It's Good To Talk: The week before the Leaving Cert - keeping everyone calm(ish) (cloned) (cloned)
Tracy McKeague is a BACP and IACP accredited mental health counsellor from Culdaff with a private and public counselling practice based in Serenity House Moville. She also promotes sea swimming for mental health and is a great believer in our ability to heal ourselves through support, connection and self-awareness
In the final days before the Junior and Leaving Cert, family life can start to feel slightly surreal. Ordinary conversations disappear, bedrooms become revision headquarters, and every flat surface in the house seems to be covered in notes, highlighters and half-empty mugs of tea or sugary drinks.
Parents find themselves sometimes at a loss - never quite sure whether asking, “How’s the study going?”, will it be appreciated or met with a dramatic sigh and a slammed door? There can be a lot of walking on eggshells. Then there are the teenagers that are carrying a huge amount of pressure, all the while pretending they are “grand”.
The Leaving Cert has always been stressful, but in recent years the pressure seems to haveintensified. I still dream about mine and I know I am not alone!
Students are not just managing exams, they are also managing expectations, comparisons, social media panic, and the exhausting feeling that every conversation somehow comes back to points, what they should do and where they should progress to in life afterwards.
Parents feel it too, many lying awake at night wondering whether their child is coping, studying enough, getting enough sleep, or quietly struggling behind closed bedroom doors while barely speaking and seeming increasingly withdrawn.
The truth is, the final week before exams is emotionally intense for the whole household and while there is no magic formula for making it stress-free, there are ways families can make it a little gentler on everyone.
One of the biggest things parents and teens can remember at this point in the final week is that most of the learning is already done. At this stage, confidence and emotional steadiness matter almost as much as revision itself.
Think of it like a physical marathon, the training has been done, the yards put-in but the basics for the energy reserve are now what really matters. Parents naturally want to help and the instinct is often to ask questions such as, “How many hours did you do today?”,“Have you covered poetry?” “What will you do about maths, if xyz comes up?”All perfectly reasonable questions but to a teenager whose nervous system is already overloaded, it can start to feel like a running performance review. Sometimes what helps more is chilled out support like a cup of tea or snack left outside the bedroom door, encouraging words, or even a chat about anything that isn’t exam related or offering a lift somewhere, small stuff but yet effective. It will give you something to do at a time where you might feel like you have very little control.
It is also worth remembering that stress does not always look like stress, it can be less obvious. Some students become emotional and teary with others becoming snappy, withdrawn or often hyper. Some suddenly decide the entire future is doomed because they forgot one biology definition or can’t recall word-for-word something they learned. Others appear suspiciously relaxed, which can panic parents even more. A lot of teenagers cope by trying not to think about the exams constantly however parents often interpret this as laziness when often (not always) it is actually self-protection.
And then there is sleep or the lack of it. Many exams students develop the alarming belief that studying until 2am is somehow heroic. It rarely is, as exhausted brains do not perform well. Parents may find themselves in the strange position of encouraging their teenager to stop studying and go to bed, only to be told “you don’t understand the pressure.” But young people also do not always realise that tiredness magnifies anxiety. Everything feels more catastrophic in the middle of the night. We are looking for balance from both the teenagers and the parents where enough might be enough!
Telling your child about your exam experience might or might not be helpful, your words of wisdom might not always be appreciated when stress and overwhelm kick in. You might have to give both them and yourself some breathing space!
During exam season, eating habits often become chaotic. Some teenagers survive entirely on toast.
Others stress eat cereal at odd hours or raid the presses non–stop. This is probably not the week to launch into lectures about nutrition. The goal is survival. Keep easy food in the house and try not to turn meals into another battleground.
Parents also sometimes underestimate how contagious their own anxiety can be. Teenagers are incredibly sensitive to mood.
A parent pacing around asking “Are you ready?” constantly might seem like you are being encouraging, but what the teenager often hears is,
“You should be worried”, “This is huge”, “Don’t mess this up”. Even subtle comments land heavily during this period. Everyone and everything can feel very sensitive and raw. It’s not easy being a teen but it is also far from easy being a parent!
Underneath all the studying, many teenagers are carrying a quiet fear that disappointing exam results might somehow disappoint the people they love and while most parents know that is not true, teenagers do not always know that so reassurance of “proud with whatever the points they get” might be worth talking about.
Exam mornings deserve special mention because they can quickly become frantic and tense, with last-minute cramming over breakfast and parents fighting the urge to “helicopter” around their teenager.
But teenagers rarely need motivational speeches before an exam. They need calm reassurance, such as, “You’ve done what you can.” “Text me later.” “I’ll be thinking of you.” That calm matters more than parents realise.
And then comes the after-exam conversation, a delicate ritual that can be hard to master with parents understandably wanting to ask – “How did it go?” But students emerging from exams are often emotionally flooded. Some want to talk immediately and others absolutely do not. Give them some space and remember to breathe, be kind to yourself too as you may have sat that exam yourself emotionally!
The danger post exam is slipping into forensic analysis as many students walk out of exams convinced they have failed, only to later do perfectly well. Teenagers can be spectacularly unreliable judges of their own performance immediately after a paper. There is also something important parents need to remember during these weeks - teenagers are still teenagers, even while doing very adult-feeling exams. They will still be messy. They will still procrastinate sometimes.
They may still spend twenty minutes watching videos when they should be revising Irish essays. That does not mean they don’t care. Stress often makes concentration worse, not better. Many students feel guilty every time they take a break, which means they never properly relax either. Parents, it is also important for you too to slot relaxation time in, you cannot be all and everything to everyone all of the time. Being a parent is your marathon but slow and steady wins the race, as clichéd as it sounds!
Parents can help by protecting some sense of ordinary life in the house. Watch a programme together. Suggest a short walk. Talk about literally anything other than exams occasionally. Constant exam conversation can make the whole thing feel overwhelming. If a teenager does have a wobble and panic, tears, anger, “I can’t do this” parents do not need perfect answers just steadiness, support and patience.
If nothing else sticks from this, let it be this - you do not have to get the Leaving Cert week perfect. It will be a little messy at times. Tempers may fray. Someone will probably cry, someone will definitely snap, and at least once the whole house will feel like it is holding its breath. That is all normal enough!
What matters most is not perfect revision schedules or perfectly calm mornings, but the steady sense that home is still a safe place to land. A place where a bad exam reaction does not become a crisis, and where pressure does not get mistaken for worth.
Most teenagers will not remember the exact questions they sat years from now. But they will remember how they were treated during this time, whether there was warmth, whether there was patience, whether there was still laughter somewhere in the middle of it all.
The Leaving Cert passes. It really does and life has a habit of opening up in ways none of us can fully predict in our late teens.
For now, it is enough to get through it day-by-day, keeping things as steady as possible, lowering the pressure where you can, and remembering that small acts of calm matter more than big speeches.
Parents and teens you have got this more than you will ever believe!
Keep up the great work and as the Irish say…..”if all else fails, put the kettle on”
Best of luck & all good wishes,
Tracy xx