Performance anxiety in children
How to help your child cope with school stress and the pressure for good grades
As parents, we all experience to a greater or lesser extent feelings of helplessness, frustration, outrage or anger about our children’s school life. Every loving parent wants their child to succeed at school.
Every parent wants their child to learn well, to get good grades, to study hard, to get involved in extracurricular projects or activities, to make the journey from kindergarten to high school with as many successes and as few troubles as possible. Believe it or not, children want exactly the same thing. It’s just that when their efforts or results don’t live up to expectations, or just threaten not to, there’s fretting on both sides.
Somewhere…Sometime… you were a child too!
🧒🏼 In the more or less distant past, we were also children at school and we were under pressure from school, parents, grandparents, classmates, etc. Only… we forgot, and as we went on life’s journey, those experiences got stuck somewhere further and further in the past. Is it because we hope to shield our children from painful experiences and find it hard to recognize how much they have to struggle to grow up? Or perhaps when our children challenge or frustrate us, we want to ignore the complexity of their struggle so that we can simplify our own?
What parenting style are you for your child?
Parents cannot bear to see their children in pain. So they do everything in their power to keep them from disappointment, unhappiness or the troubles they have experienced themselves or seen around them.
👉🏻So some parents can become over-protective and may slip down the slope of over-protecting their child, complaining about the smallest shortcomings of the school, the teachers, try to move their children to other classes or schools, protect them at every turn, over-helping them with homework, or worse, doing it for them at times. Except, if the strategy pays off in the short term, in the long run it can have negative consequencessuch as: delayed mental maturation of the over-protected child, lack of social effectiveness and competitiveness, emotional or sexual disturbances in adulthood.
👉🏻 Other parents may slip into indulgence and permissiveness, confusing the child’s freedom and independence with libertinism and thus exercising a low level of control over the child. But again, this parenting style will backfireIt will not in fact educate independence, initiative or a sense of responsibility and the child, and later the adult, will not learn the rules of conduct, rules for living together, working and teamwork.
We have detailed above two of the parenting models commonly encountered in our practice, but in addition to these, we can also find 👉🏻 the model of authoritarian, inconsistent, indifferent, aggressive or effective parents. In educational practice, the same parent may, from case to case, adopt one position or another and most of them take disciplinary measures that they know from their own experience or deduce intuitively, referring to the educational model to which they themselves have been subjected, either copying the model or trying to follow the opposite model.
👩🏻🦰 “How was school today?”
🧒🏼 “Okay!”
In all this educational rush, parents and teachers should remember their own experience with school and the struggle that they and their children have had, and not forget that this struggle is not only with the school and family environment, but also with their own development.
👂🏼 Children are willing to share with us their inner turmoil if we know and are willing to listen. And when I say listen to them, I don’t mean expecting to get an answer to the most frequently asked and rarely answered question: “How was school today?” No matter how gently you ask or how skillfully you phrase it, 99% of kids will give the well-known answer, “Fine”! Maybe some younger or more talkative children will fill you in on the details, or maybe you’ll find out the news at length. But these children are rare. 🙅🏻♂️ Most kids don’t give the kind of information about school that parents want to hear. And yet, we ask this question on autopilot in the hope that there will come a day when maybe we’ll get another answer. We expect to get the most complete and complex answer when in fact our child might be tempted to answer something like: “Stop buzzing me! Didn’t you go to school? Don’t you know what it’s like there? Why do you keep asking me?”
So, if you want honest answers and openness from children, if you want to get back in touch with the concrete reality of children, the suggestions below might be helpful:
🤔
Start with yourself, relive the intensity of your emotions, fears, struggles, things you haven’t thought about for years and share these memories with your children, otherwise they will think you were the perfect child and model student and you are not capable of understanding them!
👐🏼
Replace the question “How was school today?” with “What did you learn about yourself at school today?” And to encourage him to respond you can start with a personal example: ‘look, during today’s meeting at work I was bothered by my boss’s remark, I intended to approach him later and tell him so but I didn’t have enough courage; I’ve learned that even for me, as an adult, it’s not always easy to say what bothers me’
👂🏻
Don’t miss any opportunity where you see a child initiating a school-related conversation. If you are emotionally available, genuinely interested in what they share with you, and refrain from labeling or making value judgments, the simple act of feeling heard and understood can have a healing or encouraging effect,
🚴🏼♀️
Let go of the simplistic view that children only work at two speedseither they work enough or they don’t work enough. I sometimes hear parents say that a child “needs to push the accelerator” or “needs to be put in gear” to get better grades. I jokingly tell them that if we are to think of children as having gears, we should at least compare them to a sophisticated mountain-bike, with at least 20 gears that they shift constantly as they go up and down the steep hills of a school day.
🔇
Refrain from reproaching and reminding children over and over again what is important. If, for example, a teenager in her last year of high school tells you that in the last few weeks her grades have dropped because she broke up with her boyfriend, as a parent you will be tempted to reply that you understand her, but that she needs to understand that her future can go down the drain and she cannot afford such a mistake now because of her first relationship. Such lines usually close the channel of communication and parents’ insistence that she try harder at school will actually reach ears clogged with emotional distress.
🦸🏼
Do not step into the role of rescuer more often than necessary, children do not like to be repeatedly rescued by their parents because it confirms their worst fears about themselves: that they are not capable or good enough, that they cannot succeed on their own, and that this will slowly and surely erode their self-confidence. If parents cannot produce this confidence, their reactions become expressions of their fears and only increase the pressure and anxiety on the child.
