AN ON-GROUND REPORT FROM RURAL, URBAN AND SEMI-URBAN KASHMIR, EXAMINING HOW UNPAID CARE, DOMESTIC DUTIES AND EMOTIONAL LABOUR QUIETLY PUSH ADOLESCENT GIRLS INTO PREMATURE ADULTHOOD.
Asma Majid
Shahida is used to being relied upon. In her home in Ambarbugh village of Shopian, it is understood that if something needs attention – a younger sibling, a household task, a moment of urgency – she will step in. At a young age, she moves easily between roles: student, caregiver, helper. None of these roles were formally assigned. They simply became hers over time.
Shahida’s day commences before the rest of the household is fully awake. In the early morning hours, the 15-year-old helps with household chores, preparing breakfast and putting the house in order before school. There is little urgency in her voice when she describes it as her ‘routine’.
While her mother is occupied with other responsibilities, Shahida steps in to help with her three younger siblings: two sisters and a little brother, the youngest of them all, tending to him, keeping an eye on his needs and ensuring that he is properly settled. Before leaving for school, she helps her two sisters get ready, checking their uniforms and preparing them for the day ahead. Only after that does she get ready herself.
On most days, Shahida attends school like any other student of her age. But the distance between school and home is not always a clean break. If there is work to be done at home, especially around or after lunchtime, she returns at the cost of her post-lunch classes.
But her responsibilities do not end there. On other days, she also assists her father in the fields, offering help whenever needed. Ironically, she does not describe this as labour, but as something that naturally falls to her.
“Someone has to handle these things. So, I do”, she says with an innocent smile.
For Shahida, ‘stepping in’ has become instinctive – something she does without needing to be asked.
Despite the steady flow of responsibilities, she tries to manage her devotion towards studies. Balancing school-work with household duties and tending to her siblings is not always easy, but she nonetheless makes the effort. Among her family, she is often regarded as the ‘most responsible one’ – a role she has grown into quietly, without resistance.
For a 15-year-old, there is no sense of complaint in how Shahida narrates her day. Instead, what emerges is a life shaped by adjustment, one where education, care, and duty run parallel, each demanding attention, none easily set aside.
In the city, responsibility takes a different shape.
Rabiya, a 17-year-old from Karanagar, Srinagar, likewise starts her day by assisting her mother with breakfast and concludes it by cleaning utensils at night. Her sister, a graduate who couldn’t continue her education owing to household responsibilities and an ailing mother, takes care of the domestic chores during the day.
The tasks rotate, but the expectations are clear. Rabiya has a brother too, yet he is never asked to step in for help.
“No one tells him to do anything,” she says. “It’s just understood.”
Beyond chores, Rabiya carries an emotional role that is harder to define. When there is tension at home or when someone is upset or uncertain, the family turns to her. She listens, reassures, and tries to keep things light. “I cheer them up,” she says.
There is pride in being trusted this way but exhaustion too.
“Sometimes I get tired of carrying everything,” she admits.
Just like Shahida, Rabiya tries to prioritise her studies alongside household responsibilities, but emotional labour often spills into time meant for herself.
She recalls feeling confused after finishing her 10th standard, unsure of what to choose next. Around her, she has seen girls pushed into careers they did not want, including an acquaintance whose path was decided for her. She also speaks of a cousin burdened with excessive household work; her days consumed long before she could think of her own future. She refuses to name her though, for the fear of causing her trouble.
When asked who her family considers the most mature or responsible, Rabiya’s answer mirrors Shahida’s.
“They think it’s me,” she says innocently.
In an urban setting where opportunities appear closer, early responsibility still arrives – quieter, less visible, but firmly in place.
At 19, Soliha inhabits an in-between world – one foot in the narrow lanes of her native village, Vizer in Baramulla, and the other in the urban sprawl of Srinagar, where her family lives in a paramedic quarter at the Government Medical College. Her father’s job brought the family closer to the city years ago, and Soliha’s schooling, friendships, and aspirations have been shaped by this shift. Even though she recently passed the NEET examination and is now pursuing MBBS, the expectations that followed her from the village never quite loosened their grip.
From the outside, Soliha’s life looks like a success story that neatly fits into the narrative of upward mobility and academic merit. But what lies beneath is a darker, heavier truth.
Despite living in Srinagar for years, the insular mindset of her native village community followed Soliha all along. With only one younger sister as her sibling, expectations settled on her shoulders too early.
“People used to tell my parents that daughters can never replace sons,” she recalls.
“The words were not always spoken directly, but they were present in comments, comparisons, glances and even silences.”
This scepticism pushed her into responsibility long before adulthood would actually arrive. Soliha became the ‘mature’ one in the family – the one who is always dependable, composed and self-aware. She takes care of the small but significant needs of the household, guides her younger sister, helps her with studies, and ensures that things run smoothly at home.
Qualifying NEET did bring her a sense of vindication and proved her village elders wrong. Yet, the victory did not lighten the weight of those years of familial expectations and unspoken responsibility. To falter was not simply to fail herself, but to confirm what others had already assumed.
