5 min readApr 29, 2026 04:58 PM IST First published on: Apr 29, 2026 at 04:58 PM ISTAs the mother of a teenager who has exams, I currently spend my time bursting into my daughter’s room to see if she has studied, confiscating devices, threatening consequences, and generally being a buzzkill. I do these things because I have to, because I’m told that making your kid do well in school is one of the original covenants of being a “good mom”. I do this even though the school system is stuck in the good old days when access to information was limited, unlike now, when it has been democratised beyond our wildest imagination.So what exactly are we teaching our children when we insist that they mug up random information for an exam? Aside from perhaps ruining our relationships with them and giving them material for future therapy sessions, we are teaching them some crucial real-life lessons. Discipline. Endurance. That life will almost certainly require them to work hard at things they do not like, or fully believe in, under the supervision of people who are annoying them, in order to get to the next level.AdvertisementThe school system is built like a matrix-style video game. You do not always understand or agree with the task that it asks of you, but you have to do it regardless, because there is a next level to get through, and the game does not care whether you like its rules or not. Understanding what is expected of you and delivering it is a highly underrated life skill. When you are done with it, the ability to regurgitate information in an exam is measured as a sign of intelligence. If you do well, your friends and family applaud your achievement and your parents are told they are good parents, and everyone is happy.Also Read | My children have more than I did. Here’s how I am teaching them valuesHowever, here’s the catch. Our children are growing up in a world where, thanks to the rapidly changing digital landscape, no one can accurately predict what the future will look like even five years from now. The information that they have toiled to memorise? It is not even a drop in the ocean of what they can access within a few seconds with free ChatGPT, theirs to summon on demand, anytime, anywhere.In this brave new world, kids can email a teacher with an excuse about why they haven’t submitted an assignment, or a crush they want to impress, with equal and appropriate tonality and polish. They can appear to be anything to anyone — cool, nerdy, sincere, authoritative, humble, assertive, contrite — before they can be reasonably expected to know themselves.AdvertisementThose of us who grew up in the, ahem, olden days, had our mistakes laid bare for everyone to see. We had to recover from saying the wrong thing, from being misunderstood, from the consequences of adopting a tone that was too aggressive, or too meek. We had to face the consequences of our own incompetence. Our communication skills were hardwired by the mistakes we made.you may likeAlso Read | How to raise a boy: Parenting my son has taught me to wait, to let goWhat exactly is being lost here? Perhaps nothing. Maybe these are just new tools, and I’m like every generation that came before me, thinking that the one ahead is being ruined by convenience. Or maybe it’s about learning to lift the emotional and intellectual load of self-expression. If you have never had to sit with the discomfort of the wrong words, how will you learn to calibrate them? If every frustration has been tempered, every apology perfected, every excuse made waterproof, how will a child learn the difference between honesty and posturing? What happens to your rough edges if they appear polished before you have had an opportunity to fix them?As a mother, I see my teenage daughter trapped in a system that tests her on skills that are clearly irrelevant to the life that awaits her outside the school gates. The life which is already, in parallel, in her pocket, shaping her habits, communication skills, friendships, and possibilities. The real challenge is teaching children to conquer it and not lose themselves. Until I can tackle that, I’ll stick to nagging, badgering and heckling to get the job that must be done, done.Sibal is the author of Equations (2021)