This week's reflections
A parent tells me they were up until midnight worrying about their son’s Chemistry mock. The son slept fine. He knew the mock had gone badly, shrugged it off and went to bed. The parent carried it for both of them.
I hear a version of this every week and the thing that gets me is not the worry itself. It is who is doing the worrying. The person with the most at stake is often the calmest in the house, while everyone around them lies awake. Somewhere along the way the stress of it all got picked up by the wrong person.
Adler had a phrase for untangling this, the separation of tasks, and it is one of the most quietly freeing ideas I know of. The question it asks is simple. Whose task is this, actually? Once you can answer that honestly, a great deal of the weight that families carry through exam season turns out not to be theirs to carry at all.
On my mind this week
The way to tell whose task something is comes down to one question. Who ultimately lives with the consequence? Whoever that is owns the task.
The revision is the student’s task, because the student is the one who sits the exam. The result is the student’s task, because the student is the one who carries the grade into whatever comes next. This sounds like pressure and it is the opposite of pressure. If the result is genuinely the student’s task, then nobody else gets a say in how they work, nobody else gets to sit in their chair and nobody else’s anxiety gets to set up shop in their head. Ownership and freedom are the same thing here.
The trouble starts when tasks get mixed up. A student who revises to stop a parent worrying is now carrying two loads, their own work and their parent’s feelings…and doing neither of them well. A parent who treats the grade as their task ends up managing, chasing and reminding…and the student just hands the whole thing over because someone else is clearly holding it. The more you carry of someone else’s task, the less they carry of it themselves. That is not a personality flaw in the student. It is just what happens when a task has two owners.
None of this means not caring. Separation of tasks is often misread as coldness, as walking away and leaving someone to sink. It is nothing of the kind. It means being clear about where your task ends and someone else’s begins, so that the help you give is help and not control.
Study tip
Draw a line down the middle of a page. On the left, write everything about your A Levels that is genuinely your task, the things only you can do. Revising, turning up, asking when you are stuck, choosing how you spend a Sunday. On the right, write down the things you have been carrying that are actually someone else’s task. Your mum’s worry. Your teacher’s disappointment. Whether a friend thinks you are working hard enough.
Now really look at the right hand column, because that is the weight you have been revising underneath without noticing. None of it is yours to fix. Your mum owns her worry and she can handle it. Your teacher owns their reaction and they will be fine. Put that column down and go back to the left hand one, which is the only part that matters.
For parents
The hardest place to apply this is the one that matters most, which is your own child.
When you treat the grade as your task, everything that follows feels like love. The reminders, the checking, the buying of the revision guides, the asking how it is going for the third time that day. It comes from the best possible place. The difficulty is what it teaches, because a child whose parent owns the outcome learns that they do not have to…and the responsibility slides across the table to the person willing to hold it.
Separation of tasks asks something genuinely uncomfortable of a parent, which is to let the grade belong to your child. Your task is real and it is not small. It is to provide the conditions, the calm house, the food, the belief that they are capable, the door that is open when they choose to walk through it. Their task is to do the work. When those two get confused, you end up doing your task and half of theirs…and they end up doing neither.
The test I would offer is this. When a grade disappoints, notice who is more upset. If it is consistently you, the task has drifted to the wrong side of the table. Hand it back, not with a speech but by asking what they are going to do about it and then trusting the answer. A child who owns their result has somewhere to go. A child whose parent owns it has no reason to move.
Quote of the week
