How to Deal With Children and Exams: The Parental Guide

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Exams not only help to get good marks, secure a better stream, or a scholarship, but a successful performance in exams can help boost the confidence of a child. While your child is facing a lot of pressure from school, friends and society, it’s your turn as a parent to make your child motivated and confident enough to prepare for the exam.

Here’s how you can support your children during the exam:

Don’t put much pressure on the students

Each year, crores of students appear for exams from different boards. You can imagine the immense pressure your child may face during the preparation of the exam with such competition.

As a parent, you should realize the stress factor and not set any unrealistic targets for them. During the exam, you should give an assurance to your child that you will be there to support them irrespective of the exam result. A gentle motivation and encouragement will be much more helpful to boost the child’s confidence.

Help them to manage time and prepare a timetable

While a child is going to face the board exam, they have to give proper time to revisions, solving previous year’s questions, memorizing, etc. They must have an hour or two for rest and recreation. Parents need to help their child create a proper time table to meet the daily study target and ensure that each day remains balanced.

In this process, they might not need your consistent help. But you have to be there at the initial phase to help them stay on track. It is the moment when as a parent you have to be firm forward yet supportive to your child.

Monitor the progress and encourage them to create Self-Help Aids

Daily assessments can do much to track your child’s progress. Encourage them to take up regular mock tests seriously. Figure out their strong and weak areas from the mock assessment. Also, please do not allow any extra time, restricting them to complete a paper within the given time limit. By this, they will be more organized at the time of the real exam.

Sit down with them, take an oral test. Once your child is done with each mock and oral examination, ask them to list the patterns of mistake, and areas needing further revision. In this way, they can create a better revision plan and can improve their performance efficiently with time.

Make sure you are giving proper attention to nutrition, exercise/activity and sleep

Your child needs to look after themselves. It is very common for students to forget to eat or sleep at a proper time when the exam is just one or two weeks away. They get busy with their schedule and due to stress, sleeping and eating on time, takes a back seat.

As a parent, you have to make sure that your child remains mentally and physically healthy during this time. Make sure they have a healthy and balanced diet. You can encourage them to take juice or fruits at a regular intervals. If your child prefers to study late at night, encourage them to take frequent power naps in the day time. This will boost the mental capability in such a stressful time.

And don’t forget physical exercise. Take your child out with you for a walk or a cycle ride. Make sure they have a regular break from studying for nutrition, physical activity and sleep.

Provide a proper environment for study

Do not create a national library in your home, instead create a calm environment. Make sure you are not organizing any house party at the time of exams.

Give your child the support they need during the examination, be that pillar and help them to flourish in their exam and not be afraid of it.

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While a lot of support is being extended to new mothers and mothers of toddlers, no one talks about the hardship about parenting a teen. While the first half of motherhood is physically draining the next lap of journey wreaks havoc on the mother mentally. Postnatal depression, postpartum trauma, are the terms used to describe the mental state of new mothers, but there should certainly be a term for this phase of motherhood too. Maybe something like “mothering-a-teen-syndrome”?

After you’ve raised your kid from the potty training stage to the learning to read and write and when you have just started to enjoy the motherhood journey for all that it has been glorified about, nature plays a dirty joke on you. Your child turns into an almost stranger as puberty hits. Well you can’t blame them, can we, as they are handling their own physical, mental and hormonal changes. We’ve all been there too.

There is no guide to motherhood, as every child is different and every woman does it differently. Hence there is nothing that can prepare you for what is to come. It’s all new. The cute little toddler you once knew is now changing into some sort of an alien whom you just can’t relate to. While there are several support groups for breastfeeding moms, pregnant moms, my-child-doesn’t-eat moms, school moms, there are hardly support groups for teenager’s moms. Trust me, this is exactly when you need someone to tell you that the child you had is never coming back. This person you gave birth to a decade ago is now a stranger you won’t recognize. And as usual, you will be at the receiving end of whatever they are going through in their life. No, that doesn’t mean they are going to confide what’s going on with them, if anything they will suddenly grow distant, want more space and privacy and come with rebellion, disobedience and rolling eyes.

This is when a host of insecurities creep on the mother- what did I do wrong, where did I make a mistake? You keep second guessing yourself. ‘Should I play the good cop or bad cop? Should I be strict or be like a friend?’ Any kind of discipline you may want to enforce will rub them the wrong way and take them further away from you. You will try your best to shield them from the harsh world and the dangers lurking there, but hello, for all you know they just think you are trying to exercise power over them. And now with the bane of technology, the easy access to alcohol, sex, drugs, cuss words, porn, nudes, etc. seems so frightening. You live in the constant fear that your teen may fall prey to this sooner or later. But trust your parenting. If you have taught them the difference between good and bad, they will probably make the right choice. Of course they will want to experience it before they make the choice though. And that thought again is scary, isn’t it?

Yep the struggle of a teenager’s mom is very real. And the only solace you will find is in the company of the mother of another teen. Your struggles may not be the same but the confusions, the dilemmas, the insecurities that you are facing will be the same. Form support groups. Go get help if you want. Meet a counselor, get some parenting tips, attend parenting workshops. There is no shame in that. But please do not beat yourself up for being a bad mother every time you are being yelled at. Do not second guess yourself over the choices you make. Don’t fear being judged. No, you are not perfect. There is no perfect mother or child. It’s just an experience and you live it the way you feel is best. When it comes to raising your child, no one knows it better than you. Happy Mothers day.