School can feel like a rat race, and it’s natural for parents to worry that their child is falling behind.

As a result, anxious parents often fill up their children’s days with hours of tuition, studying, more tuition, and even more studying.

However, this can leave your child feeling tired and unmotivated, and can result in both poor grades and an unhappy child. 

Here’s why it’s important to cut down on study time:

Less stress

Asia is notorious for its highly competitive education systems.

The suicide rate remains alarmingly high among teenagers in Singapore, with many psychologists citing academic stress as a key factor behind feelings of hopelessness and despair.

Research also shows that time spent on tuition and extra work can result in unhealthy levels of stress, especially among younger children.

If stress carries on for a long time, it can lead to depression, which children are especially ill-equipped to deal with. 

Personal growth

While studying is useful to develop a child’s mind, he/she also needs to enjoy activities beyond the school curriculum.

That’s why many schools have introduced co-curricular activities, so that students can develop hobbies that are not purely academic.

Allowing your child to develop his/her skills outside the classroom can result in personal growth, increase self-esteem, and most importantly, ensure that your child is happy! 

Creativity

An anxious child is not a creative child. By limiting a child’s free time in favour of studying, we take away time they should spend exploring the world and forming independent thoughts and opinions.

Indeed, research indicates that with less free time, "children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle." 

Childhood should be a carefree time, not one full of stress and painful memories.

Reducing Academic Load

As said by Senior Minister of Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, it’s important for us to begin "reducing the academic load to provide more space for that free play of the mind".

As former students ourselves, this is what drives the team at Cudy, offering online tuition in Singapore, to develop and introduce livestreaming tuition.

By enabling students to attend tuition sessions using only their laptop, they can save precious traveling time, leaving them more time to do the things they enjoy.

Read more about how your child can learn more, study less at Cudy.