This year, a highly rated school in Dubai put on a dazzling original musical that proved a smash hit.
The top-notch young high school actors were hand-picked by the creative director of the show, but there was disappointment when at least three of them had to back out due to academic pressures.
“They need to prepare for their high-stakes finals and entrance exams,” said the director.
I would cry myself to sleep every night if I had to make a decision like that.
Passing up on an opportunity to display your talents on a world stage is not easy. There was some indication that the youngsters were pushed to prioritise more traditional classroom education over extracurricular learning, with the director alluding to parental pressure playing a part.
I remember when my mother picked out the clothes I wore every day – this went on until I was 13. Life was a breeze back then, considering how I now spend hours staring at my wardrobe trying to decide what to wear to work or a social gathering. In that period of naivety, the hand-holding made sense – but codependence on parents has an expiration date.
When this spills over into the crucial personality-building teenage years, and then adulthood, the consequences can be socially paralysing.
There is a contemporary term coined for such prolonged meddling – “helicopter parenting”.
Such parents come in many forms – those who are overprotective, those who enrol their kids in a dizzying number of activities while disregarding the youngster’s own interests, and those who are excessively involved in crucial education and career decisions.
This looming fear of some parents that their children are sure to fail in life without their constant guidance was noted by former Stanford dean Julie Lythcott-Haims, whose book How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success was released this year.
The author suggests that helicopter parenting diminishes a child’s chance to learn who they are and how to navigate the world.
While promoting the book, she cited statistics and anecdotal evidence of the rise of depression and other mental and emotional health problems among young people because of parental pressure.
This is particularly true in India, where the pressure to succeed at school and university rears its ugly head at a very young age. Stories such as that of an Indian engineering student who committed suicide because he failed an exam in June are not uncommon. At least 68 students have reportedly taken their own lives over the last three decades on the Indian Institute of Technology campus alone.
Perhaps the most telling indicator of parents' misplaced priorities was a recent survey by HSBC titled The Value of Education: Learning for Life. About half of the Indian parents surveyed ranked their child's professional success as more important than a happy life for the youngster.
You might argue that one leads to the other – but plenty of people will tell you that money cannot buy happiness.
Canadian parents, on the other hand, had a more encouraging take on their children’s future, with 78 per cent making happiness the top priority.
I don’t subscribe to the entirely hands-off approach to parenting, either. I still involve my parents in decisions I make – but it has to be my call. I don’t believe it’s too much to insist on a respectable boundary.
But I still reserve the right to call my mother on those days when I’m stuck with one of life’s perpetual problems: what should I wear to work?
aahmed@thenational.ae