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ParentsOctober 31, 2017

How to support teenagers through exam time

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Clinical psychologist Amy Wilson-Hughes shares some advice for parents and whānau to help their teens deal with the stress of exams.

I spend my days working with teenagers, and I know that term four can be rough. Heck, they’re teenagers – every day is rough. But exams add unique pressures all of their own, and what I’ve noticed is that parents have a tendency to add to this pressure rather than scaffold their teenagers through it. Results rest entirely on the teenagers’ shoulders, but parents can feel entitled to anger or disappointment should their young person fall short in their eyes. I can understand how this dynamic develops, but I’ve noticed that when it comes to exams, a little help can go a long way.

A lot of parents think that “helping with study” means having the knowledge to teach the subjects that their offspring are trying to learn. This may be true of helping with homework in primary school, but you don’t need to be able to ace an NCEA exam in order to support your teen in reaching their potential. Here are a few ways that all parents can support their kids, no matter what level of exams they’re facing.

Get a sense of what exams actually mean to your child

Not all attitudes towards exams are created equal. Exams can mean anything from “nothing, I’ve already passed with internals so I don’t care” to “if I don’t get excellence in every single one, my self-esteem may shatter into a thousand tiny pieces”. Some young people may need certain grades in exams to get into accelerate classes or certain subjects the next year, or to get accepted into specific university courses. The best way to help your child will be to get a sense of their expectations of themselves, and to start from there.

Help with scheduling and time management

The brain structures needed for time management, impulse control, and forward planning don’t finish growing until our early twenties, so no matter how mature your child seems they physically cannot be completely adult-like in these ways. Sitting down with your teen, taking a look at their exam timetable, rating the exams in order of difficulty and importance and using these to allocate study days according to need is something best supported by adults. Young people tend to study for exams in chronological order, which can lead to unproductive levels of stress when a difficult exam is nestled right behind a less important one. Helping your young person see the exam period as a whole rather than a series of individual events is a simple way to support your teen without any knowledge of the subjects themselves.

Photo: Getty Images

Make sure your child knows how to study

This may sound like a strange one, but it’s important. Different kids learn in different ways, and the same applies to studying. Reading over old notes or textbooks will do little if it doesn’t stick. Talk to your child about what works best – that may be reading notes or chapters aloud to themselves, re-writing or highlighting important notes, testing themselves using past exam papers, being tested by parents using flash cards they’ve made themselves, or creating mnemonics or poems to aid memory. Simply encouraging them to “study” or “revise” may lead to your child attempting a method of learning that actually helps very little come exam day.

Keep the motor running

Just as walking uses more energy than sitting, studying uses more energy than watching television. Teenagers are often left to their own devices during study leave and exam time, and may not be able to make the best choices about keeping their brains nourished and functional. If you’re not at home during the day, consider what easy-to-grab foods and snacks are available and do what you can to increase the quality and quantity of what’s there. Whenever you are at home with your studying teen, a snack delivery service is one of the most helpful things you can provide. This also applies to assisting your child to get sufficient sleep – our brain does a lot of work making memories stick overnight, so turning off the WiFi or doing a device collection when you head to bed may be something you can do to help.

A spoonful of teaching helps the learning go down

The very best way of consolidating learning is by teaching what you’ve learned. The reason this works is that it forces us to truly understand and internalise the concepts we’ve memorised, rather than just how to execute them. Understanding what a parabola is is every bit as important as remembering how to calculate one, but something that often gets overlooked in the rush to jam equations into teenage brains. If you can, make yourself available for a little while each evening to be “taught” whatever your teen spent the day learning. This way you’re both able to keep track of whether they’re working as hard as they’d planned to be, and help them cement whatever they’ve learned.

Be kind

This last one is the most important of all. The idea of helping your teen through exams is to relieve some of the pressure they’re under, not to increase your stake in it. Exams don’t measure how intelligent, caring, generous, funny, or generally wonderful your child is. You can go to university when you’re older no matter how bad your high school grades were. As an adult, your NCEA marks aren’t tattooed on your forehead – ask yourself how many people around you know (or care!) if you passed School C science with an A or a B. Also remember that none of us are at our best when we’re stressed out or under pressure – try to have a little extra grace for crankiness or rolled eyes throughout exam season.

Good luck for exams this year, parents – I’m sure you’ll do your best.

Amy Wilson Hughes is a clinical psychologist who trained at Victoria University and now lives in Auckland with her wife and cat.

