Children are experiencing increasing educational social and commercial pressures What are the causes What measures do you think can be taken to reduce them

In today’s world, it is true that children are subjected to various stressors and other mental illnesses due to the pressures from the commercial, academic, and competitive requirements of society. From my perspective, this negative phenomenon can be attributed to numerous reasons, and societies need to take several relevant measures to mitigate these issues.

It can be easily observed that the demand for burdens in many factors faced by children has induced some detriments in their lives as well as the community. On an academic level, it is not an exaggeration to say that without an acceptable result on some critical tests such as the National High School Graduation Examination or gaining various foreign language certificates such as International English Language Testing Systems (IELTS) or exams by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), a young adult will struggle to gain admission to a plethora of prestigious universities ahead of their peers. To secure a golden ticket to these educational institutions, students at high school levels usually sacrifice their spare time to play with other friends or do outdoor activities for tedious tutorial classes, as well as the additional time at night to self-study after a long and exhausting day at school. Therefore, children may feel overloaded and under pressure to do well on assignments and tests. If their analyses were lower than they expected, they would experience stress, together with depression, or in the worst-case scenario, commit suicide. To illustrate, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), in numerous countries in East Asia, such as South Korea, China, Japan, and Vietnam, scholars study for approximately 16 hours per day, which causes them to frequently spend a sleepless night trying to learn, associated with a shorter period of sleep, only 3 hours, and this situation is proportional to the number of self-murder cases, about 40,000 cases in these nations, which is one of the highest figures in the world. Furthermore, on a nuclear family level, as the age difference grows larger, it can be seen that the parents and their offspring may share a variety of different opinions. For instance, when kids decided to apply to a social science university, their parents contradicted them because they had a preconception about this major. Instead, parents persuaded them to enroll in a financial university that their sons or daughters did not particularly care about in this field. Consequently, conflicts can occur among family members and their children, causing tension, or even worse, collapse and disconnection in family relationships.

Fortunately, there are a variety of viable solutions that could be adopted to mitigate depression and pressure in children in both academic and social terms. The principal one is that schools and teachers may require a more relaxed classroom atmosphere with an emphasis on cooperation instead of the reliance on competition to push individuals to work harder combined with peer pressure. Besides, they can be allowed to do more extracurricular activities, such as regular physical exercise. Appropriate sports not only reduce the proportion of enduring mental syndromes but also accelerate teenagers’ metabolisms, thereby reducing their chance of developing chronic diseases. As a result, students may feel relaxed after studying for a long time. On top of that, parents can use frequent open communication between them and their sons or daughters to comprehend each difficult issue. Thus, they can help their offspring to set a realistic target based on their authentic interests and potential rather than obstructing children’s aspirations combined with comparing them with their peers. Appropriately, offspring can develop motivation and a passion for learning. Such measures, if implemented, will help diminish the effects children face from heightened stress.

In summary, although pressure can encourage people to challenge their limits to achieve success, I conclude that in the adolescence period, it is illogical for young people to experience pressure too much because this causes specific damage to their mental health. Proper parental guidance, as well as a variety of fundamental changes in school environments, may be the ultimate solution to this problem. Nevertheless, I predict that unless these remedies are adopted as soon as possible, the issues combined with the circumstances leading to the rise in children’s stress will continue to persist in the future.