01 Mar Part 5: Managing Exam Stress – How Parents can help?
As a parent we care about our kids mental and physical well-being more than the exam scores. Parents and carers play a vital role in supporting their kids through exam time. It is difficult to know how to best support a kid to manage their stress. In this post I’m providing some tools for parents to keep things moving smoothly during exam time.
Talk
Have a conversation. This is the best thing you can do for your kids.
- Just listen without being judgemental. Regularly discuss what is working and what is not working?
- Ask if the worries are about something they can control, such as feeling unprepared for exams, or is it something outside of their control, such as what will they ask in exams?
- Just have fun time, watch a film or show or just go for walk with them.
Good Food
What your child eats plays a role in their ability to cope with stress. Eating well will help ensure your child stays healthy and has the resilience and energy they need to deal with stressful situations. Highly processed foods contribute little nutrition to the diet and deplete the body of vitamins and minerals during digestion. Encouraging your child to eat whole foods can give them the energy required for the developmental years.
Erratic eating habits do cause fatigue and laziness, which could hinder exam preparations. So look after their eating habits.
Sleep
Yes most of the kids (teenagers mainly) don’t listen to the instruction of going to sleep. But the best you can do is to get them to sleep at least 8 hours.
The Sleep Health Foundation recommends these tips to help your child establish healthy sleeping patterns:
- Avoid screen time an hour before bed and encourage reading or listening to relaxing music instead to help wind down. Make a rule that all screens are turned off and kept out of bedrooms.
- Support your child to establish a routine around bed and wake-up times. Encourage them to stick to it, even on the weekends. This might not be easy, but explaining why it’s important (and forgiving the occasional breach in the schedule) might help.
- Encourage them to get around 7.5 hours of sleep per night, which is the optimum amount of time for teenagers.
- To sleep well, their bedroom should be a cool 22 degrees, dark and have fresh air circulating.
Without sleep, we can’t function properly – especially young people, who are still growing and whose brain is still developing. Pay attention to your child’s sleep patterns as an early indication of stress.
One thing and only thing if you ask me to suggest during exam times parents can do. I would say just LOVE your kids, make them know that you are there. Your scores doesn’t determine where you’ll end up in life.
Your I CAN is more important than your IQ.
You can find more tips, tricks and techniques by following my blog www.manageyourmind.co
Till next time,
Best wishes,
MP
Additional Resources
I’ve written series of article which will provide tools, techniques and strategies which can help students reduce stress. The links are below.
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