Been there, done that, yes. Yet, young Indians seem to have gone miles beyond being just jaded or laden with ennui. Victims of the too-much-too-soon syndrome the media loves to cover in its constant update of the malaise, their situations are frighteningly familiar. Children from well-heeled families steal to afford the latest cell phone model, stage their own ‘kidnappings’ for moolah to buy more gizmos or high-end designer togs or loll at special salons where stylists dance attendance on them as they sit transfixed at PlayStation consoles paradoxically placed beside cuddly toys.

Unheard of, moan concerned grandparents. What’s next, mutter child psychiatrists.

And then there is the classic ‘like parent-like child’ explanation. Mirroring the mood of the times, we may have unwittingly led the over-indulged little loves of our lives into a materialistic mess of our making. How widely off the mark is it to believe that behind every self-absorbed brat lurks a pushy parent or two, who vicariously light up their (often undistinguished) own path with ‘achievements’ they’ve prodded kids hard into attaining?

Academic brilliance isn’t the sole success chased, though it’s sometimes ranked stressor number 1. An obsession with looking good has brought skin-deep superficiality proudly centre stage among 300 million of the Indian population that is under 15 years. Pander and primp, goes the mantra. Dieticians complain parents reduce children no more than 10 years old to starving with break boxes of low-carb snacks and punishing gym exercise regimes, simply to land plum modelling and movie assignments. Coveted end-of-exam treats and birthday celebrations for kids aged six to 14 are pre-paid beauty sessions at fashionable salons like A Cut Above Children in Chennai and From Tears to Cheers or Watermelon in Mumbai. The take-home gifts are gleaming vanity cases, of course.

More dangerously, this preening isn’t reserved for an occasion. Two sisters of 10 and 14 visit a Franck Provost branch for facials ‘at least a couple of times in a month’, reports a recent India Today report titled ‘No Kidding’. The hopes are hardly restricted to the super-rich; middle class aspirations are quickly mounting just as high. Thanks to a steady stream of clients like these, spas rush to offer summer holiday packages with attractive discounts for the bacha brigade’s hair colouring and skin lightening demands.

Look around. Not that far, as it happens. The competition begins at home. Many a gum-chewing, age-defying ‘yummy mummy’ – as she’s dubbed in these days of international icons like pouting Posh Beckham – uncannily resemble the peroxide heads and impossible curves of Barbie dolls which their prettily painted daughters clutch underarm. As manicured mamas drive overloaded lasses and lads from a string of activity classes (we know of these numbering three per day) to etiquette classes (we swear) to sessions teaching them how to win at birthday party games (we’re serious), there isn’t the faintest furrow on those maternal brows. Simply because it would take an ultimately tenacious line to be let in there, what with the stretched-cat look botox routines have sealed over their faces.

Just so princesses-in-waiting mustn’t lag behind, they are sent for laser treatments claiming permanent body hair removal. “It’s still baby skin which shouldn’t be roughed up with cosmetic surgery,” confides a beautician from Bangalore. “But who’ll stop good business from rolling in?” Interestingly, the snob value of shining forever bright and beautiful can trickle down to domestic staff too; a freshly plucked New Delhi nanny exiting a beauty parlour (the same her mistress patronised) actually told a friend, “Needed to do that. Imagine attending these children’s parties all week with bushy eyebrows!”

Though they play the faulty role-model game differently, dads aren’t to be dismissed either. It’s with scant shock any longer that readers react to newspaper columns which announce 12-year-olds are circulating MMS clips of classmates ragged into parading nude. Why ignore where these strip-and-tease tendencies begin? On a school trip to Malaysia with families of fourth graders (we’re talking about tykes nine-years old), fathers huddled and gawped heartily at porn parked on their mobile phones, while juniors keeled over in awe looking up at the Petronas Towers. Some brazenly bothered not to stop the peepshow even as their sightseeing boys strode back towards them. This in the country so hung up on chastity that its states want to ban sex education in the middle school years for fear of going against our much-vaunted ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’.

