Anxiety is real. As much as anxiety unnerves us, it also makes us incapable of thinking soundly and articulating properly. Combined with stress and pressure to excel, anxiety divests individuals from using their skills fruitfully. While a little pressure is crucial for improving one's performance, sometimes when it reaches an overwhelming level, anxiety can deteriorate and impede one's cognitive abilities and affect their test performance. This is known as test anxiety. In children, test anxiety can manifest in different forms. Some of the physical symptoms of test anxiety are sweating, shaking, rapid heartbeat, dry mouth, fainting, and nausea. Many children also complain of butterflies in the stomach, pain in the chest, and blacking out during exams. The severity of these symptoms varies from person to person.
Test anxiety can be caused due to a number of reasons, In some cases, the fear of failure and disappointment is so large that children feel inundated by these feelings and aren't able to perform well. In addition to this, the fear of not living up to the expectations of parents or teachers exacerbates the situation making children feel stressed all the time. In some cases, test anxiety is so debilitating that it makes it impossible for children to focus on their tests. Further, the memory of this frightening situation might haunt the kids and inspire fear in them every time they set foot in the examination hall. Low self-esteem and lack of confidence in one's abilities compels the child to believe that they can not do well in exams. This mindset increases the chances of test anxiety even more.
According to reports, high test anxiety is one of the leading causes of poor performance in exams. Moreover, it is also the most frequently observed phenomenon in school children. To help kids overcome this, we need to guide our children with compassion and support them irrespective of test results. As adults, it should be our responsibility to teach them to focus only on doing their best and not fret so much about the results that they become ill. We also need to teach them to learn from their mistakes and see them as opportunities for improving themselves. Instead of getting disheartened at poor scores, the child should divert their energy to recognizing what they did wrong and correcting it so as to avoid making the same errors next time. We also need to teach our kids to not believe their negative self-talk and have faith in their abilities. Lastly, it's crucial that we normalize doing poorly in exams sometimes so that the prospect of bad results doesn't become so excessively frightening that children develop severe anxiety due to it in their later years. By making our own imperfections known, we can show our children that it's okay to make mistakes in exams because none of us are perfect. In extreme cases, children may even require medication to counter test anxiety.
The first step to helping children overcome test anxiety is to have an open and healthy conversation with them about it. Further, we need to tell them that the problem is shared by many kids worldwide and it's possible to overcome it. Through our support and guidance, all children can defeat test anxiety and do well in their academics.
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