OK,the game’s up – I am officially a bad parent!
In The Guardian education’s article ‘Ten things never to say to a teenager’, I am guilty on all counts. I have said all the things I shouldn’t to my teenage daughter as she approaches her end of year exams in Italy.
The trouble now is that even the most innocuous reference to homework or revision prompts dagger-like looks. Today (after having read the article and being on my best behaviour) I asked, as casually as possible “What have you got to do for tomorrow?”. The implicit criticism was seized upon immediately : “I hate that question!” she snapped back.
What’s noteworthy about the Guardian piece is that nobody has the courage put his/her name to it. The author cannot be identified so that it’s impossible to know if his/her own children are models of ‘whatever will be will be’ sangfroid .
It”s unavoidable that my parental anxiety gets to be communicated however self aware and right on I think I’m being. The advice to “reflect on my own experience of exams to avoid passing down unprocessed anxiety or paralysing guilt” strikes a particularly raw nerve. At the age of 16, I flunked all my exams. I re-took them all the following year and bizarrely passed them all but losing a year meant that I didn’t go to University. This, with the benefit of hindsight, was a lucky escape. I subsequently got a degree with the Open University .
The moral could be drawn that what seemed disastrous at the time all worked out for the best in the end. Nevertheless, I care enough about my daughter not to wish an exam failure trauma on her.
The liberal ‘parent’s love is not grade dependent‘ position may ultimately be sound but it is also massively unrealistic to expect we concerned parents to be the models of calm as the fruits of our perceived wisdom falls on deaf ears.
