GCSEs: the pressure

Whichever child of mine I offload about in the next three years, it will be on the teenage topic. I know how important it is to be present, even if this means sacrificing my writing reading and writing luxury.

My oldest is going to be 16 this August. As you may or not be aware (depending on where in the world you are reading this from) in the UK it’s the GCSEs period. GCSEs are very important for students, especially for those who have higher learning ambitions. This is the case for my daughter. She’s dreaming about studying in Cambridge for the past two years. The struggles we have been undergoing as a result of Covid may have caused irreparable damage to her targets, but we don’t know yet. She has been trying to catch up on her subjects for the past year, amongst a lot of school absences triggered by social anxiety, and it has been hard. On her and on all of us. It has been difficult to juggle the focus between her and her brother, and the work we’ve been putting on our house since we purchased it a year ago. It has dramatically affected our daily routine, as she has been absorbing a lot of our emotional energy (despite hating the attention).

Although we know she has a good perception of the importance of school attendance, she has allowed her social circle to interfere with the way she would usually manage her studies. Every parent knows that children can be cruel to each other, but they’re still children. And even if my motherly side sometimes wishes I could slap the other child, I make it a forbidden rule to not meddle and hinder her social experience.

You can try and teach a child how to behave, but you cannot teach them how to react. Reacting is instinctive. You can only present the possibilities for the outcomes. Ultimately, it is their decision how they choose to react and if they are mature enough to inhibit inappropriate or irrelevant responses. This is part of their learning. They could never mirror ours, as much as we’d like, because our learning path was totally different.

Teenagers’ lives are hard. There are too many choices to make in all areas of their growth and too much pressure to rush to make them. They are only children. Yet society imposes these pressures too early in life, almost forcing them to skip the joys of childhood. Because the world is busy and competitive out there, and if you want to make it, to be successful, you need to have started yesterday.

She is definitely in a better place today than she was a year ago. I have not been authorising her absences. Instead, I am making it clear to her that from now on, she needs to take the consequences for her actions, to think before making a decision about things. I find it may be beneficial to start standing up for herself without expecting one of us to cover for her. She might not be allowed to go to the Prom because of that. So what?