Year 10 GCSE anxiety and pressure, it is becoming ridiculous and cruel…parents stop it before it starts!

Year 10 GCSE anxiety and pressure, it is becoming ridiculous and cruel…parents stop it before it starts! Here’s how.

I have written before about GCSE anxiety and how to manage the expectations from school, within that blog I spoke of very practical things you can do as a parent to ease the worry on the run up to exam season. You can read that blog here https://helenharveycounselling.blogspot.com/2017/08/do-you-have-child-doing-their-gcses.html

Yesterday I read a ridiculous article featuring a former head teacher from Harrow in which he stated that revising for 7 hours a day is the recommended thing to do during the Easter holidays. I read on further down the article in the hope there was an ‘expert’ psychologist or mental health expert telling Barnaby Lenon that he was totally out of touch and spouting dangerous s**t. Unfortunately, no, the experts were too polite about it and should be complaining that their bums are hurting from sitting too much on the fence.

This kind of results driven pressure is contributing to our teenager’s poor mental health and their perception of ‘good enough’. Not only do our teenagers make the comparisons of physical appearance and lifestyle on their Instagram and snapchat accounts, but they can go into school from year 10 onwards and hear the message of not good enough every day.

This type of pressure is dangerous, irresponsible and bordering on cruel.

My year 10 and 11 clients report that it is shoved down their throats in form time, assembly, in lessons and at parent’s evenings. Revision guides are flogged to parents from the start of year 10.

If we don’t try and dampen down this message of endless revision and A* status then we are in danger of leading our teenagers into an adult world of anxiety and perfectionism.

My daughter’s end of term report gives her the highest number for effort, so technically she couldn’t try harder, but her ‘working at’ level is equivalent to a D/C. Understandably she has started to worry and believes there is a magic formula to it that she just isn’t getting.

Today I thought I would share with you the thinking that could be adopted by your teenager with help from you as a parent.  I have this conversation with my clients and I recently talked with my daughter about this.

I was sorting laundry upstairs and my daughter was doing a lot of sighing with her hands on her hips. I asked tentatively what was bothering her, she replied that she was worried she wouldn’t get good grades and that the teachers were talking about GCSE’s all the time and it felt so hard to stay with this train of thought as it made her anxious.

I replied ‘we are not doing that’

‘doing what’ she responded’

‘we are not starting to think about what might happen even if you try your best, I am not starting to say to you that you have to work to saturation level to get the difference from a grade 5 to a 6 in physics that you don’t like and will probably never use in your working life.

The most I have taken from Physics in my life is that my laundry door doesn’t open when it is hot whether because materials expand. I have forgotten everything else. We are going to do what needs doing when the time comes. I had to resit my GCSE year. I decided to go back and study when I was 36 years old and got a degree, whatever results you gain in the next two years DO NOT DETERMINE the course of your life. The results make the journey a little shorter to the destination, but it is not the end of the world if you don’t get them now’

Within this message I am not communicating that she doesn’t need to try her best, I am communicating that I am not prepared to reinforce this message of get the results...NO MATTER WHAT! 

I know loads of talented people from my year that got great results and went off to university and squandered their chances in all the wrong places, those people got to their destination at the same time as me.

To buy into this results/pressure/last chance mentality reminds me of the Grand national horse race when they are whipping the last bit of anything out of a horse that is already trying its best. IT LOOKS CRUEL and IS CRUEL and I’m not prepared to do that with my children.