goals of their own, only your expectations and goals to live up to (you try hard to coonvince them are 'good' for them!) Little wonder then, when children grow up, they are completely aimless and irresponsible, and then we blame them or the educational system/government/society as the reason for our children's lack of goals, aims, awareness, responsibility, efforts, decision-making, etc.
But it is us who make our children responsible or useless. When we take control of our children's homework or studies, we take away their responsibility for doing it. We also take away their right to the rewards, personal or otherwise, for its accomplishment. It's their work, let them do it. True, they will often still need your help, but you must help them without doing the work for them. How? Have faith in them that they can do it, then prove it. If you really want to be helpful, help your children learn how to help themselves. Their self-reliance is the key to confidence and what they need really to do their own work and earn their own rewards. To do a good job, it is the actual doing of the task, relying on their own efforts, going through the experience, witnessing the results, assigning goals and reaching them, that will make them believe in their own ability. When a responsibility is assigned to a child, let the task be his or hers to do. That's how children realize whether or not they can do their work on their own, or if they are facing a problem in understanding the concepts. Learning to ask for help is also a great life-lesson that they will learn from this process. But before the children can learn to ask for help, they must first learn to discover, if in fact, they need help. If we just tell them before they even ask for it, it does a lot for our self-confidence, but it certainly doesn't do much for theirs!
If we just jump in and try to make all the decisions, it just releases the children from their the responsibility of determining their own best time, or to plan ahead far enough, or to even know when to ask for help. They know that we will remind them, nag them if need be, because we have taken control! We get so concerned with whether or not they are getting their homework or preparation for exams done, that we lose sight of the fact that it is theirs to do. Some parents even practically end up doing it for their children! We will discuss the dangers attached to this in the next issue. Till then, this is what I'll quote from an ancient Chinese Proverb:
I hear, and I forget.
I see, and I remember.
I do, and I understand.
al mother-teacher, runs Life Express - an after-school center for children. She can be reached at juhimalini@gmail.com. She also writes 'Reflections of an inner Journey'
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