Mental Health: Are We Preparing Our Children to Win, but Not to Lose?
Updated: Sep 23
The growing concern about student mental health may also be a question about how we raise children, define success and respond to failure.
As parents, most of us want the same thing for our children. We want them to study well, enter a good college, build a successful career and become independent. Encouraging children to work hard is not wrong, and ambition is certainly not the problem. Yet the growing concern about student mental health in India raises a difficult question: Are we preparing our children only to succeed, or are we also preparing them for the times when they fail?
This is not an argument that parents cause student suicides. The evidence does not support such a simple explanation. Student distress and suicide are associated with multiple factors, including academic and career pressures, family and personal problems, isolation, mental-health concerns, financial difficulties, discrimination and abuse. The Ministry of Education has repeatedly described student suicides as a multifactorial problem in its Parliamentary responses. What deserves closer examination, however, is the role parental expectations and our broader approach to achievement may play in shaping how young people experience pressure and failure.
The race begins much earlier than college
For many Indian children, competition begins long before university. Marks become important in school, entrance examinations dominate the senior years, and by Classes 11 and 12 many families are already thinking about JEE, NEET, CUET, professional courses or overseas education. The message is usually well-intentioned: work hard now and you will have a better future.
The difficulty is that children can absorb a different message from the one their parents intended. They may begin to believe that marks determine their worth, that a particular college is the gateway to a successful life, and that failing to reach that destination means disappointing the people who have invested so much in them. A 2024 study of 570 adolescents preparing for competitive entrance examinations in Karnataka reported high levels of academic stress and perceived parental pressure alongside low general well-being. The study was limited to selected colleges in one district and was cross-sectional, so it cannot establish causality, but it does demonstrate how strongly students can experience the competitive environment surrounding higher education.
The important distinction is between expectation and conditional acceptance. A child can understand that parents expect hard work while still feeling completely secure when results are disappointing. Problems arise when the child begins to feel that love, approval or respect depend upon performance.
What happens when the child who always succeeded suddenly does not?
This becomes particularly important when students enter elite institutions. A young person who spent years among the top students in school may enter an IIT, medical college or another highly selective institution and discover that almost everyone around them was also academically successful. The student has not suddenly become less capable; the reference group has changed.
The National Task Force appointed by the Supreme Court found evidence of this transition in its interactions with students and faculty. It heard about highly competitive environments in which grades, internships, placements and future career prospects could become powerful sources of anxiety. Students who had previously experienced academic success could struggle when that success was no longer guaranteed. The Task Force's interim report discusses experiences of defeat, alienation, humiliation and weakened belonging in the context of student distress.
This is where parents can make a profound difference. When a student receives a disappointing grade, the important response may not always be, “You should have studied harder.” Sometimes it is more helpful to say, “Let us understand what happened and work out what you want to do next.” The first response focuses primarily on performance; the second helps the child develop the capacity to recover.
Have we made failure too expensive?
Children need to understand that failure has consequences, but they also need opportunities to discover that most failures are survivable. Losing a school competition, not being selected for a team or changing an activity can teach an important lesson: disappointment hurts, but life continues.
The difficulty arises when every academic decision becomes connected to a supposedly “good career”, and every result is seen as a signal about future employability. A poor grade can become “I am not intelligent.” A rejected internship can become “I have no future.” Not getting into a preferred college can become “I have disappointed my parents.”
The event may be temporary, but the conclusion about one's identity can become much more damaging. One of the most important things parents can teach is the difference between failing at something and being a failure.
What about the nuclear family?
There is another question worth examining, although the evidence does not justify a simple answer: has the shift towards nuclear families changed the emotional support available to young people?
There is no reliable evidence that nuclear families cause student suicide, and family structure by itself does not determine psychological well-being. A supportive nuclear family can provide far greater emotional security than a dysfunctional joint family. Recent Indian research also suggests that both family structures can provide emotional security in different ways.
