Opinion Breda O'BrienA great deal of media attention focuses on the stress of the Leaving Cert, but we pay scant regard to the stress that follows. It is safe to presume that there is a great deal of tension in many homes right now, either because the results are not as expected, or because parents are worrying about what their offspring will get up to on the post-results holiday.
Parents are often powerless to affect decisions which young people will make. Those who have completed their Leaving Cert are officially adults, in part because most of them are over 18, but also because they have completed a rite of passage.
Other cultures lock their young people up in sweat lodges, or tattoo their skins. We make them sit the Leaving Cert. They must prove their worth to us, while simultaneously avoiding humiliation in the eyes of peers and elders.
Alain de Botton has written a bestseller called Status Anxiety. He might have been describing the Leaving Cert when he says that status anxiety is a "worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect".
Young people measure themselves against their friends, against siblings, against the number of points that various courses demand, and against the expectations of their parents. They may effect bravado, or indifference, but as de Botton says, only rare individuals, such as Socrates or Jesus, are completely unaffected by status anxiety.
We send our young people very mixed messages. We tell them that their worth is not determined by how they fare in this exam, and then wonder why they accuse us of hypocrisy. Perhaps it is because they can sense our anxiety, our desire that they "meet the ideals of success set down by our society". Gender is not a social construct: but our notions of success certainly are.
We may point to examples such as Feargal Quinn, who managed to achieve a great deal in life without having a Leaving Cert.
However, it is doubtful we would be extolling him had his success consisted of a salaried job with modest pay, combined with devotion to his family and community. No, the Feargal Quinns are trotted out as examples to prove that not having a Leaving Cert does not necessarily exclude you from the ranks of the wealthy and influential. The goal of achieving status has not changed: merely the route.
If parents are honest, there is a little vicarious status anxiety, too. It is hard to disentangle the real feeling of wanting a child to do well for his or her own sake from the natural desire to bask in a bit of reflected glory. How many times have you heard an adult say that they are doing the Leaving Cert this year? Sometimes it is a revealing slip of the tongue, and sometimes it is a conscious and dry acknowledgement of the impact of the exam on the entire family.
It is a paradox that when self-esteem has never been more talked about, more and more people measure themselves against external criteria of success. Young people are often plunged into despair if they do not achieve what they wanted in this exam. They do not take any comfort from the fact that there is a great deal of chance and luck involved, including how the questions fell, and a person's health on the day. They feel exposed and vulnerable, because they have not lived up to their own and other's expectations.
Those who have been very successful face other hurdles, including a feeling that they will always have to be as successful as they are now. It is no coincidence that our preferred rite of passage involves measuring oneself against an external standard, because that is what most of us will be doing for the rest of our lives. Our jobs, addresses, and cars will often be valued, not because of their usefulness or merit, but because of the status they convey.
The Jesuit writer Antony de Mello says that the truly free are immune to what others think of them. However, while de Mello is right, it is not just saints who are totally indifferent to society's opinions. Sociopaths are equally indifferent. A society in which no one cares what anyone thinks about them is anarchic and incapable of functioning.
Through subtle and not so subtle forms of indoctrination, we socialise our children to say please and thank you, to eat with their mouths shut, and to think of others as well as themselves. A certain amount of anxiety about whether others will have a good opinion of us reinforces that socialisation.
Where, then, does anxiety about our status in the eyes of others become pernicious? Paradoxically, it can take two forms. Firstly, there is the inability to separate failure in an enterprise such as the Leaving Cert from failure as a human being.
Everyone needs a bedrock belief that they are valuable, regardless of what they do or do not achieve according to society's standards. The second peril is arrogance, a belief that we hold no responsibility, no matter how lazy our choices have been, or how little of our talents we have actually used.
Yet real self-respect enables us to face up to our responsibility for any difficulties we find ourselves in, while not writing ourselves off as human beings. The person is always valuable, and that knowledge should give us impetus to make better choices in the future.
Such maturity is beyond the grasp of many adults, yet we expect it of our teenagers. Although they may appear indifferent, what our bruised teenagers need of us is a feeling that we will love them, without patronising them, regardless of how many points they achieve. While it is difficult to be a teenager who has not done well in the Leaving Cert, in some ways it is even harder to be a parent of such a student. It involves heroic degrees of tongue-biting and silent support, and is probably most successful when we truly believe, rather than just parrot, that it is not the end of the world.
bobrien@irish-times.ie