My son couldn't sleep the night before his assessment.
I lay awake wondering what I had done wrong to cause such a high level of anxiety over something so low-stakes in the grand scheme of things. And then I lay awake wondering whether that was even the right question. There is a line parents reach for in these moments, almost reflexively: "You tried your best, that's all that matters." I have said it, most of us have. But if I am really being honest, I don'y fully believe because it's not entirely true - not in the way the world actually works.
Trying your best and not getting there is a real outcome with real consequences, in school, in work, in life. The child who internalises that effort alone is sufficient regardless of result is not being protected from disappointment, they are being under-prepared for it. There is a version of that message that is compassionate and a version that is simply not accurate and I think we conflate the two because the accurate version is uncomfortable to say to a child who is already struggling.
What I actually believe is closer to this: the effort matters enormously and the result also matters and holding both of those things at once is one of the harder things a parent has to teach. The question I keep returning to is where the line is between taking something seriously and being consumed by it.
I want my children to understand that assessments, tests, even a spelling quiz - these things are worth showing up for properly. Not because the result is everything, but because the habit of taking things seriously builds something over time. A muscle, as much as anything else. The understanding that how you approach the small things is connected to how you approach the larger ones.
That belief is genuine. And I fully stand by it. And yet I watched my son carry that belief somewhere I did not intend for it to go. Into a sleepless night. Into an anxiety that was disproportionate to the stakes, even if the stakes were real. The preparation that was supposed to help him feel ready instead gave him more time to catastrophise.
So what do you do with that?
I thought about whether I should have said nothing. Let the assessment arrive unannounced, let him sit it without the weight of expectation and accepted whatever came out the other side. Part of me thinks that might have been kinder in the short term. The anxious night would not have happened. He would have walked in without the anticipatory dread. But he also would have walked in underprepared. And for a child who finds certain things genuinely difficult, underprepared is not a neutral state. It is a different kind of unkind - one that shows up not the night before but in the result itself, and in what that result tells him about his own capability.
Somewhere in the middle of thinking all of this through, I looked at him. Like really looked at him. And I saw, the way you sometimes do with your own children when you are not expecting it, every version of him at once. The toddler who used to fall asleep on my shoulder. The newborn I brought home and held like he was the most fragile thing I had ever been trusted with. The small person who had no idea what an assessment was, or what it meant, or what anyone would ever expect of him. And now here he is. Eight years old and lying awake worrying about it.
I don't have words for what that feels like. It is love and grief all arriving at the same time. You want to scoop them back up into that earlier version of themselves where none of this existed yet. And you also know, with absolute clarity, that the only thing you can actually do is help them learn to carry it. The harder truth, the one that sits most uncomfortably with me, is that I unknowingly planted my son's anxiety that night. But he grew it from something inside him that already understood the stakes, already cared about the outcome, already had a relationship with his own performance. And I am not entirely sure whether the sleepless night is a problem to solve or evidence of something that, managed well, will serve him for the rest of his life.
The research on anxious children is not reassuring in the way you want it to be. It does not say: relax them and they will flourish. It says something more complicated - that the same sensitivity that produces anxiety also tends to produce conscientiousness, depth, and a capacity for genuine effort. That the goal is not to remove the feeling but to build the child's relationship with it. To help them hold the pressure without being held by it.
I definitely do not think I am doing that well in that regard. And I definitely know that my own anxiousness having being a former high-achiever at school has driven behaviours I do not like in my own children. What I have decided for now, is that I will not pretend results do not matter. I will not tell him that trying is enough when I know and he will soon know more clearly, that life does not operate on 'enough'. What I can do is make sure he understands that one assessment does not tell the full story of what he is capable of. That struggling with something is not the same as failing at it, but part of the process of getting better at it. And I can keep showing up the night before, calm on the outside, working through my own version of it on the inside, which is, I think, what most of us are actually doing.
When does this ever get easier?
With love,
Roshni
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