4 Things to Say to a Stressed Out Teenager

It wasn’t all that long ago when I faced the stress and pressure of TEE exams (or HSC as they are known over east).

You sit through a year or two of teachers and parents harping on about how important these exams are, how they will shape your future and open (or shut) doors for you, all dependent on how you go in that massive room with a hundred other students and your little brain jam-packed with knowledge.

Life becomes all about note taking and research and study groups and flash cards and sticky notes flapping out of the side of textbooks. It’s intense, especially for kids.

The final exams high school kids take at the end of their secondary education years, usually with the view to enter into tertiary studies, are significantly harder than any exam I ever had to face at Uni. I did Year 12 twice, and two degrees, so I am well equipped to compare. Ironically, the intensity of the HSC/TEE exam situation is only really similar to stressful situations found in life, which you don’t need to sit an exam to pass. It’s frustrating to see kids focusing so much of their future aspirations on a single set of exams.

What if you are a doer, not a writer? What if you don’t perform well under pressure? What if you are ill on the particular day of an exam, or something has shifted your focus, like an argument or exciting news?

Granted these kids will have performed to their usual level of academic achievement during the year and have achieved a certain amount of ‘pre-requisite’ credit, but still so much emphasis is placed on the importance of the HSC/TEE and their academic future.

So parents, when your child is locked in their room studying, or they are walking around looking like the knowledge they have crammed into their still-developing brains is about to spew out of their eyes’ ears and nose at any moment, sit them down and tell them this…