No Time to Be a Child: The Overloaded Lives of India’s School Kids

As classrooms extend their grip beyond the clock, childhood slips quietly out the back door.

In metro cities across India, schoolchildren are spending more than 10 hours a day in structured academic settings mirroring, and often exceeding, the schedules of full-time working adults. What was once a half-day engagement ending by early afternoon has now become an intense, tightly packed grind of lessons, assignments, extracurriculars, and tests.

The shift, often justified by schools as part of a “holistic learning” approach, is drawing sharp reactions from parents, educators, and mental health professionals.

A Childhood On Fast Forward

Gone are the days when children returned home by 2 PM, had lunch with family, played with neighborhood friends, or simply curled up for an afternoon nap. That gentle rhythm of life has been replaced with a relentless timetable. A standard weekday now includes early wake-ups, long commutes, extended classes, after-school tutoring, and often, homework that spills into the evening.

The Growing Cost of Rigor

Schools argue that the extra hours help them squeeze in robotics, coding, yoga, and performing arts activities once considered luxuries but now deemed essential in competitive academic landscapes. In Kerala, for instance, high school hours are being extended in the 2025–26 academic year to fulfill a target of 1,100 instructional hours annually. Officials claim this will reduce dependence on coaching centers by ensuring syllabus completion within school itself.

But the other side of this “rigor” reveals a worrying picture.

Behavior Speaks Louder Than Words

Teachers and counselors are sounding the alarm on rising cases of social withdrawal, anxiety, and emotional fatigue even in primary school students.

“Some children just want to be left alone during breaks,” shares a school counselor in Bengaluru. “We’re seeing more frequent meltdowns, irritability, and kids zoning out in the middle of class.”

For many children, their behavior has become their only voice. Exhaustion masquerades as tantrums. Silence becomes a protest. A yawn in math class is more than just boredom, it’s burnout.

A Divided Home Front

Working parents often welcome extended school hours, citing safety, structure, and value for time spent. But stay-at-home parents or those who observe their child closely see another story: one of over-scheduling, sensory overload, and missing joy.

“What happened to free play, storytelling, or just lying in bed and dreaming?” asks a mother from Mumbai. “Not everything a child learns has to be measurable on a report card.”

What Children Really Need

Experts stress that rest, unstructured play, and family bonding are crucial for cognitive development, creativity, and emotional regulation. In the absence of this, children are being robbed of the very foundation that builds resilience and joy.

What’s often missing in these debates is the voice of the child. While some children do enjoy extracurriculars and peer time, many are simply too tired to speak up. The system is training them to fit into adult-like productivity patterns, before they even understand what adulthood means.

Time to Pause, Reflect, and Reclaim Childhood

As educators and policymakers double down on curriculum and competitiveness, it’s worth asking:
Are we raising emotionally grounded, curious children, or just high-performing machines?

Maybe the answer isn’t in adding hours to the school day, but in revisiting the natural rhythm of childhood, where school ends before the sun sets, and life continues in mud pits, storybooks, mischief, and midday naps.

In a world racing ahead, childhood needs slowing down not speeding up.