Keep going!
Lina and Elliot outside Ronald McDonald House
Lina and Elliot outside Ronald McDonald House

ParentsOctober 30, 2017

A home when our family needed one: In defence of Ronald McDonald House

Lina and Elliot outside Ronald McDonald House
Lina and Elliot outside Ronald McDonald House

When Counties Manukau Health dropped plans for a Ronald McDonald House for families of Middlemore Hospital patients, many parents of very sick children were shocked. Caroline Beech explains why Ron’s House means so much to those who use it.

The scan found our daughter’s tumour on a Tuesday. A week later we were on a plane to Christchurch. In that unfamiliar city, a surgeon would drill a hole in Elliot’s head, about the size of a 20 cent piece, and take a tiny piece of her brain.

Our world had been upended.

Elliot in hospital

We’d need two trips to Christchurch, in the end. The first was for Elliot’s brain biopsy, and to meet the team who would be managing her treatment; the second was to kick off her chemotherapy. During both trips we stayed at what we affectionately called “Ron’s House”.

In case you’ve never been to one – and I kind of hope you haven’t – Ronald McDonald Houses are basically motels for the families of sick children. The one in Christchurch is just a stone’s throw from the hospital (convenient, when you could be trekking between the two places several times a day) – and has indoor and outdoor playgrounds, a comfortable lounge, and a communal kitchen and dining room.

At a time when we were going through so much uncertainty, everything was just there. We didn’t need to think about where we were going to be staying, or where the next meal was coming from, or anything other than supporting each other. Ronald McDonald House was genuinely invaluable, to the point where it’s hard to imagine how we could have coped without them.

Ronald McDonald House at Starship

We had to go to Christchurch because there’s no pediatric oncology service in Wellington. There are only two in the whole country (the other one being Starship Hospital) – so if you live anywhere other than Christchurch or Auckland, and your child has cancer, you’re going to need to get familiar with Ron’s House. The same goes for any number of other conditions that can’t be treated at regional hospitals – and for some families, treatment means having to stay there indefinitely.

I’ve described it as being like a motel, but Ron’s House is more than that. At a motel, you can’t take for granted the heightened awareness of hygiene that’s required when many of your guests are immune compromised. You won’t have meals cooked for you most nights by local businesses and community groups. Motels don’t provide workshops and activities for patients and their siblings, and don’t have shelves stocked with donated food. And a motel probably wouldn’t be so forgiving about unexpected arrivals and departures, and guests who don’t know how long they’ll be staying, or who might not know they’re leaving until the day it happens. It also wouldn’t have the sense of community you can only get from other people who fundamentally understand the things you’re going through, because they’re going through them too.

Elliot with her father Jarrod at Christchurch Hospital

The day we arrived, it turned out that they weren’t expecting us – they hadn’t received our booking, for some reason. They shuffled things around and made it work anyway. They were having their mid-winter Christmas that night, including a full Christmas dinner and a visit from Santa, complete with presents for all the children. Despite the fact that we’d literally turned up on their doorstep 45 minutes beforehand – and they didn’t even know we were coming – Santa produced named gifts for Elliot and for Lydia, our older daughter, from his sack. Elliot was too young to appreciate it, but for Lydia it was huge. At that stage she was almost four, and the whole situation was as hard on her as on any of us. The people at Ronald McDonald House went the extra mile to make sure she was included.

Caroline and Elliot outside Ronald McDonald House

Yes, they’re sponsored by McDonald’s (along with, as it happens a whole host of other businesses and individuals) – and you’d be naive to think that the corporate sponsors of any charity are providing that sponsorship purely out of the goodness of their hearts. But aside from the name, the connection is fairly low-key – it’s not as if they’re serving Big Macs and Happy Meals there. To someone (like myself) unfamiliar with the eponymous clown, the relationship is almost obscure. And maybe in an ideal world corporate sponsorship wouldn’t be needed for this sort of service… but as the mother of a child with a brain tumour, I feel uniquely qualified to tell you that this isn’t an ideal world.

We’re lucky that for now Elliot’s able to be treated as an outpatient in Wellington – but if she eventually requires more intensive treatment, we’ll be off to Christchurch again – where we know that the team at Ron’s House will welcome us with open arms. It won’t be home, exactly – but it’ll mean we can all be together – and no matter what happens next, that’s the most important thing of all.

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