Bengaluru: Insecure parents pushing children to skill' academies

Bengaluru: With the summer holidays over, and with the schools getting into full stride, it is a stressful time for children in the city.

With a school day behind them, in the evenings, the children have no time to play. It is time for tuitions. And the tutorials are mushrooming in the city.

Insecure parents are driving their children to tuitions not just for subjects like maths, chemistry, electronics, but also for self-improvement in the hope that their children will be ready for the unknown future. And hundreds of tuition facilities and so-called academies are opening up a booming business. Brain Activation is the new mantra of many of these tutorials. “Your child needs ‘skills’ to succeed; not just ‘certificates’,” screams one of the ads.

“..that Mid-brain activation for your child enhances memory, concentration, creativity, intuition, confidence, leads to improved health, better control and character. This activation tricks lies in the equal use of right and left side of the brain. The human brain function optimally if both hemispheres are in equilibrium,” the ad for Monisha Mid Brain Activation Academy offers.

The goodies it offers is impressive: Brain training & Super Sensory Development Program, Dermatoglyphics Multiple Intelligence Test (DMIT), Smart School Educator Kit, Handwriting improvement Classes and Vedic mathematics.

And the target group is children studying in 1st to 10 standard. And jargon of management courses is seeping into the advertising for these courses.

For instance, an outfit called Brainac Associates offers teaching to “activate the brain cells” and among other things ‘Better Organisation Skills’ and ‘Improved Productivity’. What children have to do with such abstract mumbo jumbo only the starry-eyed parents would know.

And there are classes offered to children in Chess, painting, ball room dancing, salsa, zumba, personality development, public speaking, finance, yoga, you name it. And the desperate parents enrol the children into these classes thinking that their kid would miss out on something if she or he does not get into these tutorials.

Jyothi, the mother of a five-year-old, said: “I put in my child in one of the academies. He goes there for four days in a week.”

Has he shown ‘Better Productivity’ and ‘Improved Organisational Skills’? Jyothi laughs sheepishly. “I don’t know, but I think it is worth it.” In what way, she is unable to say. Yet these academies say there is less awareness among parents. When DC contacted Monisha Mid brain Academy, a representative said that the, “trend is picking up slowly as there is less awareness among people.”