Shreya Sen-Handley | How To Survive A Stressful Summer

Waiting my turn to webchat with my parents in India, I heard my septuagenarian mother console my teenage daughter, about to sit for her first board exams, “At least, exams become a thing of the past when you’re older!” and thought, but while your children are in its throes, its hooks remain firmly embedded in you! Like it or not, parents with kids negotiating the major life-defining exams are stuck on the backseats of tandem bikes: not doing the hardest of the work, sure, but labouring in the background to provide support. With little control over the results but all the anxiety of exam-time!

This summer has unprecedented levels of stress in store for my British family, as not one but both kids take on the biggest tests of a young person’s life. If it’s crucial for the youngest because it is their school-leaving exams, it’s all-important for our two-years-older son in securing his university place (and his life’s path)! Between the two of them, they will rack up hundreds of hours of navigating inky minefields, as we cheer timorously from the sidelines.

I remember the sweltering summer months in India as heaving with as many important exams, and we somehow survived the searing heat, studying by candlelight amidst interminable “load sheddings”, incessant clamour from the bazaar’s loudspeakers, to cross the finish line, sapped but alive.

Though there’s considerably less heat and noise in Blighty, and despite our bright-as-buttons offspring being tough little cookies, we cannot leave them to hack it alone, naturally. Their challenges will always be ours. The unusual ones included, as they are both neurodivergent, but in different ways. One sings while studying, yet the other can’t stand noise, and we create safe spaces for both somehow.

I’m resigned to reliving the excoriating, revision-riven summers of my youth, therefore, but with assistance from other quarters. Rafts of practical help from the husband, alongside gossamer fragments from my Indian foremothers, whose tried-and-tested exam-alleviating techniques can only puff our sails farther. Having lived through testing times too, with mothers and grandmothers clucking around you, you’ll have your own methods, but if this wired world has any virtue, it’s the wisdom we can collate!

So, here are the Fab Four from my family to yours, fuelling flaggers for generations:

1) FOOD: The one good thing I recall about exam-time were the special dishes streaming from the kitchen of my skillful grandma, whose affection was communicated through her expertly-crafted nosh. The deliciously healthy noodle soups, cooling salads, and other tasty seasonal treats, were made exclusively for the exam-takers in the family, to show sympathy and support, as much as to fortify, keeping up our flagging appetites and frazzled heads cool. Over thirty years later in Britain, we’re similarly feting the kids, with nothing bought in or upsettingly rich, yet all of it scrumptious. Not only does it provide nourishment, relief from work, and something to look forward to, but opportunities to sit down and discuss snafus, test-related especially. Food for thought indeed!

2) FRESH: We may not have got enough fresh air in Kolkata at exam-time, chained as we were to our desks (figuratively!), but the benefits of airing out the cobwebs that accrue in our brains from mouldering over textbooks, alongside the undeniable need for aerobic exercise to boost immunity and wellbeing, have never been lost on thinking parenthood. How to eke out those opportunities, without overstraining the sprogs, has also got to be considered. We have a biggish trampoline for the children in our garden for pleasantly undemanding workouts, but if you don’t have something of that sort, rambles in the park, or on less congested urban terrain, do wonders as well.

3) FROLIC: The imagination must have places to go too. My revision pauses would always find me immersed in storybooks. I would lose myself to the extent that revision became the intermission, and that turned out to be unhelpful (also ADHD as I discovered a few years ago). But in sensible measures, stories that transport you are the best breaks possible, freeing the mind whilst brushing up your intellectual tools. And it doesn’t have to come in the shape of books alone, because soothing music, good TV, and laidback board games, furnish just the right amount of chill, besides well-timed cat naps that are restorative.

4) FREEDOM: Showing children the workings behind our decisions on structuring study, when and how to revise, and how best to order and fill their own downtime, is the best revision support you can give them. Once the foundations of responsibility and aspirations have been laid, which happen, of course, long before the final reckoning aka BIG Tests, there’ll be no need for you to micromanage academics for your bright sparks. Impossible not to intensely care, equally hard not to ease their way whenever you spy an egress, but you have to let them learn their own lessons. Literally. Standing over them with a big stick as my formidable great-grandmother actually did, will do nothing to encourage excellence (though a juicy carrot, or yummy gajar ka halwa, might)!

Just like us, our foremothers didn’t always get it right, but there’s so much to learn from every corner of the world, and no wisdom that can’t be moulded to our requirements. Don’t have kids going through exams and maybe never will? Try the Fab Four on yourself in testing times, and feel your inner child flower.