Ask Anjali what her day looks like, and she does not really describe a day. She describes a schedule – hers, but really her son’s. She gets up at 5 to pack his lunch. School at 6. Then, three days a week, a 45-kilometre drive to a football academy near Bengaluru airport, which in the city’s traffic can mean two hours in the car each way. Swimming on the other days, to build his stamina. A nutritionist for his meals. Homework squeezed in wherever there’s a gap left, usually late at night, usually rushed.
“It also means one parent is constantly working around his schedule,” Anjali says.
Her son Kabir is 12. He wants to play football for a European club one day. And somewhere in between his goal and academics, the whole family has stopped running on its own time and started running on his.
It is not just them. Rekha, in another city, quit her banking job two years ago so she could ferry her daughter Ira, 11, to badminton training and back. Sometimes four trips a day between the academy, physiotherapy and school. “People think I stopped working,” she says, laughing but not really. “I didn’t stop working. I just stopped getting paid for it.” She and her husband barely argue about anything anymore, she says, except this – whether they are pushing too hard, or not hard enough.
Psychologists have started putting a name to what’s happening in homes like these: “Olympic parenting.” Not because either child is headed to the Olympics, necessarily, but because of the mindset – complete sacrifice, non-stop training, a whole family reorganised around one child’s shot at being the best. It can build real discipline in a kid. But it can also, slowly and without anyone noticing, hollow out everyone in the house.
When A Child’s Worth Gets Tied To A Scoreboard
Dr Kavita Rao, a Bengaluru-based child and family psychologist, has counselled a number of families who live this way. “What struck me with these families was how normal it all felt to them,” she says. “Nobody sat down and decided to sacrifice everything for one child’s medal. It happened gradually, one extra coaching session at a time, until there was no family life left outside the sport.”
She is very cautious about painting the whole style as damaging. “I have seen kids do brilliantly in this kind of environment – disciplined, mature beyond their years, genuinely in love with what they do,” she says. “The trouble starts when a child begins to sense that their place in the family depends on winning. That’s usually not something a parent says out loud. It’s something the child just picks up.”
In a family she worked with, it showed up sideways. “The child, a 13-year-old, once told me she was more relaxed when she lost a match than when she won it – because after a loss, nobody expected anything from her for a few days,” Dr Rao says. “That’s conditional self-worth and it is very hard to undo once it sets in.”
She says the signs she tells parents to watch for are drawn largely from cases like this one: A child becoming irritable for no clear reason, mood swings that don’t match anything going on, sudden disinterest in a sport they once loved, or complaints of stomachaches and headaches that no doctor can explain. “Kids this age don’t usually have the vocabulary to say ‘I’m burnt out,'” she says. “So the body says it instead.”
It is not only the children who carry the weight, in her experience. “I’ve had parents cry in my office – not because their child failed at something, but because they realised, mid-conversation, how much of their own identity was tied up in the child’s success,” Dr Rao says. “That’s not a character flaw. It happens quietly, after years of driving to practice, paying coaching fees, rearranging your own work life. At some point the child’s win starts to feel like your win too. And their loss starts to feel like yours.”
That spillover, she adds, rarely stays contained to just the parent and child. “In this family, the younger sibling had started acting out at school – nothing dramatic, just attention-seeking. When we dug into it, it turned out he felt invisible at home. Every conversation at the dinner table was about his sister’s tournament schedule.” Marriages take a hit too, Dr Rao says.
So where’s the line? “Healthy involvement looks like celebrating effort, not just results, and letting the child own their sport rather than perform it for someone else,” she says. “It tips into something unhealthy the moment a parent’s own mood for the day depends on how the child’s training session went.”
The Body Keeps The Score, Too
The physical toll is just as real, says Dr Meena J., Senior Consultant in Paediatrics at Aakash Healthcare. A structured routine is not inherently bad – sleep, nutrition, activity and rest can coexist productively. The trouble starts when there is absolutely no room left for recovery. “If a child’s schedule is too busy, there’s less time for their body to recover,” she says. “This can result in fatigue, prolonged illness, headaches, poor appetite, decreased physical performance and, in young athletes, an increased risk of overuse injuries.”
Sleep is often the first casualty, and the numbers matter more than parents realise. Preschoolers need 10 to 13 hours a night; school-age children, 9 to 12; teenagers, 8 to 10. Falling short, Dr Meena warns, “may result in poorer concentration, slower learning, mood changes, reduced athletic performance, impaired immunity and slower physical recovery” – and over the long run, it can even affect growth and metabolism.
Rekha admits Ira’s sleep has been the first thing to slip on heavy training days. “By the time she is done with dinner and stretching, it’s 10, sometimes later. She’s up again at 5:30. I keep telling myself we will fix this after the next tournament. There is always a next tournament.”
Parents should also watch for fatigue that does not lift with rest, recurring illness, unexplained aches, irritability or a child who’s suddenly indifferent to an activity they once loved. “If these symptoms continue,” she says, “it is better to review the workload of the child, rather than saying to him that he has to work harder.”
But when you ask Dr Meena about the parents themselves, the picture tends to darken further. “Parents often devote enormous emotional, financial and physical energy to support their child’s ambitions,” she says. “Many sacrifice sleep, postpone medical check-ups, skip exercise and live under chronic stress.” She says that it is common for parents to delay their own doctor’s visits, eat irregularly, and abandon anything that is not in service of the child’s schedule – all in the belief that this is what success requires.
That trade-off, however, rarely stays contained to the parent alone. “Children are very sensitive to the emotional climate in the home,” Dr Meena says. A stressed household changes routines, sleep, meals and the space for relaxation and children absorb that atmosphere in ways that show up in their own sleep, appetite and immunity. “Healthy parent-child relationships are based on emotional security, open lines of communication and a balanced lifestyle – not just achievement.”
A Dream Worth Sharing, Not Just Chasing
For families like Anjali’s and Rekha’s, one of this is abstract. The 5 am wake-ups, the two-hour commutes, the drop-offs and pick-ups – all of it comes from love, even when it does not feel like it by 9 pm on a Tuesday.
Nobody is asking these parents to abandon ambition for their kids. What Dr Rao and Dr Meena both seem to circle back to, in their own ways, is something smaller: Ambition needs room to breathe. A child who knows she is loved whether she wins or loses. A parent who still has a life – and maybe a doctor’s appointment or two – outside the schedule. Those might be the two things standing between a healthy pursuit of excellence and a household running on empty
Times Now | Opinion
Every parent wants to give their child the very best but what often begins as encouragement can quietly turn into pressure. Constantly asking children to do more, achieve more and be better may come from a place of love, yet it can leave them believing that success is the only measure of their worth. The healthiest balance lies in nurturing children with love, faith and encouragement without making achievement the price of approval.