Soliha now speaks of a persistent fatigue: not physical, but emotional.
“It feels like I had to grow up faster just to be taken seriously,” she says with a faint smile.
She often wonders how different things might have been had she been a boy or whether the same burdens would have followed her so early, or whether growing up could have waited.
Now, standing at the threshold of a medical career, she feels proud but weary.
The experiences of Shahida, Rabiya and Soliha are not just exceptions, but part of a wider, recurring reality. Broader research evidences exhibit analogous patterns across geographies suggesting that early assumption of responsibility among girls is part of a structural phenomenon and not merely a series of scattered individual cases.
At the global and regional level, UNICEF data reveals that unpaid domestic and caregiving work is a significant part of many girls’ everyday lives, long before they reach adulthood.
In the South Asia region, girls aged roughly 10 to 14 years spend significantly more time on household chores than boys of the same age. This pattern reflects deeply rooted gender norms about caregiving and domestic work, and it begins early, often limiting time for play, rest and self-exploration during critical developmental years.
A similar story emerges at the national level in India. Analyses based on India’s Time Use Survey, 2019 reveal that adolescent girls are far more likely to be involved in unpaid domestic work than boys. About one-third of girls aged 6 to17 participate in household duties, compared with fewer than one in ten boys. On an average, girls in this group spend roughly 134 minutes a day on unpaid domestic tasks – nearly 70% more time than boys, who spend about 79 minutes per day. Older adolescents (15 to 17 years) tend to take on even more of this work, cutting into time that could otherwise be used for study, rest and personal development.
While the detailed time-use data for adolescent girls specific to Jammu & Kashmir are not yet published, other indicators from the region highlight similar pressures.
Recent provisional figures (2025-26) submitted to the Rajya Sabha indicate that 38,994 out-of-school children were identified in Jammu & Kashmir, and of these, about 16,900 were girls. The Ministry of Women and Child Development identified common reasons for such dropout, including household responsibilities, economic distress, and the need for older children to work for livelihood.
This trend reinforces what we see in personal accounts; when girls are expected to manage care and domestic duties on top of schooling, their opportunities and time for uninterrupted learning diminish.
Moreover, this pressure does not end with school.
Data from higher education surveys indicate that a significant number of young women discontinue college education, often citing domestic responsibilities, caregiving roles, and early marriage. While enrolment of women in higher education has improved in recent years, retention remains uneven, suggesting that access alone does not guarantee continuity when gendered expectations persist at home.
Early maturity also operates at the social levels for these girls. With little time for friendships or leisure, adolescence is shortened, often leading to isolation, silent competition, and the pressure to constantly prove oneself. Growing up becomes less about self-discovery but a pattern that can later resurface in the form of fractured relationships and emotional distance.
Thus, beyond these patterns of adjustment and responsibility, mental health experts say, lie emotional costs that are not always immediately visible.
Dr. Wasim Rashid Kakroo, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Srinagar who specialises in child, adolescent and family therapy at the Centre for Mental Health Services, believes that what often gets labelled as “emotional maturity” in girls needs to be examined more closely.
“Emotional maturity in itself is not a problem,” he explains. “Girls are often emotionally understanding, empathetic, and perceptive. These are healthy traits.” The problem, he says, arises when families and society begin to take undue advantage of this emotional strength.
According to Dr. Kakroo, girls are frequently expected to absorb emotional stress within families to manage conflicts, soothe tensions, and carry invisible responsibilities, simply because they are seen as naturally better equipped to do so.
“The burden of emotional regulation should not rest only on girls,” he says. “Boys also need to be helped to emotionally mature.”
He points out that the traditional gender roles play a significant role in this imbalance. Boys are commonly socialised to focus on external responsibilities like employment and financial provision while emotional intelligence, including empathy and emotional awareness, is quietly neglected.
“Empathy is a core component of emotional intelligence,” Dr. Kakroo notes, “and when we do not nurture it in boys, we automatically shift emotional labour onto girls and this imbalance extends into everyday domestic life.”
Dr. Kakroo stresses that household chores should be entirely gender-neutral.
“These are life skills, not gender-assigned duties,” he says.
When girls alone are expected to manage domestic responsibilities, it reinforces the idea that care and adjustment are inherently feminine roles.
He also highlights how patriarchy sustains itself across generations, often subtly, and sometimes even through women themselves.
“Lack of emotional awareness and patriarchal conditioning contribute directly to early emotional responsibility in girls,” he explains. “Even mothers, despite being women, may consciously or unconsciously teach their daughters to accept and adhere to patriarchal norms.”
The emotional toll of this early responsibility is reflected in Dr. Kakroo’s clinical practice.
“Nearly 90 percent of my clients are female,” he says.
“They range from as young as seven to around forty, but the largest group consists of adolescent girls and young women.”
Many of them, he adds, come with concerns rooted not in a single traumatic event, but in years of silent emotional over-exertion.