🤐
Stop repeating to children that life begins after school, that the rest of their lives will depend on the work they do now, as this is neither psychologically nor mathematically true. In school children already live a good part of their lives as children, teenagers and young adults, they know that these years are not coming back and it is not fair to minimize the importance of the psychological journey they go through in school. One pupil’s reply to the psychologist – “At this school I feel like I have lived a lifetime” – speaks for itself.
👬
Don’t take the teen’s ID in person. All their conversations and relationships with their parents are about identity: ‘I know who I am because in some ways I’m the same as you, but in other ways, fortunately, I’m different from you.’ They really want to celebrate the transmission of two simple things: 1. I’m growing up (and you can’t stop me) and 2. I’m different than you (ex. A bright but underachieving teenager who comes to the doctor’s office brought by his father says flatly that he won’t live up to his father’s expectations because “He doesn’t want to have a life like his father who does nothing but work and not experience the simple joys of life.” What the father perceived as laziness was actually the son’s attempt to build his own identity).
And… what about performance?
🎯 Because of the way the education system is designed and constructed, because of the lack of other sources of information other than grades, test scores, competitions and occasionally a personal observation by a teacher or principal, parents are directed by the system to focus on grades.
Once caught up in this system, they forget every detail about the complexity of the developmental process that their own children go through and come to accept grades as the ultimate goal and measure of their children’s success at school. And this is where the first crack in the child-parent relationship appears. 👦🏼 Children know better that their lives mean more than just grades.🧒🏻 They try as best they can to tell us these things, in more or fewer words, actions or deeds, but often remain silent afterwards, needing to attract more adult attention and judgment, leaving parents to ask themselves unanswered questions or to worry about their performance and results on their own.
The reality in the practice shows that no grade, no matter how small, is worth sacrificing your relationship with your own child.
To then put the high-performing child on a pedestal and the low-performing child in a prison is equally damaging, because both, unfortunately, are too small a space for them to move around freely.
✔️ When working with children and teenagers, it is important to assess parents’ attitudes towards performance. In many cases parents might expect high performance – or at least this is how their children perceive the situation. In other cases, children may assume that if their parents don’t take a keen interest in their school activities, then it doesn’t really matter how well they do. There are also parents who scold their children for less than perfect performance. Such high expectations often condemn children to underachievement: these children not only suffer from anxiety because they cannot live up to perfectionist standards, but also become angry at the parents from whom they receive only conditional acceptance.
What I would like the parents of these children, now grown up, to know is that many of them pay the price of perfection, of unrealistic standards or dreams that their parents have projected in them. Later on in the journey of self-discovery, these adult children, once they understand how demanding, perfectionist or punitive their parents were, can also understand the distorted perception of the reality they experience: They understand why they are so hard on themselves when they make a mistake, why no matter what they do, it is never good enough, why they can never relax or enjoy life, why they feel the need to always be first in everything they do, why they see their achievement as trivial while everyone else sees it as a real success, why they are depressed when they would have no realistic reason to feel that way, why they have a sense of failure and incompetence when reality shows the exact opposite. They understand then, that because of this form of outcome-conditioned affection, the rush for success will never end and that it is up to them to put an end to this never-ending marathon.
At the same time, parents who are wracked with guilt about the upbringing of their children need to be aware that all parents more or less wear parental blinders and their vision is affected by their own history, hope and love and concrete reality takes on many subjective nuances.
The truth is that they are always stumbling over their anxiety, ambition, love and confusion as to how much their children resemble or not in their needs and wants. Ambitious parents, like anxious parents, are always worrying about their children’s future, comparing their child’s performance with their ideals or, worse, with more successful siblings. The parents always imagine that if the child concentrates hard enough on what they want, he or she will achieve it. It’s good to know that this strategy will work to some extent or not at all and the child will feel like a chronic loser. Perhaps the hardest thing is to realize that what worked for us may not work for our child and our success strategy may not be his success strategy. If we have tasted the rewards and the rewards of this strategy, it is hard not to want the same for our children. But you don’t have to put the tape of your life through your child from the beginning just on the grounds that you have had a full and unique life. So is your child’s.
I will end this article on an optimistic note by referring to the story of Pinocchio which is a story of development, and the moral is that we cannot make children out of wood, they create their own selves through their own process of growing up. The story reminds parents of the limits of their power: I like to see the moment when Gepetto ends up in the belly of the whale as a metaphor for the powerlessness of parents in relation to the process of growing up. In the end, Pinocchio rescues his father, just as young people grow up and come to help their parents and take responsibility for their lives. Pinocchio’s awakening to life actually happens in the context of the love relationship and LOVE, pure, wholesome and honest LOVE, dear parent, is the key to solving the most difficult problems you may face in your relationship with your own child.
Psych. Luminița Achirei – Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with training in Systemic Couple and Family Psychotherapy – Med Anima Clinic Iasi
Bibliography:
- Vernon A. (2002) What Works When with Children and Adolescents: A Handbook of Individual Counseling Techniques. Amazon.com
- Glăveanu S.M.(2012). Parenting competence. Models of conceptualization and diagnosis. University Publishing House
- Thompson M. And Barker T. (2024). The destressed child. How to free our children from the pressures of school performance and help them discover the joy of learning in order to succeed both in the classroom and in life. Herald Publishing
- Young J.E. and Klosko J.S (2017). How to reinvent your life. How to end negative behaviors and feel good again. Trei Publishing
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