Exam Results Time

Exam results time raises a whole host of emotions for children and for parents.

We each have our own hopes, wishes, and perceptions of how the revision at exam time went (or didn’t). As a parent of 3, and as someone who had a tricky experience of high school myself, I have felt first-hand the stress of exam times and results day. Yet I can honestly say that I do not clearly remember any of these results days. Not one! I do, however, remember the days when my children or I were engaging in things with passion and true interest.

When Results Aren’t the Whole Story

Sometimes we’re pleasantly surprised by the outcome of results day. Sometimes our children need our support with the exam process and its harsh realities. Always, we parents need to try to embrace a way of being with our children that welcomes them to show us their results and to feel able to come to us for our compassionate support, whatever our own feelings are. A key tip on how to help them is to turn to their creativity, interests and hobbies. Let me explain this a little further…

The Pressure Parents Feel

We begin to feel judged as soon as we become parents. And for most of us, some of our hopes for results day are based on how others may view us if our children academically “underachieve”, based on exam results and academic expectations and pressures.

Practical Support for Parents

Flourish has designed a Navigating Exam Stress course to help in very practical ways at these times. It offers practical advice for the parents that I support as a mindful mentor and social worker. These tips are based on therapeutic and compassionate parenting, including how to show compassion to ourselves as parents - possibly the trickiest concept.

The Science Behind Learning and Survival Mode

Let’s consider what we have learned about our developing brains in recent years of research. So many of us that underachieved as children are now highly achieving adults who, in adulthood, may have been diagnosed as being neuro diverse and bright enough to have achieved highly, had the school systems understood how we learned and what we needed. But some of us had survival at the forefront of our minds when home life was challenging, or the environment around us was insecure.

When in survival mode, we are unable to access an integrated brain where we can find our curiosity, passion and creativity, or simply enough stillness to sit in class. We do, however, learn to survive - and sometimes this is the most helpful skill for our school years, one that will open up a world of curiosity and passion for us as resilient adults.

Creativity: A Key to Future Success

In 1959 E. Paul Torrance began a longitudinal research study on creativity and achievement in adulthood, studying gifted students for up to 30 yrs. Torrance viewed a student’s creativity as the key factor in high achievement as an adult, and a fundamental human capacity that is in all of us as children and can be nurtured up to and into adulthood. That’s quite a liberating thought!

We all begin our lives with creative potential and the capacity to wonder, dream, explore possibilities that do not exist yet, and it is crucial to identify and nurture this potential, particularly in individuals who might not be recognised through traditional assessments and schooling.

Spotting and Nurturing Your Child’s Interests

It seems that our future successful self doesn’t necessarily need to pursue our childhood passions, it’s simply important that we had the experience of being able to nurture our capacity to become passionate and creative in our passion. Falling in love with a future dream in childhood was shown as a predictor of high achievement in adulthood and careers – more so than scholastic achievements, school grades and IQ tests. However, if not nurtured, it seems that we are also capable of losing this.

Has your child found something that they love, one where they lose sense of time when engaged in it? Did you, when you were a child? It might have been unrealistic in practical terms, it might have been seemingly mundane and dull to others, it might have been off-the-chart, sci-fi-impossible in our lifetimes, but it was a dream, an interest, a passion.

Why Today Isn’t the End of the Story

Whatever the results this year, and whatever the emotions around our expectations, hopes and dreams, we now know that ‘today’ isn’t the be all and end all. Nurture the child and their dreams, and there is plenty of time to find a way to engage fully and to achieve highly when the time is right. If the results aren’t what your child had been hoping for, support them to turn to their passion and interests as a de-stressor and calming activity, to help them manage the situation and create a new plan.

If excitement and relief is your child’s experience, you can celebrate and let off some of the pent-up tension through these same interests too.  Our creativity and interests – however small and mundane – are also the things that will help us through this time if we turn our focus on to them. A win / win situation if ever I saw one, even if it does not seem it on results day!