Helping teens cope with school stress and grade anxiety

As a parent, it is easy to make assumptions about the impacts of school stress on teens – but education has changed a lot since we were teenagers. I asked 15-year-old Lydia Bach from This Teenage Life to give her insider view on the academic pressures faced by today’s teens and how parents can help. This is what she wrote.

A group of girls is sitting at the end of the hallway in a pile of backpacks, cardboard lunch plates, and dozens of math worksheets. I see my friend Sarah and go over to the group, plopping down on the floor.

There’s a math exam today. Some of them have already taken it and are giving out advice on what to study last minute, other people are frantically scribbling problems down. My other friend is bent over two Spanish worksheets. Her class starts in twenty minutes and she hasn’t finished them. She asks, to anyone listening, if they have the worksheet, and if she can see their answers. Someone hands her the work and she starts transferring the answers.

Technically, this isn’t allowed. We’re supposed to be doing our own work, but everyone knows that this sort of thing happens constantly. Not just from kids who are less academically inclined, but from people who are incredibly eager to learn.

The problem is that we live in a world in which grades are more important than interest or accumulating knowledge, so sharing answers on things like homework happens frequently. How are we supposed to learn properly when we are told from day one that your knowledge means nothing if you don’t have the good grades to prove it?

Losing the desire to learn in school

I’m someone who loves to learn. Doing research makes me incredibly happy. I am also someone who has been so lucky when it comes to teachers. My teachers have been smart, interesting, and considerate people who’ve continued to foster my love of learning, but most of that learning doesn’t happen from preparing for evaluations.

I’m too anxious about passing my math and physics exams to try and retain any information. As someone who doesn’t test very well, I memorize to the best of my ability the topics I need to know in order to pass, and then once the test is over I let the information go. If I do retain the information, it’s not because it was taught in class.

One day, my physics teacher and I had a fabulous conversation about astrophysics. It was fascinating. So far, it’s the only information I remember about physics, and it happened not in a formal class, but during a work session that morphed into this long conversation about black holes and solar energy.

That being said, I wouldn’t take a course on astrophysics, because I know I would get a bad grade, and I wouldn’t want to take that risk, even if I find the subject interesting. A fear of bad grades has interrupted my and my peers’ in-school education, which limits our potential for learning, and our desire to go to school.

What adults don’t remember – grades feel personal

I like to pretend that grades don’t stress me out, that I understand that my intelligence isn’t measured in my grades. And I also know, to some extent, that grades don’t matter. But when adults say this to me, it makes me so incredibly frustrated.

Grades don’t matter when you’re forty, that’s true, and it’s nice to think about that being my reality some day. But right now, my grades do matter. All I can think about when I get a bad grade on a test is whether or not that lowered my grade in the class, thus lowering my GPA (GPA or Grade Point Average is what we use in the U.S. to see our overall high school grades averaged out on a scale of 0-4.0). Me, and most (if not all) of my peers, spend a large amount of time on online GPA calculators. Because if you have a good GPA and good grades, that means you’ll have a better chance at getting into the university you want to go to.

While this logic makes sense, it starts to snowball and quickly becomes a measurement of self-worth and intelligence. ‘If I don’t get this grade in this class for this semester, then I won’t get into this university, which means I’ll be less likely to have this job, which means I won’t make enough money or be happy or content…‘ and the spiral goes on.

Not to mention the fact that a failing grade or even a low grade on an exam means that you, too, are a failure. A lot of the time my first thought when getting an exam or quiz back is ‘Gosh, you’re such a failure’, because it doesn’t feel like ‘just an exam’, it feels like a measure of how good you are. Of how smart and capable and respectable you are.

As much as we might not want to admit it, grades feel personal.

Supporting your teenager through grade anxiety

Teenage problems like grades can oftentimes be brushed aside and made to feel less important. But, it is a huge source of anxiety for a lot of kids. I often joke about the collective amnesia people must get when they become adults, because so much of the time it seems as if adults don’t remember the struggles of childhood.

The first thing an adult can do is recognize this anxiety around schooling and academics, and the fact that many of our decisions can feel like things that will impact us for the rest of our lives.

Yes, it’s stressful to be an adult, but remember that it’s also stressful to be a kid. Just because our sources of anxiety are different doesn’t make them less real.

It can be hard, trying to support a kid through midterms and finals and tests, mostly because it’s something that just has to be done. There isn’t a way out of it, and so besides acknowledging the pressure, how can parents and other safe adults actually help?

In my case, commiseration has been a better pacifier than solution-based help, but that’s personal for me. My current English teacher tells me, every time I’m upset about a math or science exam, “Oh, well, I got horrible marks in maths, and you know what, it’s a useless subject.” Not a solution, not a suggestion, just something that makes me smile when I’m feeling down. In some ways it also does reassure me, knowing that she’s a successful person who simply wasn’t good at every subject.

The thing about teenagers though, just like adults, is that each kid is completely different, and so no matter how much advice I give, you must take initiative and begin a real conversation.

Ask your kids questions. Talk to them, not to give advice but just because you’re interested in what they have to say. Don’t tell them ‘not to worry about it’, because oftentimes that comes across as ‘your problems aren’t as important as mine’.

Instead, talk to them about the pressure, how they think it impacts their day to day life. Talk to them about what it means to learn outside of the classroom. Ask if they think they would be more interested in learning if they weren’t constantly being evaluated. They probably won’t open up and tell you all their greatest fears and deepest desires, but a conversation will have started.

Lydia Bach is a 15 year old student in New York City and writer of the This Teenage Life substack. This Teenage Life is a global youth dialogue and podcasting program, helping teens develop communication skills, authentic community, and a sense of purpose. You can listen to This Teenage Life on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever podcasts are found.

 

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