Everyone has faced an unimaginable number of hardships in the past one year, and there seems no end to it in the coming future. Be it a rich figure or a person of below poverty line, their struggles differ but everybody has faced something or other during the pandemic. The migrant laborers had to go back to their villages, and the ones who used to have a secured job became unemployed overnight. Like them, there is also a section of society who faced major issues, but most were overlooked. Yes, I am talking about the ones, who are living a “perfect and best of their life” according to others. And you guessed it right, I am addressing the pillar of a society, the “Youths” or to be precise, the “Students.”
Yeah, students are not going to school and the exams are getting postponed, what else could they want? That’s the question everyone is throwing on students and ignoring the genuine issues. So what is the actual issue? The real issue lies in the system, which does not seem to be student-friendly. A system that continuously ignores the mental health of its students cannot be an appropriate administration.
According to a study it was found that high school students are experiencing rising stress levels and lower engagement with learning since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the current education system acts as a calculator, only stresses numbers (marks, grades, ranking). It weighs student’s ability on the marks they score and not on the knowledge they have. This creates pressure on students to study for getting good marks, and here we lack as a society in providing our youngsters with the perfect knowledge. This keeps growing and children’s mind goes on with this functioning. Further, all this build-up pressure forms stress and health issues too.
A senior lecturer at Stanford GSE stated about the psychology of students, “They are more stressed than they were before the pandemic, they have more work, they are less engaged in school, and their relationships with teachers and [other] kids are strained.”
This recent lifestyle has impacted students severely, starting from kids to high school students, all of them got affected by this. Daily online classes and investing hours to attend them have made the young generation more attached to “Online life” or a life that runs on a phone/laptop. Parents have noticed the behavioral changes in their children, after their bonding with the gadgets. The pandemic brings a completely another way of life, and everybody is trying to cope-up with it. The new culture of doing mostly everything online, including studies, has created an imbalance in a student’s life. As it is observed that the workload given to the youngsters are too heavy for them to manage. Consequently, their sleep cycle gets disturbed, and they suffer from a lack of sleep. According to scientific reports, lack of sleep is one of the crucial causes of Stress. This is actually surprising because the new culture should have been more relaxing, but the reports depict completely opposite scenarios. As per a report, 43percent of the students reported sleeping less, and about 5 percent said they were getting less than four hours a night.
There are many such reasons that cause stress to students in their early stages of life where they should be enjoying. Other sources include anxiety for the future and finances, one of the biggest reasons behind a youth’s suicide. In between all this, the youth is getting away from the little joyful moments of their life.
Unfortunately, there is no particular solution for this, what can be helpful is the behavior and knowledge of parents and teachers towards mental health. So, the children can freely talk to them about their situation. In recent times, lending an ear to someone is the most precious gift, which somehow lessens the amount of pain. As a part of society, we can improve ourselves in this part and make a better environment for the upcoming generations. A world with more knowledge and awareness is far better than a society with stereotypes.
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