How to Survive Your Child's Exam Season Without Destroying Each Other

I want to be honest about what exam season actually looks like in our house, as opposed to what it looks like in articles where someone tells you to "keep things calm and maintain routines."

Exam season in our house: my son stops sleeping well two weeks before. I start checking his school bag more than I do in normal months. My husband and I have at least one argument about whether I am putting too much pressure on the children, in which he is correct and I am defensive. At least one evening results in someone crying, and it is not always one of the children. The apartment is, as one of my colleagues once described her own home during exam prep, "vibrating slightly."

I am not going to tell you how to avoid this. I am going to tell you what I've learned makes it survivable.

Accept that exam season is different. I spent several years trying to pretend that exams were just another period of the calendar and maintaining normal household operations was achievable. It isn't, and the effort of pretending it is adds to the tension rather than reducing it. Exam season has its own rhythms. Some things that are normally important become less important for four weeks. This is not failure; it is appropriate reprioritisation. Screen time rules get loosened slightly. Bedtime gets pushed back on specific evenings. The house is messier. I have made peace with all of this.

The exam schedule goes on a physical board.

Printed, on the wall. Every exam, every subject, every date. The children can see exactly what is coming and exactly when it will be over. Uncertainty about what's ahead is a significant source of anxiety. A visible endpoint helps. When my son is having a bad evening, I can point to the board and say "that's three weeks from now, and then it's done." The specific knowable end matters.

Protect two things: sleep and breakfast.

Everything else is negotiable. Sleep and breakfast are not. A child who is undersleeping in exam season is running an exam on compromised hardware. The extra hour of revision he might have done if he'd stayed up until 11pm is worth less than the cognitive function he loses from sleeping six hours instead of eight. I know this. I still have to actively defend the rule against my own instinct to let him squeeze in one more round of past papers.

Breakfast is slower to negotiate away. If he's up in time and there's food in the kitchen, breakfast happens. This is a rule from a simpler era of parenting that has survived because it is both obviously correct and something I can make happen.

The two-week revision plan is built with them, not for them.

I used to build the exam revision plan and present it. This is efficient and produces a plan that looks correct and that no one follows. Now I sit with each child and we build it together. I bring the calendar and the exam schedule. They bring their own sense of which subjects need more work. The resulting plan is messier than what I'd build alone. It also gets used, which the neat plans didn't.

The rule about past papers:

Past papers are useful. An endless supply of past papers, done mechanically in the week before exams because they are "exam preparation," is not useful. We do past papers under timed exam conditions, then — and this is the bit I had to learn — we spend equal time going over the wrong answers. Not correcting and moving on. Actually understanding why each wrong answer was wrong.

My son resists this. He finds it more pleasant to do another paper than to sit with the evidence of what he doesn't know. I understand this preference. I share it. We do the review anyway.

What I'm working on:

I am working on not reading his face after every session. There is a thing I do where I watch him come out of a study session and try to assess, from his expression, whether it went well. He has learned to read this watching, and he adjusts his expression based on what he thinks I want to see. This is not information; it is performance. I am trying to stop asking "how did it go?" immediately after and wait until dinner, when the question is more casual and the answer is more honest.

I am working on saying "I'm proud of you for working hard" and meaning it regardless of what the result is — not as a strategy, but as an actual belief I'm trying to develop. It is a belief I hold abstractly and find difficult to embody at 9pm when he's got an exam at 8am and I can see from the practice test that chapter five is still shaky.

Exam season is four weeks a year. I have seven more school years of it, approximately. I am trying to learn to be a better companion in it, not a better exam prep manager. The distinction is important. My children's exams are their exams.

This is the thing I repeat to myself, with varying levels of conviction, throughout the month of May.