The DSE Year Is Not Just Hard on Your Child. It Is Hard on You.

My daughter is in S2. She has two years before DSE, which means I have been thinking about DSE for approximately one year already, which tells you something about me that I'm not entirely proud of.

I am not thinking about it productively. I am not building a two-year revision plan or identifying subject combinations or researching university entry requirements. I am thinking about it in the way I think about things I'm afraid of: circularly, at 11pm, running scenarios, arriving at no conclusions. It is not useful. It is what I do.

Here is what I want to say, carefully, to other parents of secondary school students in Hong Kong: the DSE year is genuinely hard for your child. The examinations are high-stakes, the curriculum is demanding, the peer pressure is intense, and the path forward feels — to a seventeen-year-old — as though it narrows to a single point. That is a real and serious challenge and your child will need real support.

It is also hard on you. And this is what nobody talks about — the parental experience of your child's DSE year — because talking about it feels like making your child's exam about you.

But I think the silence about parental experience is itself a problem, because unexplored parental feelings don't stay still. They come out as anxiety projected onto the child, as micromanagement, as reactions that are disproportionate to their apparent cause because the apparent cause is just the most recent expression of a deeper fear.

Let me be specific about what I'm afraid of, because I've been sitting with it long enough to name it.

I am afraid that if my daughter doesn't do well in DSE, it means I failed as a parent. I know intellectually that this is not true. I believe it emotionally as though it's written law. The DSE is, for me, the moment when everything I have invested — the tutoring, the schedule, the arguments, the money, the Tuesday evenings — will be either justified or shown to have been insufficient.

This is not a healthy relationship with my daughter's exam.

I am also carrying something older: my own experience of high-stakes exams, which was not good. I am a person who produces reasonable exam results through extreme effort and then experiences them as evidence that I barely survived, not that I succeeded. I don't want that relationship with exams for my daughter. I am concerned I'm transmitting it anyway.

What I've actually done about this:

I started seeing a therapist in January. Not exclusively for this — there were other things — but DSE anxiety was on the list of things I brought. The most useful thing the therapist said was not a technique or a framework but a question: "Whose exam is it?" I said, obviously, my daughter's. She waited. I spent several sessions arriving at the answer that emotionally, in the way I was experiencing it, it was mine. It has always felt like mine.

I've started talking to my daughter differently about her academic future. Not "you need DSE to get into a good university" — which is a statement about a pathway that may or may not be the right one for her — but "what do you want?" with genuine openness to an answer I don't expect. She wants to study something involving design. This was not on my list of acceptable trajectories. I'm working on the list.

I've also started paying attention to what I say when her grades come up in conversation with other adults. I have a tendency to preface her results with the conditions they were achieved under: "she got a B but the exam was difficult" or "she's been tired, so that B is actually quite good." I'm hedging her results before anyone has commented on them. She can hear this. I am communicating that a B is something that needs defending. I'm trying to stop.

The DSE is two years away. I can spend those two years tightening with anticipatory anxiety, or I can spend them trying to be a person who is actually present to my daughter right now — in S2, before the pressure peaks, while she is still in possession of enough bandwidth to let me know who she is.

She is funny. She is more socially sophisticated than I was at her age. She cares about things I don't understand and explains them to me with patience I don't deserve. She will take the DSE and she will do what she does and she will have a life.

My job, I'm slowly understanding, is to make sure she knows that the life is hers regardless of the results. Not as a consolation. As a fact.

I'm working on believing it. Two years is enough time.