Supporting our Kids through Exams – Procrastination
Right now, it’s Easter, and I am doing a little coaching work supporting families where there is friction around school work, where the dynamic tends to be parents pushing and prodding, and the young person, retreating and avoiding. Occasionally being on the receiving end of the age-old teenage riffs of parent-shaming which is either precipitated or met by teen-blaming ‘don’t blame me’ / ‘I told you so’ medley… It’s frustrating, exhausting and discouraging for both parties.
About this time of year the dynamics of these duets tend to intensify, as most secondary schools will be gearing up to summer term assessments – and of course, the public examination season is about to open. In our house, our 16 year-old is in anticipation of the starting gun of her GCSEs at the end of April…so tick tock. The count-down clock is ticking!
So this newsletter is drawing together my experiences – as a teacher and trainer of teachers, and as a parent and parent coach. To look at how parents can best support their kids through exams, and know what works and what doesn’t – in terms of where to direct your energies as a parent, and how your tween or teen can prepare themselves and get maximum benefit from their efforts.
The first question to ask yourself, is who really cares the most about this and why. If you’re the one who is mobilising, stressing, fretting, doing all the caring about it, then it’s time to take a good hard look at the energy you’re expending and how it’s serving you, your relationship, and the self-drive of your child.
We can’t force our children to want what we want. Or to do what we would have done in their stead / back in our day when O levels were O levels and GCSEs were GCSEs and it was just a case of internet-free, phone-free hard work.
The energy changes when they make their own choices. This is when we see engagement, momentum and motivation build. After all, how are they meant to build the musculature that supports responsibility, if we constantly intervene and take responsibility for them? This is the ultimate recipe for learned helplessness. And I have seen it many times, as parents enrich the input in response to their kid’s apathy or discouragement. More tutoring. More 1:1 support. More ‘subject surgeries’. Before you know it every single adult is racing around doing the thinking for them…
Focusing on procrastination. A much-misunderstood barrier to learning…
The exam candidates worst friend. And parents’ worst enemy…What looks like laziness and lack of focus is often really fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of failure, fear of losing your esteem and their self-esteem. Instead of being trapped in the doom loop of policing, catching them out, and berating them for not doing the business, try something else.
Try trusting them – to want to do well. As Ross Greene (Clinician and author of ‘The Explosive Child’, and ‘The Kids Who Aren’t OK’) says this: “Children – and teens – do well if they can.”
Trust that they are capable of making good decisions. Trust that they will learn from their mistakes. Warm your heart (in spite of the fear and judgment that you’ve busted your ass raising a lazy child) and take a good look with them at what’s stopping them. How they really feel about the work, the exams. What they want. What they’ll actually need in order to progress on the pathways that might look interesting to them.
Reduce the pressure – the all-or nothing thinking. For you and for them. Face the fears. What if they don’t do well in these exams? Start to visualise – constructively, compassionately, what the alternatives would look like – and help them see that the impact is most likely going to be manageable. This is a real tool for strengthening resilience. It’s called Plan B, Plan C thinking. (Read about this in The Thriving Child by William Stixrud and Ned Johnson – Chapter 3 and chapter 10) And it really helps meet the fear rather than fend it off or just try to intellectualise it away.
Ever noticed that people don’t respond to logic or rationalisation when fear is in the mix? It’s a bottom-up feeling. And it can really mainly only be quieted by a bottom up sense of safety. You, as the parents and care-giver, coming alongside them and facing the fear together, and with compassion.
This is known as co-regulation. And as Prof Marc Brackett, Director of Yale’s Emotional Intelligence Centre, and author of ‘Dealing with Feelings’ explains:
“Co-regulation is the intentional supportive process by which the adult helps a child manage emotions in the moment whilst simultaneously building self-regulation skills over time. It’s about empathising whilst keeping enough perspective to be useful.” https://amzn.eu/d/0f6DlE9c
Here, the feeling to be regulated is fear of failure / fear of rejection. By coming alongside that fear with curiosity, the parent is able to allow the young person to express their feelings more fully – outside of the infinite darkness of the cramped space of the skull.
In expressing those feelings – connected with the core fear of abandonment – more fully, those feelings approach completion. The more the felt sense of our child gets verbalised when they are struggling then that process helps takes them from the wordless music of the right brain of instinct – the felt sense of fear, into the lyrics of the left brain where some logic and analysis can begin to take place once the fear can be labelled, seen, known, and understood.
