YOU SIGNED HIM UP at the "institute" for revision at Easter, you've drawn up a schedule and you phone home from work to see how he's getting on. You're going to do well in the Leaving - and so, dammit, is your child.

If this is your first time, you need guidance. Is there anything in the handbook on competitive parenting (senior cycle) to help you do this right? What are the rules? You've heard that friend X is studying for five hours a night, that friend Y doesn't take any phone calls during the week, that friend Z's mum has taken three weeks off work to be supportive.

Speaking of which, you wonder secretly: Is there a support group for parents who are doing the Leaving? For the stress and pressure surrounding the Leaving is contagious, and right now thousands of parents are suffering right along with their children.

Parents who have been through this experience agree that it's hard to avoid getting sucked into the panic. But avoid it they must.

"If you get too uptight, it passes on to them," says Margaret, a Dublin mother of seven. "The calmer you can become, the better for them."

When Margaret's eldest child was doing his Leaving 18 years ago, she had just had a baby. Now that baby, her youngest child, is about to sit her Leaving Cert, and Margaret doesn't get too rattled about it all.

Like all the other parents I spoke to, she says that the most important thing parents can do is simply be there, to feed, encourage, give cups of tea, words of encouragement, maybe buy a little surprise.

When Margaret's eldest sat his Leaving, part of her job was to keep her younger children away from him now, it's to make sure her eight grandchildren don't interrupt her daughter's four or five hours of study per night when they visit.

"We told all the children that it was up to them, that all we could do was encourage them and be there for them. But we were lucky, because they were all motivated."

Margaret, like other parents, believes it can be counter productive to get over involved in trying to organise your student: "Helen drew up her timetable herself and showed it to me. But there's no point in nagging."

If you concentrate on putting the whole household into Leaving Cert mode (if not after Christmas, then certainly after Easter), creating conditions conducive to study, it can have pleasant side effects for you.

"I don't mind it really," says author and journalist Mary Rose Doorly, whose second daughter is doing her Leaving this year a year after her older sister. "The house is quieter, there isn't loud music blaring out all the time. The place is running like an army camp - everyone's up at seven." Her 11 year old son is quiet and co operative about all this.

She agrees that Leaving Cert students "just want you to be there, to keep everything organised and quiet. Everything revolves around them." She believes strongly in fresh air and healthy eating, encouraging her daughters to drink lots of water, not coffee, to eat fruit, not biscuits, to cycle to school, go for walks, and to get to sleep by midnight. And she puts them on a course of vitamin supplements a month before the exams.

The regime is good for her too: "I might as well be doing the exam. I'm not going out, not drinking. I'm taking vitamins, eating healthily, walking more."

WHETHER YOU WORK outside the home, or full time in the home, you have to make everything else take a back seat to your student and that exam. But if you have to go out to work, "don't be apologetic, and put your worries over on to the child," says a teacher who is also a mother of four post Leaving students. "Just say, `there's your meal,' and let them get on with it."

This teacher/mother also advises against phoning home to check on their studying, or on getting heavily involved in organising their timetables. "You can ask, `Do you want me to help you plan it out?' and help them to draw up a schedule - but you can't do it for them."

All these parents say it's a good idea to hold phone calls during study time, to get rid of bedroom extensions, and to insist that a teenager gives up any part time job.

On the other hand, they all believe strongly that it's important for the children to have one night out at the weekend with their friends; they are better off keeping up extracurricular and sporting activities all through their final year in school - because it relieves stress.

If you're lucky, your teenager is motivated, and therefore grateful if you put the house into exam mode. Butt what if he or she isn't?

Barbara reckons there isn't really a whole lot you can do to force an unwilling 17 or 18 year old to work - even if you come the heavy and force her to sit at a desk for four hours a night.

However, though Barbara's philosophy is to put the responsibility for tackling the Leaving on to her children, she found herself saying negative things like "What will you do if you fail?" when it became obvious that one of her sons just wasn't bothering to study for the exam. (Sean, a teacher and father, says that it's not true that kids who appear to be lounging around are not worrying - they tend to be worrying, ineffectually, more than most.)

Barbara knows that parents' views on how to handle this situation vary a lot, with some driving themselves mad flogging their children to study. But she reckons that if they won't take responsibility for something this important at 18, it will catch up with them later on - perhaps when they fail college exams.

Her son failed his Leaving, but did get a job with potential and is now sitting the Leaving again at the age of 21. But it is hard on parents to stay calm while they watch a child throw his or her chances away.

And come August, even if you really don't care what other people think, it's tough to admit that your child failed, when all around, parents are crowing (and they do crow) about the high points they (ok, their child) got in the exam.

The theory sounds fine, but as a parent who is still one year away from sitting the Leaving, I can see how hard it might be to put it into practice. Parents have stresses of their own, work and family duties, noisy younger children. I can see how tough it might be to stay cool and calm if your stressed out exam child begins to get ratty and touchy as day approaches.

So come September. I think I'll start stocking up on anything tranquilising herbal teas, tapes of the sea, videos of the Rose of Tralee contest, Prozac perhaps to help me through the exam everyone agrees is The Big One. Like they say, you gotta be prepared.