Parents, when did your child’s suffering become acceptable?

Another student has died.

By the time this article is published, there will likely be another headline, another round of condolences, another debate on social media, and then, as always, silence.

The tragedy itself is heartbreaking. What is perhaps more troubling is how familiar it has become.

Every year, we hear of students taking their lives in the midst of board examinations, entrance tests, competitive examinations, and admission cycles. Every year, there is outrage for a few days. Every year, promises are made. And every year, the cycle repeats.

At some point, we need to ask ourselves a difficult question: when did children's suffering become an acceptable cost of education?

Over the years, we have built an educational culture that often mistakes distress for dedication. A teenager studying fourteen or sixteen hours a day is celebrated. Chronic stress is normalised. Sleep deprivation is worn as a badge of honour. Anxiety is seen as evidence of ambition.

Somewhere along the way, suffering became proof of seriousness. And this should be concerning even if it produced healthy, fulfilled young adults. Increasingly, it does not.

As a psychologist, I often meet young people who have learned to tie their self-worth to performance long before they have had the opportunity to discover who they are. Their confidence rises and falls with marks, ranks, admissions, and outcomes. Many carry the belief that success earns them value and failure takes it all away.

What message are we sending when a teenager begins to believe that a single examination can determine whether life is worth living?

No examination should carry that kind of psychological weight.

No result should be powerful enough to convince a young person that there is no future beyond it.

If a bridge slab falls and kills a person, we investigate the system. We ask who failed to maintain it, who ignored the warning signs, and who was responsible for keeping people safe. But when a student dies under the weight of relentless academic pressure, we investigate the student. We ask whether they were emotionally vulnerable, whether they were resilient enough, whether they could cope with pressure.

What about the system that failed to protect them? Because a system should not only produce results. It should also protect the people passing through it.

When suffering is individualised, it allows the larger system to escape scrutiny.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth is that many families remain invested in the very system that exhausts their children. The hope that one day their own child will succeed often becomes stronger than the desire to question the cost at which that success is being pursued.

Parents are not passive observers in this story. They are the single largest stakeholder in India's education system. They pay the fees, fund the coaching industry, rearrange family life around examinations, and make enormous sacrifices in pursuit of opportunities for their children.

Yet despite carrying the greatest emotional burden, parents rarely mobilise as a collective force demanding change.

The question is not whether parents care. Of course they do.

The question is whether we have become so accustomed to educational suffering that we no longer recognise it as a problem until tragedy enters our own homes.

An education system should not be judged solely by the number of toppers it produces, prestigious colleges it feeds, or ranks it celebrates. It should also be judged by the emotional health of the children passing through it.

Are they curious?

Are they resilient?

Are they able to fail without believing they are failures?

Are they leaving the system with hope intact?

These questions matter just as much as scores and admissions.

If children truly are our future, then protecting them cannot remain a slogan repeated on special occasions. It must become a standard against which we evaluate every policy, every examination, every institution, and every expectation we place upon them.

Because a society that accepts the suffering of its children in the name of achievement is not preparing them for success. It is failing them. And the question is not whether that failure exists. The question is how much longer we are willing to look away.