Top 5 Tips to Help Your Child Beat Exam Stress

As a student, it always annoyed me that exams were during the summer. I would be studying in my room while looking out the window at the bright sun, in the clear blue sky and all the trees and flowers swaying in the cool breeze. It was torture! As well as wanting to be outside in the sun, I wanted to do my best, and my loved ones also wanted me to do my best.

At that moment in time, it felt like any wrong move would destroy my future forever. That type of pressure can feel immense, and it didn’t just come from within myself, it also came from my family, friends, cultural expectations and from my school. As parents, we want to apply enough pressure to ensure that our children feel motivated enough to do their best, but not apply too much pressure, which can cause our children to buckle under the weight of it. In this blog, I am going to give you five tips that can help our children during exam time. 

1. Provide practical ideas on how to revise.

A common mistake children can make is to think that the more hours they do, the more successful they will be. Obviously, they do need to put in a good few hours of revision for exams, but if they have the right system and make their revision efficient, they won’t need to spend 12 hours a day, every day, for months on end revising for their exams. Many schools teach children how to revise, but it is important that the method your child chooses works for them. 

Everyone is different. Some students may prefer to write and rewrite their notes. Other students prefer to use pictures, videos or mind maps. Whatever method your child prefers, ensure that it involves testing their ability to recall the information they are studying. It is not enough to just keep re-reading the same information. Practice questions, quizzes and flashcards (paper or electronic) can significantly increase your ability to recall the information you are learning.

Also, your recall increases if your notes are colourful or a tutorial video is funny. This is because it makes the information interesting, and this can then also activate the visual and audio centres in the brain. This helps to create pathways in the brain that cause the information to move from their short-term memory to their long-term memory. 

I would also encourage children to make notes as they go along, throughout the school year. This way, when it comes to exam time, they do not need to waste time making notes and they can concentrate on learning the information. 

2. Help Them Create a Realistic Study Schedule

Students also tend to underestimate the time needed to cover all the material. Therefore, the earlier they start the better. To help keep stress levels low, it is important to start your revision early and create a study timetable. It can be helpful to start with a copy of the syllabus and then to creak this down into chunks/topics in each section. This can give the children a realistic idea of the amount of content they need to cover and therefore plan accordingly. 

Always add wiggle room to your schedule. Life happens, and your child may become unwell, need a longer break than anticipated, or an event or sports match pop up unexpectedly. Also, there can be topics that your child needs to spend longer on than they thought to grasp fully. 

3. Prioritise Wellbeing: Sleep, Nutrition & Breaks

Often, our children will spend all day in their room eating ultra-processed goods, drinking sugary drinks and going to bed at 1 am. Then, when the exams start, they pick up virus after virus and burn out. In order for your brain to function properly and for your children to have the stamina and mental functioning needed to complete their exams, they need to look after themselves.

One of my previous blogs titled “What is Lifestyle Medicine” provides a summary of the six pillars of lifestyle medicine which can be applied here. However, poor sleep, not taking enough breaks and poor nutrition are frequent causes of poor exam performance. 

Sleep

This so important. When we sleep, our brain takes inventory and decides what needs to go into long-term storage and what can be forgotten. It tidies everything up and gets ready for the next day. How many times have you forgotten a word for something or someone’s name just because you have been exhausted. This is not a time to be exhausted so getting good quality sleep is a priority and non-negotiable. 

Nutrition

The body and brain need good nutrition in order to work properly. By having constant sugar highs and lows or by being dehydrated it hinders the body’s ability to fight infection and maintain brain function. By having regular healthy meals, you are fuelling you body and brain. Exam season is a marathon and not sprint in those last final weeks. Just like athletes do, fuel your children for success.  

Breaks

Have you ever used your phone for a long time and then find it becomes really warm or overheats? Our brains act like this, too. If our brain is constantly active, it “overheats” because it has not had enough rest, and this causes its ability to function or learn to significantly reduce. Breaks help the brain to subconsciously go through the information you have just covered, being the process of storing that information in the short-term and then long-term memory banks and to prepare for the next revision session.

4. Don’t Compare—Run Your Own Race

Exam time brings out the best and the worst in other students, parents and carers. Everyone is looking for some kind of advantage. Therefore, if their friend is revising 10 hours a day, then your child may feel they need to study at least 10 and maybe even 12 hours a day. Or if their friend has made 100 flashcards, then they may feel that they need to do 200 flashcards.

There will always be someone who has done more work and has more revision notes than your child. Your child needs to run their own race and not someone else’s. All you and your child need to concentrate on is revising in the way that suits them and doing the best they can. 

By comparing themselves to others or by you comparing them to others, fear, anxiety and stress can be created. For that reason, your child should focus on only comparing themselves with how they were yesterday or the month before. They can gain so much self-confidence and satisfaction from finding something difficult and then a few weeks later understanding the topic completely. 

5. Schedule Fun—Yes, Even During Exams!

This is so important and often a factor that gets forgotten. Human beings are social creatures. Being holed up in a room by ourselves for days on end is not something we have evolved to do. Have you had a time when you have been working non-stop and feeling exhausted, and then a friend drags you out, and then the next day you feel energised and get so much work done? 

As mentioned in tip no.4, our brains need breaks. Our children need time to have fun, laugh and be silly. This can be small or big. It can be daily or weekly. A common mistake that parents/carers make is to schedule something fun for AFTER the exams. They use this as an incentive to motivate their children. The problem is that the fun is usually a couple of months into the future and by the time they get there they are exhausted and run down. Also, nothing is planned until then and they can feel low and lose all their joy for life as all they do is study. 

If you want your child to have good levels of wellbeing and have the energy, stamina and capacity needed to do well, you have to schedule some fun. It can be movie nights, a half an hour break to play football in the garden or going bowling. 

Final Thoughts

I hope these tips provided you with the advice you needed to support your child during the stressful exam season. There are so many pressures on our children from so many different sources. We need to help them cut out the noise and set them up for success without trading in their well-being. If you have any other tips or comments on this blog, then head to my social media accounts and let me know. Good Luck to all the children who are taking exams at the moment!

References

Help your child beat exam stress – NHS

Exam Stress – How can Parents Help! – BBC

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