The more useful question is therefore not whether a family has two generations or three. It is how many trusted people a young person can speak to when something goes wrong. A larger extended family may provide access to grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins who offer different forms of support. A nuclear family may provide a much smaller immediate network, particularly when both parents are working and the child later moves to another city for higher education.
The issue, then, is not nuclearisation itself. It is whether the emotional safety net around a young person has become too narrow.
Social media has made comparison continuous
Young people have always compared themselves with others. Social media has simply changed the scale and frequency of that comparison. A student can now see another student's internship, foreign university admission, scholarship, salary, startup or social life almost continuously.
The National Task Force heard concerns from faculty about FOMO, social-media comparison, reduced face-to-face interaction and difficulty forming meaningful friendships. At the same time, research does not support the simplistic claim that social media causes student suicide. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis covering 182 studies and more than 1.16 million young people found only weak associations between ordinary social-media use and depression and anxiety, while problematic social-media use showed stronger associations with poor well-being, depression, anxiety and sleep problems.
For parents, therefore, the question should not simply be, “How many hours is your child on the phone?” A more meaningful question is, “What is happening to your child while they are on the phone?” Are they connecting with friends and finding support, or are they spending hours comparing their lives with carefully presented versions of everyone else's success?
What does your child believe will happen when they fail?
Perhaps this is the question parents should ask themselves most honestly. When your child receives a poor result, are they thinking about how to improve, or worrying about how to tell you? When they want to change a course or career, are they asking, “What do I really want?” or “What will my parents think?” When they are rejected by a college, internship or employer, do they believe that you will help them find another route? And when they are struggling emotionally, do they feel safe enough to say so?
Young adulthood is a difficult period because independence is increasing at the same time as uncertainty. Students are making decisions about identity, relationships and careers while still depending heavily on family approval. A supportive family cannot remove all pressure from a young person's life, but it can change the meaning of failure. The same disappointing result can be experienced either as a setback that needs a response or as a verdict on the student's worth.
Perhaps we need to prepare children for failure, not protect them from it
Preparing children for failure does not mean abandoning them to “toughen up”, nor does it mean dismissing genuine mental-health problems as a lack of resilience. Students experiencing serious psychological distress need professional help. India has also expanded access through initiatives such as Tele-MANAS, which provides 24-hour mental-health support through 14416 or 1800-89-14416.
But resilience is also built through ordinary life. Children need opportunities to make decisions, experience disappointment, solve problems, take responsibility and discover that one setback does not destroy their future. They need parents who can ask, “What did you learn?” rather than turning every setback into a judgement about ability.
Perhaps we should also ask fewer questions such as, “How many marks did you get?” and more questions such as, “What did you find difficult?”, “What did you enjoy?”, “What would you do differently next time?” and “What do you want to explore?” The purpose is not to lower ambition. It is to ensure that ambition does not become the child's entire identity.
India needs young people who are willing to work hard and compete. But we also need young people who understand that a career is a journey rather than a single examination result, that changing direction is possible, that rejection is not humiliation, and that asking for help is not failure.
Perhaps the deeper question is whether the pressure to succeed has grown faster than our children's opportunities to learn how to cope with failure. If that is even partly true, the answer is not to ask our children to aim lower. It is to make sure that when they fall short, they know that there is still a road ahead.
A note for students and parents: Persistent distress, withdrawal from normal activities, feelings of hopelessness, or thoughts of self-harm are reasons to seek help rather than manage the situation alone. In India, Tele-MANAS provides 24-hour mental-health support at 14416 or 1800-89-14416. In an immediate emergency, please contact a trusted adult, seek urgent professional care or use local emergency services.
Sources: This article draws on the Supreme Court-appointed National Task Force's Interim Report published in June 2026, Parliamentary material from the Ministry of Education, UGC guidance on student well-being, and peer-reviewed research concerning academic stress, parental pressure, family structure, social support and social-media use. The National Task Force's report is interim, and its survey is not a nationally representative prevalence study; its findings should therefore be understood as evidence of patterns and institutional concerns rather than as proof of a single cause of student suicide.
Further reading reference from my earlier blogs on ICC and Medium
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