How should parents cope with exam stress this week? Louise Holden offers some expert tips.

Parents of exam students have two priorities this month. One is to encourage success. The other is to banish stress. Are the two objectives mutually exclusive? If the atmosphere in the home is too revved up will the student crack up? If you're laid back and philosophical will the student lose momentum? Does it make any difference what you do?

According to Marie Murray, author of Surviving the Leaving Cert, parents have a crucial role to play in these fraught days and weeks. "Receiving emotional support has been found to be particularly effective in coping with stress. This is where parents can play an important role, by providing their children with the vital emotional prop. It is terribly important to have someone there, someone who is concerned and caring, and someone in whom the student can confide and trust when they are feeling stressed."

If you can provide emotional support in the home this month, you should be able to achieve apparently contradictory aims - to pave the way for optimal exam performance without winding your child up into a frenzy.

Here are 10 tips for helping to create a helpful environment for the frazzled student.

1 Do what you can to create positive channels of communication. If you have had a year of negative feelings on the subject of the Leaving Cert now is the time to try a different approach. If every conversation starts with you asking "how's the study going?" and ends with her screaming "why don't you just leave me alone!"- try changing the question.

2 Concentrate on the student not the exam. Acknowledge that this is a stressful time. If she/he complains about being worried or unable to cope don't kill off the conversation with false assurances.

Parents often get anxious when their child speaks about stress and worry. Because of this they sometimes jump in with false reassurance - "you'll be fine" - without realising that they may be dismissing an important request for help. If parents can ask the student to tell them about the anxiety it shows respect for the young person's feelings and demonstrates to the young person that talking about feelings will get a positive response."

If changing the question doesn't help, try changing the medium. Students may feel crowded by too many direct questions and helpful heads popped around the door. Send a text, leave a note, send an e-mail.

3 Handle friends sensitively.

It's tempting to rule out all social engagements, screen phone calls and turn away friends from the door but a measured approach is advised. Naturally it's distracting for a student to be called away from the books by constant phone calls, and late nights out are very unhelpful at this time. However, the only people who can really understand what your student is experiencing right now are his friends, and social interaction is an excellent way to relieve anxiety. Going out with friends at this time can be a major source of conflict. Try and find a balance.

4 Feed their heads. Poor nutrition is associated with a whole range of performance impediments such as blank mind (zinc deficiency), memory problems (amino acid deficiency), stress, depression and inability to focus (essential fatty acid deficiency). A sensible balanced diet will remove these basic challenges. It is also very important that students limit their intake of caffeine, processed foods and refined sugar. Offer water and milk rather than coffee or cola. Keep plenty of fruit in the house and cut back on chocolate and biscuits. Refined sugars and caffeine cause energy swings, cravings, and periods of lethargy which make concentration very difficult.

5 Guard their sleep. They may be tempted to stay up late studying at this time. Sleep has to be viewed as part of study as it wires new information into the brain. The longer the sleep, the easier it will be to retrieve the previous day's learning. A 1998 study showed that students who received low grades went to sleep an average of 40 minutes later than students with high grades and that adolescents who slept less than seven hours reported increased daytime sleepiness and depressed moods.

6 Consider the physical challenges of the exam as well as the academic. Encourage your child to recreate those challenges so as to avoid surprises on the day. Some exams, such as English and history, require students to produce thousands of words in three hours. They should not attempt this for the first time on the day. Essay style questions of appropriate length should be tried and timed. The student's timetable in the days approaching exams should match the exam timetable - early rising, early nights, regular meals.

7 Don't hype up the event by leaving constant TV and radio broadcasts blaring Leaving Cert coverage throughout the house. Nothing is more panic-inducing than seeing your personal challenge turned into a national curiosity. Students will be drawn to engage in exam post-mortems but they don't do much for morale.

By now you'll have a feel for your child's individual coping mechanisms and approaches to study. You may have been expecting to crack the whip and have instead found a student who won't leave the books. Or one who leaves everything to the last minute but always pulls through. Respect your child's coping strategies as long as they are not showing signs of stress such as sleeplessness, depression or extreme irritability. If they are, see tip number one and try to get to the bottom of it.

8 Help your child to spot and handle her own anxiety. Physical indicators of tension include a stiff neck or dull headache and cold hands. If the student has clenched jaws and or attaches her tongue to her palate, these may also indicate physical tension. Encourage the student to find ways to relax - a warm bath, a massage, a brisk walk, essential oils.

9 Give the student the space to do the right thing before issuing instructions or, worse still, nagging. Many students resent being told to go and study when they had planned to do so anyway. It may in fact be a discouragement if students are made to feel that you are controlling their study and not them, If they are finding endless things that have to be done before studying, however, suggest that they go and do 15 minutes before tidying their room/having some food/watching TV. Getting started is half the battle.

10 Check your head. You've probably told your child to keep things in perspective but are you practising what you preach? Check your own attitude to these exams - are you very anxious? Are you having trouble seeing past the Leaving Cert? Remember what's at stake here, and I'm not talking about careers. A bad experience of education is demoralising. If a student leaves secondary school feeling like a failure it will be a setback for many years after the Leaving is forgotten.

There's a lot of talk about how you need a qualification for everything these days. It's not true. You need a qualification for some paths in life, but you can't achieve much without self esteem.