What emerges, he further suggests, is a system where girls grow up faster not because they choose to, but because they are expected to – emotionally, socially, and psychologically. And while this early maturity is often praised, its costs remain largely unacknowledged.
While Dr. Kakroo points to the social conditioning and emotional expectations placed on girls, other mental health professionals warn that the consequences of this imbalance often surface much later.
Dr. Muzzafar Ahmad Ganaii, another clinical psychologist from Srinagar, who works closely with adolescents and young adults in Kashmir, explains how the emotional load carried by adolescent girls frequently translates into long-term psychological distress.
“In my clinical practice, female clients significantly outnumber the male ones,” he exclaims, attributing this disparity to cultural perceptions that continue to frame domestic work and emotional responsibility as primarily female roles, pushing women to the brink of stress overload.
What appears as early maturity or stoic endurance, Dr. Ganaii goes on to explain, often masks chronic stress.
“Over time, this stress can manifest in serious mental health concerns, including anxiety disorders, depression, and somatic symptom disorders where emotional distress manifests through physical pain and other stress-related conditions.”
Some adolescents, he adds, also experience dissociative symptoms or episodes of emotional shutdown, particularly when the pressure to ‘manage everything’ becomes overwhelming.
What psychologists observe in clinics, educators say, is visible every day in classrooms.
Dr. Deeba Malik, an educationist and lecturer at one of the colleges in Srinagar, who teaches students from both rural and urban backgrounds, highlights the impact of early responsibility manifesting as lassitude and exhaustion rather than indiscipline in female students.
“Boys may appear disinterested in class because they are not keen to study,” she observes. “But girls are different. They are usually interested, attentive, and eager to learn. The problem is that their attention is divided.”
According to her, many girls sit through lectures already mentally exhausted, preoccupied with responsibilities waiting for them at home: chores to finish, siblings to tend to, expectations to meet.
“They keep thinking about what all they have to manage after college,” she says. “That constant mental load tells upon their focus.”
This, she explains, often results in underperformance, not because girls lack ability or motivation, but because they are overburdened.
“The potential is there,” Dr. Deeba asserts, “but they are stretched too thin.”
She emphasizes that adolescence is a crucial transitional phase between childhood and adulthood, a period where personality, confidence, and self-understanding are shaped.
“This is the time when young people need space to reflect, to explore who they are and what they want from life,” she explains.
“When girls are burdened with excessive responsibility during this phase, that space disappears.”
In her view, schools and educators have limited capacity to address this invisible burden because students bring their domestic realities with them into academic spaces.
“In trying to manage everything, from household work, emotional expectations and academic pressure, to the need to prove themselves, many girls end up overstressing, and that stress, ironically, is what sometimes holds them back,” adds Dr. Deeba.
While educators witness the consequences of this invisible burden in classrooms, social workers argue that its roots lie much earlier within families, everyday parenting practices, and the spaces where girls first learn what is expected of them.
Khursheed Ahmad Farash, Adolescent Programme Lead at the Jammu and Kashmir Association of Social Workers (JKASW), points to a deeper cultural gap rooted in how children, especially girls, are raised and heard within families. According to him, the absence of positive parenting and emotional reinforcement often leaves girls carrying responsibility without support.
“Girls need reinforcement, not just responsibility,” he observes, stressing that emotional validation and support are as crucial as discipline in shaping healthy adolescents.
Beyond homes, Khursheed emphasizes the role of schools in offering nurturing environments where students are allowed to be themselves rather than moulded into prescribed roles. Allowing girls to express opinions, choose their paths, and articulate discomfort, he says, is essential to counter the gradual silencing that often begins early.
Drawing from JKASW’s work on inter-generational dialogue, he recounts sessions where fathers and children were encouraged to openly discuss dreams and aspirations.
“Most of the times, they realise that they want similar things,” he explains. “It is the lack of communication that creates distance, not difference.”
He believes that such conversations can disrupt rigid cultural expectations before they harden into inveterate habits, insinuating at early maturity in girls as not being inevitable, but produced, reinforced, and therefore changeable.
Shahida, Rabiya, and Soliha are often described as mature, reliable, composed and responsible beyond their years. In many households, these qualities are boasted of with pride.
But the question that remains unasked is whether this maturity is something that these girls choose, or something that they are compelled to assume?
Across rural and urban spaces alike, girls continue to shoulder domestic and emotional labour as an unspoken obligation, while their ability to endure is mistaken for strength. The language of praise – “adjusting”, “understanding”, “responsible” often veils a deeper inequality that asks girls to grow up faster, while allowing boys the time to arrive at adulthood at their own pace.
If growing up continues to demand more from girls than from boys, the cost will not be borne quietly forever. The real question, then, is not how mature our girls are but why they are required to be.
The author is a V-YES Media Research Fellow,Jammu and Kashmir Association of Social Workers (JKASW), can be reached at asma.majid786@yahoo.com
