Lucy Clark on why we shouldn’t stress about our children’s academic success — or lack of it
Lucy Clark on why we shouldn’t stress about our children’s academic success — or lack of it
Ebecomes your best friend.
When she was about 14, my daughter went off the programme with extreme prejudice. She pushed back against most things, but school was the major issue — the rules, the competition, the pressure to perform, the pressure to conform. For her, it all added up to a recipe for chronic anxiety.
By the time she reached the crucial final two years of school, she was failing at everything, or feeling as if she was. Failing to hand in assignments, failing to turn up on time (or at all), failing to meet uniform requirements, failing, at every turn, to meet all the standard-markers and expectations of the education system.
It was confronting for a self-confessed goody-two-shoes former prefect like me (why can’t you just hand in the assignments on time?!), and deeply frustrating and painful to watch (wouldn’t it be so much easier for you to just follow the damn rules?!). Thirty years earlier, I had ticked all the boxes, hit all my marks, played every sport possible, studied hard and did the best as I could. For me, school was a bit of a breeze; the stakes didn’t feel that high.
And here, with my first child, I was confronted by the anti-me, not mini-me. A child who — for whatever reason — would not tick any boxes. In adults we revere disruptive thinkers — thinking “outside the box” is a trait to be admired — but in kids we want round pegs for round holes. Particularly at school.
And so there were countless threats of detention and suspension, and me in the deputy principal’s xpectations are a funny thing. We all have a sense, as we set out on the great adventure of parenthood, of our hopes for our kids. We imagine self-sustaining successful adults who, on their own thrilling adventure towards adulthood, have ticked off all the boxes that get them there: crawl at this age, walk at that age, read, write and learn times tables as the grades are ascended at exactly the right moments, get a brilliant score, go to uni, get a great job, repeat. Follow the rules, keep to the programme.
We read all the parenting books and we know what to expect from the moment we are expecting, and beyond. Life is prescribed and if things don’t quite fit perfectly, the term “the range of normal”
I was confronted by the anti-me, not mini-me. A child who — for whatever reason — would not tick any boxes.
office on many occasions looking for answers, trying desperately not to cry, and failing miserably every time.
It was difficult for her family, and difficult for her teachers. But it was difficult for no one more than her. Every day of my daughter’s high school life was like an enormous mountain to climb, and very often she didn’t scale it. It was a daily struggle just to get her ready to go. When she did make it to school, if she could make it past the park bench where she would sit and watch her friends continue on, the urge to flee overtook all sense. She panicked and froze while the noise of anxiety drowned out everything a teacher might be trying to teach her. She slipped further and further behind in her work; the anxiety got worse.
Expectations, hopes, and dreams were revised on a daily basis, systematically lowered to the point that by the end of school — which she desperately wanted to finish because not finishing would make her feel even more like a failure — we were just hoping that she made it through another day unscathed and unharmed, and school success be buggered. In a funny way it was liberating not to enlist in the final year of school stress programme all my friends were trapped in, and the three weeks of her final exams were the most relaxing of all her high school years; it was almost over, her freedom was in sight.
Looking back, I can see that these terrible years can be partly explained by my daughter’s personality — her rejection of judgment of any