Did you know that 7 in 10 students admitted feeling stressed at least once a week, based on the 2023 Australian and New Zealand Student Wellbeing Survey?
With such high expectations to get the marks, hit the highest possible ATAR, get accepted into a good university, and hopefully get their careers and future together, conversations with students have revealed that children struggling with the stress future life as early as Year 6.
It’s no one’s fault. We understand that your goal as parents is to help your child get the best opportunities. So, you push them forward and make sure they gain the ideal results.
However, that same drive and hyper-fixation on ‘excellence’ can turn into a pressure cooker for your child’s stress levels. In fact, it’s one of the causes of student approach apprehension, where they disengage and avoid tackling any academic tasks due to stress and anxiety.
In this article, we explore ways to combat student stress and disengagement so your child can achieve the results they aim for while safeguarding their overall wellbeing.
How Tara won against stress and procrastination
We worked with Tara last year, a Year 11 student and a huge procrastinator.
Tara would leave things too late and panicked when there wasn’t enough time to finish assignments. She also struggled to finish exam papers and often left sections incomplete because she didn’t know the content well enough. She was overwhelmed, frustrated and completely disengaged with school before she finished Term 2.
Tara started saying she didn’t care about getting into university. But Delia, her mum, saw Tara was stressed out, scared and needed support.
We assessed Tara’s exam readiness and identified areas that would help her rapidly improve her marks. By identifying Tara’s stressors, we found the underlying cause of her overwhelm which was that she didn’t know how to study properly.
Then, we did a strategic review of Tara’s learning profile and gave her a personalised and structured way to get her work done in a way that would improve her marks and confidence.
It did not take long to see results.
Tara’s motivation levels stopped dropping almost immediately, and her marks increased. From being unable to finish timed exams and failing Year 11 exams, Tara topped three subjects in her first Year 12 assessment – including 100% in Maths, Modern History and Food Tech. By Term 2, she ranked Top 5 positions across almost all her subjects.
The Kalibrate-Ed way to keep stress at bay
According to Dr Amanda Mullin, psychologist and founder of Mindworx Psychology, high stress levels can push students to avoid school-related work because of irritability and overwhelming anxiety. That’s exactly what Tara struggled with. Her unhealthy stress levels pushed her away from caring about her schoolwork and achieving her highest academic potential.
When it comes to dealing with critical stress levels, knowing the different causes is key. Working with thousands of students, we were able to identify three of the major causes:
- Poor time management.
- Lack of understanding of academic expectations.
- Feeling guilty of taking breaks when a student should be resting.
At Kalibrate-Ed, we designed specific approaches that can be tailored to your child’s learning challenges and are able to address these stress causes.
First, your child can boost their productivity by up to 20% and find their focus easily with a procrastination focaliser. It enables students to take a step back from being overwhelmed and tap into strategies to self-regulate and work around distractions in their environment.
Second, your child can reduce unnecessary stress by tracking their deadlines and outcomes with an assessment tracker. With this tool, your child gets a full overview to effectively prioritise their tasks and accomplish them on or ahead of time (check it out here). It also helps avoid the mismatch between your child’s efforts and results because they understand what’s expected of them.
Lastly, your child can use a personalised program designed for structured study. This helps students balance out their stress with resilience and actually get the work done. A structured study plan can also allocate time blocks for rest as part of their success strategy, eliminating your child’s guilt and the possibility of burning out.
If you want to learn more about these approaches and other ideas to help your child improve, we’re launching a guide on the 24th of October for Year 7-12 parents who want their child to study effectively and get higher marks. Send us an email with ‘EFFECTIVE STUDY’ at community@kalibrate-ed.com.au, and we’ll make sure you get a copy when we release it!
