How to cope with exams

The combination of adolescence and the final year of high school can leave the relationship between mother and daughter strained. Psychotherapist Carolyn Parfitt offers some helpful thoughts.

“I’m in despair about how to help my daughter get through her Higher School Certificate exams. She doesn’t let me help her at all. Sometimes she seems to hate me. What have I done wrong? Perhaps I should have been more involved in her schoolwork before now. I just want her to do as well as she can so she is happy and fulfilled in life. We were very close for all of her earlier life, and now we’ve had our worst year ever. I’m heartbroken. I can’t seem to say or do anything right. I know it’s a stressful time for her, but I’m having trouble biting my tongue.” Rosie, Dulwich Hill, NSW

What a cocktail of competing stresses those final years of high school pose. Who ever thought the combination of adolescent preoccupations, including an increased interest in both social life and sex, with final-year exams and worries about ‘the rest of your life’ would be a good idea? Add to this the fact that the push and pull between a mother and her daughter reaches a peak during this time as the daughter strives to become her own separate woman, and it can be a very tense time indeed. Here are some ideas that might provide a basis for your own discussions on the subject. As all teenagers are individuals and all families have their own dynamics, no doubt you’ll take some of the ideas on board and reject others.

Stepping back

While it is extremely difficult to step back and let things take their course, particularly at a time when your every instinct is to protect your child, it might help to keep the bigger picture in mind at this time – that is, your daughter’s growth and development, and your relationship with her, beyond and regardless of exam results.

One redeeming quality of these major exams (some might say the only redeeming quality) is that they offer teenagers the challenge of a difficult obstacle to face up to and overcome. This can be valuable practice for meeting the other challenges and deadlines that will inevitably confront them throughout their lives.

Your daughter is in the middle of the metamorphosis between adolescence and adulthood, and one of the things she needs most from you now is to feel your trust in her ability to handle whatever comes her way. This is your challenge. How well can you take a back seat? You can’t do these exams for her and you can’t force her to accept your assistance. But you can let her know you’re there for her and you trust her to ask for your help whenever she wants it.

Start talking

If your daughter is closing up and not wanting to talk to you, it could be that your talk is too often about the exams for her liking or that your conversation is too heavily loaded with questions – with the best of intentions, of course. You might need to shift gears from the ‘worried mum’ conversation to one that speaks to her as an adult. If you can be authentic, showing her your real self and letting her really know you, it might open the way for her to share more of herself with you.

Try not to get into (or continue) the habit of sounding critical, which is so easy for mothers to do because so much of their job with young children is to teach, correct, warn, admonish and so on. If that’s you, it’s time to change and give your daughter more positive feedback. If it continues, she’s likely to start hearing even the most innocuous remark as a jab.

Done wrong?

Why is it that when our children are unhappy, not doing well at school, have trouble with their friends or choose the wrong partner, mothers wonder what it is they did wrong? I don’t often hear fathers wondering if it was something they did. Part of the answer, I think, lies in the idealised images of mothers portrayed not only in contemporary media, but as far back as that purest of mothers, the Virgin Mary, who certainly could do no wrong. If we measure ourselves against a perfect golden mean, who wouldn’t feel guilty? At the same time, mothering has been the one area where women have traditionally been allowed, even expected, to be powerful, and it can be hard to let go of this privileged spot. There’s an amount of grief involved.

Rather than having ‘done wrong’, you sound like a fabulous mother who is working very hard to find the best way through a difficult situation, with the aim, as you say, of helping your daughter to find fulfilment in life. I can’t think of a greater expression of love than that. It must be hard to have lost some of the closeness you had earlier, and very hurtful to feel her rejection.
 
What’s going on for her?

The importance given to the final high school exams and the uncertainty of what the following year will hold (not to mention ‘the rest of your life’) must present a fairly frightening prospect to teenagers. After all, for 13 years they have known fairly well what to expect – school, weekends, holidays, friends, teachers, sports, speech days and so on. At the end of high school, as exciting as the prospect of freedom must be, there’s a lot of doubt about what comes next.

In their minds, everything is riding on their marks, whether they get into the tertiary course of their dreams or get into any tertiary course at all. And your presence can represent just another pressure for her. She knows you have hopes for her success – it’s impossible for parents to raise children and not have hopes for them – and she wants you to be proud of her.

Enlist Dad now

Adolescence shares some of the qualities of the toddler stage in that it’s a time of striving for independence, for doing it ‘on my own’, and mothers seem to bear the brunt of this. It can really test a mother’s unconditional love to see that Daddy doesn’t ignite the same level of antagonism that her daughter reserves for her. It’s a major disadvantage of the job, and it can really rattle your confidence, which might have been so sure when she was young.

Which brings us to Dad. It’s well known that a father’s encouragement to a girl’s academic growth is meaningful and important – many successful women have acknowledged it – so enlist his help and give yourself a break.

Not the end of the world

Most parents who have already been there would agree that six months after the final school exams they wondered what all the fuss and angst, tears and hand-wringing were about. Teenagers get into courses they want, or don’t; they find jobs, they travel and life goes on. It can be disappointing to miss out on a course you have your heart set on, but often other avenues exist, such as starting a TAFE course that has credit transfer arrangements with universities.

Whatever happens, your reactions to your daughter during this testing time will be something she will remember, and appreciate, long after her school days have become a distant memory. All the best for handling it with grace.

Helpful books

Friends for Life: Enriching the Bond Between Mothers and Their Adult Daughters by Susan Jonas and Marilyn Nissenson (Harper Paperbacks, 2007).

Mothers and Daughters: Searching for New Connections by Ann F. Caron (Henry Holt & Company, 1998).

Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand and Support Your Daughter When She’s Growing Up So Fast by Joe Kelly (Broadway Books, 2002).

 

Photography: Sam McAdam.