How to cope with exam stress at a distance

The school will have a range of strategies in place to help guide your child to exam success, and they will be putting them into practice

Boarding schools are fantastic places of learning and education, and as a parent of a boarding child, you will know this. You will have appreciated over the years the time, care and attention that have gone into helping your child grow and turn into a fully-fledged, well-rounded young person on the brink of adulthood. When it comes to exam time, however, when all the pressures of the season seem at times unbearable – for parent as well as for child – then the anxiety of lying awake wondering how your child will fare can distort reality: suddenly, nothing seems to matter more than success in these vital few weeks. How can you cope with your offspring’s stress when you yourself are not there?

First piece of advice: don’t believe everything you hear on the phone from your teenager. Whether your teenager projects outwardly an all-consuming anxiety, or a breezy utter self-confidence, you can rest assured that neither situation is by any means the full picture. Sometimes our children need to offload on us, to make themselves feel better; sometimes they want to protect us from concern, or protect themselves from the onslaught of advice they know we would unleash if we felt that they weren’t working as they should. Take everything that is said with a pinch of salt, and keep checking that you are not interpreting the situation as worse than it actually is.

If you put down the phone after a conversation with your child and feel in any way disconcerted or worried, pick the phone right up again and phone his or her Housemaster or Housemistress straight away. These people are in the very best place to tell you exactly what is going on in the House, and what they are doing about it. It may be that all is well, and work and revision is going to plan; if it is not going entirely to plan, then the House Staff will be on the case, and will be able to reassure you about what they are doing to ease your child’s worries or deliver reminders of the importance of these examinations.

Whatever the situation, the school will have a range of strategies in place to help guide your child to exam success, and they will be putting them into practice. These will be partly concerned with physical health (making sure that your son or daughter gets enough exercise and sleep, for instance), partly practical (ensuring that he or she is working rather than just watching TV), and partly emotional (offering encouragement, advice and motivation). It is good for you to know what these strategies are, because the knowledge will help to reassure you, so do not be afraid to ask; you will feel more confident and will therefore be able to sound and feel much more confident when you reassure your teenager over the phone.

Keep calm and retain a sense of proportion

Something else to think about: consider very carefully what to do about ‘study leave’. Most schools will operate a system in the run-up to public examinations where their pupils can study at home – the rationale, of course, is that at home they will better be able to organise their own time and revise in peace and quiet to prepare most effectively during the last few days before the examinations. This can still apply to boarding school pupils, but you need to be absolutely clear that if your teenager comes home during this period of the term, then the purpose of this time will not be to relax and unwind, as is normally the case at home, but rather to focus, work to an organised schedule, and learn systematically.

Above all, keep calm and retain a sense of proportion. Your very natural anxiety will help no-one, and could easily make the situation more tense. Moreover, although we can all be guilty of building these public examinations up into monuments of tremendous importance which will affect the direction of your child’s life forever, they are only exams. Some of the most successful people in the country failed at school and still made a name for themselves; your child has had the huge advantage of a well-rounded education which will have made them into the person they are meant to be. We all want them to have great exam qualifications too – but if it doesn’t happen this time, it is not the end of the world.