IN THE PRESSURE COOKER The final years of school can be a harrowing time for students. How can you help?

The first thing I noticed was she stopped playing her guitar.

I’d loved those 15 or so minutes every night when she broke from her study to strum and sing snippets of songs.

Next she suggested giving up her part-time job — four hours in an ice cream shop every Saturday afternoon.

“Are you sure?” I inquired. “You really like the money.”

“I really like the money,” she said glumly. “But I have to study.”

But it was the tears just two weeks into Year 11 that finally made me realise the ludicrous amount of pressure our kids are under.

“I’ve been told that Year 11 and 12 are the worst two years of your life,” she said resignedly. “I s’pose I’ve just gotta get through it.”

My daughter is not depressed or prone to melodrama. She’s not uniquely burdened or particularly fragile. Indeed, a quick survey of other parents revealed every other kid her age is feeling the same. And the word they’re all using? Stressed.

It’s a word that crops up in virtually every scene of the new ABC documentary Mr Year

12 Life, which screens tonight. At the beginning of last year, filmmaker Laura Waters gave cameras to a group of Year 12 students and asked them to document their last year of high school.

They’re a diverse bunch of kids from a range of public and private schools, yet each is engaging. They have dreams — to study fashion design, to go into the army — yet they’re universally concerned about their futures. Specifically, their ATAR or Australian Tertiary Admission Rank.

These kids are not simply participants in a social documentary, but the very real face of alarming statistics that show 42 per cent of Year 12 students suffer from high-level anxiety, high enough to be of clinical concern.

The study from the UNSW School of Education showed 16 per cent of students reported severe levels of anxiety, while 37 per cent registered above-average levels of stress. The pressure was highest among girls and higher still in girls deemed “gifted”.

The 2015 findings also showed students saw themselves as the greatest source of pressure (44 per cent), with family (35 per cent) and school or teachers (21 per cent) as the other key sources.

And that’s when the message hit home — it’s up to us. Somewhere in the muddle of my daughter’s stress and the incontrovertible proof we’re in the grip of an adolescent mental health epidemic, I realised what all these years have been for. All the nappies and the broken sleep and the nits and the chickenpox — they were just parental boot camp for this: the test.

I’m not talking about THE test — the NTCE (Northern Territory Certificate of Education or its interstate equivalents), but our test as parents. Are we bold enough and brave enough to act as a dam against the pressure pouring in from their schools, their peers and themselves? Are we secure enough in ourselves to not simply say the words — “just do your best, darling” or “the number isn’t everything” — but to genuinely mean them? And not just in the moment, but during that long year when our kids need a spine of steel they can lean on.

Laura Waters tells me she was compelled to make the program after watching her eldest daughter go through Year 12. She’d grown up in America, where students’ results are based on all their years in high school, and not just academic outcomes but their involvement in sport, arts and community activities.

Here she observed ridiculous levels of expectation, scaremongering and student burnout. “The message is that the one number is all that matters. You either become a lawyer or you’re homeless.”

She learned about the Year 10 nudge, where struggling students are quietly told they should look for another school lest they imperil their current school’s results. And she saw students so exhausted by the rigours of Year 12 that when it came to university they dropped out within a few weeks, too burnt out to contemplate more learning.

I tell her of kids so anxious they became incapable of sitting the exams, and my fears the volume of study is not just killing flair and creativity, but lifelong curiosity.

I also reveal I was frowned upon for “letting my daughter do drama”, a subject that apparently scales badly and is not one of the “Asian 5” — namely extension maths, English, biology, physics and chemistry. Notably, students also refer to them as the “suicide five”.

So how, I ask Waters, can I best support my daughter?

Don’t buy into the parental pressure where everyone is invested in their child’s results, she tells me. But, crucially, “acknowledge to your kids that it’s all a bit crazy.” As she says: “If they get the result they want that’s great, but if they don’t, let them know you’ll be there to help them find another path.”