How to Help Your Teenage Child with Testing Anxiety

Testing anxiety affects many teenagers and college students. Test anxiety can lead to lower grades, desires or attempts to avoid school, and unnecessary suffering.

I’ve spoken with so many teens who worry endlessly about their performance in school and exams. In this blog post, I talk about ways that parents and caregivers can help their teenager child with testing anxiety.

What is Testing Anxiety?

Testing anxiety is anxiety that arises before or during a test of one’s performance in an academic environment. It comes in the form of intense physical, emotional, and mental agitation.

While the causes of test anxiety vary for each person, they center around the fear of performing inadequately and, as a result, being negatively evaluated. This fear can exist, bodily (in the form of increasing tension and heart rate as the test approaches), emotionally (in the form of fear and dread), and mentally (in the form of beliefs and negative self-talk, e.g., “I’m going fail” and “I’ll never go to a good college”).

How to help your teenage child overcome testing anxiety

Here are three ways to help your teenage child overcome test anxiety. I list them first before explaining them in more detail below.

• Validate your child’s anxiety

• Talk openly with your child about their thoughts and feelings

• Give your child permission to score poorly

Validate your child’s anxiety. Let your child know that having anxiety doesn’t mean they will do badly on tests. What matters is how they handle the anxiety as it arises. Let your child know that having some anxiety is normal, and that it’s okay to be anxious. They don’t need to get rid of their anxiety or make it disappear in order to have a good life, let alone score well on a test.

Talk openly with your child about what they think of the school system. I mean it – really talk to them. Be curious about their opinions. What pressures do they feel to perform highly? How much pressure do they put on themselves? How much pressure do they feel from outside? And what do they think will happen if they fail a test?

Give your child permission to score poorly. You’re a great parent, so of course you want your child to do well at school. But what might help your child most is for them to face their fear of failing a test and discover that they are still alright. They are still them, and you still love them for who they are. By openly communicating your love and acceptance of them, you help them see that their fears aren’t founded, and that failing a test is not a catastrophe. You also model for them how to prioritize their own health and well-being over external demands.

Conclusion

This is the power that you as a parent can have in your child’s life. You can help them talk through and identify their fears and beliefs. You can share your own experience in navigating fears throughout your life, and help them reappraise whether or not their fears and predictions are accurate. You can talk through with them what it would actually be like if they failed – helping them confront their fear while in your supportive presence.

In short, you can teach your child how to face their fears. You do this not by telling them to get rid of their thoughts or feelings, but by helping them to talk them through. You can be a model for how to face anxiety with a calm, insightful attitude. This is one of the many awesome privileges of being a parent. Go for it!

Meet Cameron

I offer effective, evidence-based treatments to help teens overcome anxiety and testing anxiety. Through therapy for teens, I help adolescents do the personal work needed to develop into thriving adults.

Reach out for a free consultation to see if I’m a good fit for your teen.

I am an Oakland therapist and I see clients both in downtown Oakland and online throughout the state of California.