Some stress is useful. Some is destructive. Here is how to tell the difference, and what to do at home.
Exams are coming and your child is not okay.
Maybe they're snapping at everyone. Maybe they've gone very quiet. Maybe they're doing 6 hours a night and still saying they haven't done enough. Maybe they've stopped altogether, which is the one that frightens parents most.
Here's what's worth knowing before you say anything.
A moderate amount of stress before an exam is useful. It sharpens attention and it gets the work done. A student who feels nothing before their HSC is not in a better position.
The problem is the other kind, the kind that stops being fuel and starts eating capacity.
The mechanism is worth understanding. Anxiety consumes working memory, which is the mental space your child needs to hold a problem while they solve it. So a genuinely anxious student walks into the exam with less room available for the actual questions. They then underperform relative to what they know, which confirms the fear for next time.
That's why "just relax" is such useless advice. It's also why the difference between a student's practice marks and their exam marks is usually not a knowledge problem.
"Just do your best." Said kindly, heard as pressure, because your child has no idea whether they're doing their best and now has to worry about that too.
Asking how the study is going. Every time you ask, you remind them it's happening, and they hear an audit. If you want to know, ask what they're working on rather than how it's going.
Reacting to the practice mark. The whole point of a practice exam is to be bad at it while it doesn't count. A parent who flinches at a practice result teaches their child not to practise honestly.
Comparisons. To a sibling, to a cousin, to yourself at that age. There's no version of this that lands well.
Rescuing them from everything. Taking over all the chores and tiptoeing round the house signals that this is a crisis. It raises the stakes rather than lowering them.
Feed them and make them sleep. Unglamorous and it's most of the battle. Working memory is the first thing to go when a teenager is tired, and working memory is the thing an exam actually tests.
Make them stop. A student doing 6 hours a night is not learning for 6 hours. They're anxious for 6 hours near a desk. 3 focused hours with a real break beats it comfortably.
Get them practising retrieval, not rereading. Anxious students reread because it's soothing. It's also the least effective thing available. Closing the book and writing down what they remember is harder and works far better.
Normalise the feeling out loud. "Everyone in that room is nervous" is true and it helps. Anxious students often believe they're uniquely bad at this.
Point at the next hour, not the exam. "What are you doing between now and dinner?" is answerable. "Are you ready for the HSC?" is not.
Not much.
The work is done or it isn't, and nothing you say at 9pm changes the mark. What you can change is whether they sleep.
So: something ordinary. Dinner. A show. An early night. Treating the evening as normal is the most reassuring thing available to you, and it's more convincing than any speech about how proud you are.
If your child has stopped eating properly, isn't sleeping at all, has withdrawn from everyone, or is talking about themselves in a way that worries you, that's not exam stress any more.
Talk to their GP or the school counsellor. Every school has one and they're used to exactly this, particularly in October.
No exam is worth a kid in genuine distress, and it's worth saying that out loud to them.
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