Make the grade A pushy parent’s guide to exams
As exam season starts, Grant Feller admits that despite best intentions the urge for children to over-achieve can take over
Every morning, I’ve had the same feeling of sickness in the pit of my stomach. Twice a day, when the invigilators are due to start the clock, a bolt of panic shoots through me – once at 9am, then at 2pm. Yes, it’s GCSE time again, and I’m living every moment with my son. As much as we tell ourselves “it’s only exams, not life or death”, it never really feels like it.
The compulsion for our children to over-achieve is now so allconsuming that it has become as much of a parental obsession as it is a student one. We’re told that these few weeks are disproportionately vital to their futures. It’s A-stars or nothing. But are our ambitions for them doing more harm than good?
The Fisher family thinks so. Standing inside their palatial Buckinghamshire home, you’d never imagine that misfortune could have so blighted the family that lives here. The expansive rear lawn is immaculately manicured, the shelves groan under the weight of hundreds of books, all five bedrooms are pristine and clad in designer labels.
But that’s all something of a mask for 18-year-old Annabelle, who spent most of her final year at school in a private mental health hospital after a period in which she self-harmed, as the stresses of her impending A-levels increased.
Already suffering from anorexia, she tried to kill herself the weekend before her mock exams began. Today, she’s positively beaming. “I’m me again,” she says. “The pressure to succeed, to impress my parents and beat my friends, to go one step further, to be the best… well, I suppose I could never handle that. I bottled up those feelings of inadequacy because I felt I couldn’t turn to anyone.”
It’s an experience that many teens will recognise. According to Young Minds, the mental health charity, the number of British 15- and 16-year-olds with depression has nearly doubled between the Eighties and the Noughties, and one in every 10 aged five to 16 will suffer a mental health disorder. A recent poll funded by the Government found that more than half of all parents didn’t speak about depression with their children because they didn’t consider it an issue. We are all susceptible. My own children – Amy, 18, who is at Edinburgh University, and 16-year-old Joel, who is in the midst of his GCSES – have, I hope, benefited from our insistence that enjoyment of life, positivity and being socially skilled are paramount. Work hard and do your absolute best, but understand that your best and someone else’s best may be very different things. But it’s not an easy balancing act and I often find myself trying to hide my stress for them, from them.
For families like the Fishers, it’s not government help that’s needed, but a more realistic understanding of responsible parenting.
We have become a middle-class society riven by guilt, split between those who feel they’re not pushing their children enough and those willingly pushing them too hard. “My friends were obsessed with getting A-stars,” Annabelle says. “The school was pushing us to achieve even greater things – for ourselves, and also to make them look good in the league tables – and I got the sense that unless I at least tried to be the best, then I would have failed.
“And I did, spectacularly. There just didn’t seem to be any room to breathe. I wasn’t sure if I was loved for me or what I achieved.”
Her mother, Kate, sitting beside her on the sofa, suddenly interjects: “Dad and I didn’t see what these pressures were doing to you, we were caught up in the whole competitiveness thing, just as you were. If anyone failed, we did.”
Kate works as a copywriter and Annabelle’s father is in the City. They admit that their ambitions for their daughter sent her over the edge.
“Depression isn’t something you expect in a family that has it all,” says Kate. “But we live among friends who also have it all, who also want the best, who smart when their children aren’t made head boy or girl, who layer on tutor after tutor to get their children into the best universities. And they don’t realise what that competitiveness does.
“We stepped on the brake, forgot about university and tried to let Annabelle be a regular teenager – not expecting, or striving.
“And now she’s transformed. In fact, we all are. We are more relaxed and supportive of each other, free of the target-obsessed life we once were all part of.”
It’s similar to the strategy pursued by Heather Hanbury, headteacher at The Lady Eleanor Holles, an independent day school for girls in south-west London.
When she took over in 2004, she encouraged the pupils and parents to experience setbacks in a positive vein and, rather than see things in rigid terms of success or failure, to realise that achievement is relative.
“I remember a girl came to me saying that she had failed because she missed a distinction in her music exam by one mark,” she says.
“For her that was a failure. Yet she had achieved an incredible score, she was a wonderful musician and a lovely girl to teach. She was as far from failure as you can get.
“Life is not about success and failure, one or the other, it’s all relative. Getting a B in an exam is not a failure, and for some children across the country a C grade is a huge success, and so it is.
“We all have high expectations, but we don’t all have to have the highest possible expectations.
“Sometimes, that difficult to explain to parents.”
Some names have been changed