Cost accountant Rohan and wife Sumana (names changed) haven’t socialised since their son failed to make it to the kindergarten section of any of the four reputable schools they had chosen for him. The boy goes to an ICSE school in south Calcutta, but that is apparently not good enough for his parents. The Tollygunge couple’s frustration at not being able to send their child to a school of their choice has reached such a state that they have had to see a psychologist.

Admission stress is getting to young parents in the city, sending many scurrying for psychiatric help to face the “social embarrassment” of their children not getting a seat in a reputable school.

Psychologist Mahua Ghosh said as many as 10 couples had approached her for “advice” this admission season. “The tension and trauma associated with nursery and KG admissions among young parents are increasing. Modern parents believe that educating their kids in a branded school is a measure of how successful they are in life. It is this feeling that is driving them to a state of depression,” she told Metro.

A Behala homemaker with a three-and-a-half year-old son approached a doctor recently to help her husband cope with alcoholism triggered by their child not getting a seat in “one of the best schools of Calcutta”.

Admission stress has, of course, long been the reality of parenting with only around 20 of the 400-odd English-medium schools in the city being counted among the “brands”. These are the schools that witness the longest queues for seats, and not necessarily because they are the best.

Psychologist Salony Priya, who is the director of Umeed, a multi-speciality counselling and training centre for parents, children and others, attributes part of the problem to a mismatch between supply and demand in Calcutta. “In most other cities, every locality has a few good schools and the parents are not part of a mad rush for seats,” she said.

The mismatch shows up in the ratio of the number of seats to number of applications at the nursery level. At St. James, the ratio is 1:30, Modern High’s is 1:10 and Calcutta Girls’ 1:5. For lower nursery at La Martiniere for Girls and Boys, it is 1:6 , Loreto House’s is 1:8 for KG and Don Bosco Park Circus’s is 1:10 for Class I.

Many parents refuse to accept that they are victims of their own expectations. “They look at their children as underachievers, which is worse,” said J.R. Ram, consultant psychiatrist at Apollo Gleneagles.

According to psychiatrist Debashis Konar, most parents of children who don’t get admission in any reputable school tend to feel that they have been humiliated in front of others. “They basically need to revisit the idea of what is a good school,” he advised.

Ram warns that a family can disintegrate if parents who are so touchy aren’t counselled immediately. “Such an attitude can have a long-term impact on a parent’s relationship with his or her child. Not only will the child’s self-esteem take a beating, the parent-child relationship could be affected,” he said.

The obsession with “branded” schools drives some parents to hire tutors for pre-school children as little as two-and-a-half years old. “I know of a boy of about two years and eight months who was tutored for four months so that he would gain admission to La Martiniere or St James. He didn’t get a seat in either institution and his parents thought that was the end of the world,” a psychologist said.

The father, a public-sector employee, apparently feared that his son would “suffer” just as he did because of his “non-English” background. “The father thought his Bengali-medium background had hampered his career,” the psychologist said.

Some sink into depression after blaming themselves for their children not making it to the institutions of their choice. “One of my patients was convinced that her four-and-a-half-year-old son did not get a seat in a particular school because she hadn’t said the right things at the interview. Worse, she saw it as a bad omen for her family,” a doctor said.

But isn’t there a system in place to stop schools from infusing CAT-competitiveness into KG admissions?

Unlike in many other states, Bengal doesn’t have a set of rules governing KG admissions. In Delhi, the government sets the criteria. Applications are screened on the basis of factors like proximity to the school and sibling presence.

In Calcutta, the open secret is that children as young as four are accepted or rejected based on interviews to test their “skills” and verify their parents’ professional and financial status.

Given the lack of a state policy, that isn’t illegal. But it isn’t fair either, say parents.

“We often receive complaints from guardians regarding malpractice in admissions. But we do not have rules to regulate nursery and KG admissions; so we don’t monitor the screening process,” a senior official of the school education department said.

So what is the way out? “We have proposed a legislation that will enable us to establish control over private schools,” the official added.

The schools, of course, plead helplessness. “We have a fixed number of seats and we cannot increase that because the teacher-student ratio has to be healthy. We are unable to accommodate as many number of students as those who apply,” said Devi Kar, the principal of Modern High School for Girls.

“Our classrooms are overflowing with children, we cannot accept each and every applicant because a certain level of comfort needs to be provided to the students,” insisted Basanti Biswas, the principal of Calcutta Girls’ High School.