The co-regulation process we’re using as parents is that of debriefing – and is used for instance in the aftermath of combat experiences for those on active military service. It helps build resilience. And it can be summarised in 3 words: express, extract, reflect.
Instead of arguing with the fear, distracting from it or shutting it down, by meeting it supportively and compassionately, we’re able to help the young person extract the most important messages that link to the fear. What that means to them…and to then be able to reflect on it.
Empathy is everything. Being a non-anxious presence to their fears and worries is where the work is at for us…And this might mean us doing some work ourselves – facing some of our fears – or the things we really would rather didn’t happen… So they might have to change school – where might they end up going? So they might have to drop down a set…what would that mean? What might be helpful / better / worse because of that? How might their pathway need to change? What subject choices might have to be dropped and substituted?
So yes, their path might be different to the one that we trod, or are most familiar with. But honestly, in your heart of hearts, do you really feel that fundamentally they will be OK, they will be functioning. Try to visualise them at 25. 30. Do you honestly see them eating out of bins?
In this way, giving them the freedom to fail – in their imagination, in their visualisation of the future…and in doing so…we give their fear scope to retreat so that they can give themselves permission to succeed.
Once the fears and worries get identified and released, then in my experience other tactics can be brought to bear and help…Here’s a few that might help:
- Clearing any friction that gets in the way of starting:
- Clean / tidy workspace
- Folders for each subject. Everything to have a ‘forever’ home…
- After finishing one set of revision, get the books /material out for the next before going to have a break.
- Eat the elephant. Approach large intimidating tasks in bite-sized ways. Break it down. 10 minutes eg planning an essay or a long answer. Then write the first sentence or paragraph and come back to it…
- Lower the stakes. Instead of saying ‘I’m going to spend 2 hours revising something complex in Chemistry…say ‘I’m going to do 20 minutes on one very specific topic…Or I’ll do the first section of the English / History paper. This section is worth X % of the marks, therefore I will spend the proportionate time on it and see where I get.
- Structure revision sessions so that there’s lots of rest and recovery time. The Pomodoro Technique is one of many – essentially 40 minutes work, 20 minutes off.
- Bear in mind 90 minutes is roughly the longest window we have for deep concentration. After that point the brain’s capacity for integrating, applying knowledge, problem solving dips.
- Structure revision sessions in an order that is sympathetic to the energy levels. Eg start with the gnarliest subject first when fresh, and end with a subject and activity that is more engaging and inviting…so you leave a series of 3 Pomodoros in one morning – for instance – feeling good.
- Back off being a grand inquisitor on their productivity. Instead have empathic and caring conversations about how they felt about their work today, what went well…what progress etc.
- Provide snacks and give them leeway to choose comfort food. Don’t let food become a power-struggle or part of conflict loops.
- Ask them questions about what’s working for them – be open and curious about how they might be using digital resources – don’t be dismissive and judgmental. Get them to show you / teach you / tell you more about why they work…So long as they are also doing lots of practice papers too, then game-like, quiz-like rewarding and lighter types of revision should be in their armoury.
Step back – let them step up…Do less chasing, criticising, and telling…and more coaching, catching them doing things right, and championing. A procrastinating child is not always a lazy child. There may – or may not be some executive functioning challenges there. But who is able to access their executive functioning skills when they are afraid, fearful, anxious? Not many.
Also – and this blew me away when I first read it – again – in The Thriving Child…They talk about the mis-match between dopamine levels between boys and girls. This is totally borne out by my experiences of working in a boys school and working in girls schools. Boys generally have slightly lower resting levels of dopamine – meaning they generally will tend to take a little more oomph – eg of pressure and anxiety to get started on a task. Whereas girls and women tend to have higher levels of dopamine. Meaning they – again – in general – like to feel ahead of themselves, that all the plates are spinning and the ducks are in a row…So mothers of sons can end up having extra clashes due to this mismatch – their lack of stress and last minute approach creates mega stress in Mum…
This is the best time to remember Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson’s ‘Pygmalion Effect’. This is the psychological phenomenon whereby people live up or down to the expectations of others. This was something I held really dear in my classroom as a teacher. That my belief in the children I taught – or lack of it – was incredibly powerful. Chase a kid down the drain, and that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Show you believe in their capacity to elevate and they will take your invitation.