Happily, there are a number of acceptable ways to try to map what young minds themselves think. Creative arts like music and drama reveal more than a few ideas. Doing a play, especially writing an original production for the stage, holds a key to the highs and lows of growing up – which might explain why theatre workshops for children are becoming frequent affairs. When actor-director Joy Fernandes and actor-writer Shiv Subrahmanyam sifted through a bunch of scripts born from countrywide playwriting workshops at the Writers’ Bloc 2 festival earlier this year in January, they learnt a thing or two themselves. “It was heartening how the kids opened up to discuss whatever impacts them, from fears and phobias to sibling rivalry and peer pressure,” said Fernandes who saw children aged 10 to 13 conjure scenes written in imaginative genres ranging from action and psycho-thrillers to fantasy and comedy. Subrahmanyam’s workshop addressed slightly older kids, to discover scripts brimming with all the angst of typical teen concerns: the struggle against loneliness, coping with newfound independence and unrealistic parental expectations, the search for popularity alongside the assertion of individual voice. “Though they were articulate, most did not seem to express much of a consciousness about things beyond their own concerns,” Subrahmanyam said. “But you could put that down to the age and impulse of their time.”

How, then, do some kids break through the compulsions of this self-centred ‘age and impulse’ which seems to have gripped armies of their peers and manage, instead, to reach out to others? Once again, sensitive parents and teachers hold the key, feels Feruzan Mehta, India coordinator for Seeds of Peace, an international NGO working with 13 to 15-year-old school children to promote political and racial harmony among 25 countries. Mehta explains how unconscious biases operate within families to filter through existing prejudices to children… Some grandparents repeatedly recall the travails of Partition in bedtime stories. Eminem sings rap lyrics which verbalise the politics of hate. Computer games inure kids to mindless violence, as do lopsided news reports which sensationalise crime and war. Misplaced ‘team spirit’ and outright jingoism encourage youngsters to jeer at opposing teams at international cricket matches, or brainwash them to fall for racist slants in inaccurate history textbooks.

Adults could try correcting such confusion which can cause chaos in impressionable youngsters. As Mehta puts it, “Kids are intensely curious about what adults think and take them quite seriously. However, because they can also be incredibly gentle, children can as easily understand pacifist attitudes too. They need to be channelised, not controlled. Current affairs could be clearer discussed – not with words of heavy-handed parenting that go ‘Oh, this is right-that is wrong’ but through logic and reasoning which children quickly catch on to.”

Psychologist Sonya Mehta agrees with this view of core values and socialist intentions still being alive and healthy among the young. She adds that she sees children more concerned about environmental issues, corruption and human rights concerns than previously narrower-focused generations were. “They are better and broader tuned in to these aspects than we give them credit for,” she observes. “It is parents who are to blame when they keep telling their kids, ‘There’s going to be enough time to get involved with this goody-goody stuff later, concentrate on your studies right now.’ Left to themselves, children are amazingly connected across the globe. Not only are they aware of local issues and their responsibilities towards them, they take equal care to participate in a range of campaigns, from stopping seal killings to deforestation in South America and global warming.”

From movements like Greenpeace to Planet Help, the call to help is not always ignored and may overwhelm the urge to splurge. One dodgy question is that of socio-economic compulsions fogging such do-gooder choices. Sociologist Shilpa Phadke regularly conducts workshops based on gender-related themes like ‘The Beauty Myth in India’ for undergraduate collegians and has started a reading and discussion group in St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, on ‘Re-imagining the Body: A Feminist Reading’. She elaborates: “Students feel far greater pressure than 10 years ago, to think of the future – to plan for careers and focus on them now. That makes them more conformist and they work within the status quo, rather than imagine another world. They are constantly bombarded with images of material success as also the notion that consumption equals happiness. This is an image they don’t buy entirely. But because they are caught in the trap of adjusting to their context rather than challenging it, they do not have the language to critique clearly either.”