How to support your child during exams

This blog is based on a training that I deliver to parents in schools to help them provide exam support to their children.

As we all know the exam season is very stressful for children. However, it is especially stressful for parents! Often parents don’t know what to do and how to help and this is an extremely painful experience for them. They’re desperate to help their child and really want to see them doing well and feeling good during the exams but all too often students are going into crisis and having meltdowns. It is excruciating for parents to feel that all they can do is stand on the sidelines helplessly.

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Why Superheroes Matter

 

What is most helpful is identifying our strengths and building on them.

Most of the time we can be really focused on our negative aspects and what we are not doing, or achieving. In terms of the performance literature we know that this isn’t a helpful approach. What is most helpful is identifying our strengths and building on them.

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How parents can help stressed students to think.

Student Stress

Feeling stressed changes our thinking. This is important to remember when we are trying to help students who are under pressure.

Parents can help by: 

  1. Allowing your child space to talk.
  2. Actively practice not interrupting and not giving advice.
  3. Slow your own stress responses down.
  4. Help explore the way they are risk assessing.
  5. Be steady, open and responsive.

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How can parents support their children during exams?

Parent support

How can parents best support their children during exams?

▪Seek to understand your child’s problems

▪Your understanding of their problems enables your child’s understanding of their problems.

▪By listening we create a ‘thinking environment’.

▪By listening you enable them to think for themselves.

▪By enabling them to think for themselves you build their confidence.

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Are you caught in the stress cycle?

Student Stress

Stress is something that we can all relate to. It pervades our lives and can build in such a way that we don’t even notice it developing. Often we are highly aware of short-term stressors but can, in fact, be unaware of how highly stressed we have become over the longer-term. It becomes part of the air we breathe, part of the way we think and part of our background experience – which makes it difficult for us to spot. Continue reading