WHEN someone asked me what we were doing for the Easter holidays, I was taken aback. It seemed such a quaint, old-fashioned term.

The words “Easter” and “holidays”

haven’t gone together in our house since 2008, the year our oldest boy started his GCSEs. A letter he brought home from school had advised parents of children taking major exams not to go on holiday because it was an important revision.

The problem is, with five boys close in age, we have had someone sitting major exams every year since.

So we don’t call it the Easter holidays.

In our house, it has become the nerve-jangling, nail-biting “Easter revision period”. At moments of high stress, when I am battling to persuade them to turn off the TV and do some work, I have been known to refer to it as “the period upon which the future of your whole life may depend”.

This Easter, we have the 22-yearold at home studying for his master’s, the 20-year-old, who is taking his finals in June and the 18-yearold, who sits his A-levels in May.

Everywhere, from their bedrooms to the large dining table, our office and the table on the landing outside our bedroom is strewn with files, books, revision cards and paperwork.

I tiptoe around, telling everyone else to be quiet, even though the boys who are supposed to be studying are listening to loud music on their headphones.

No matter how laid- back and relaxed we mums and dads try to be, it’s impossible not to succumb to the pressure of parental exam panic. We worry our offspring won’t have a hope of getting onto the university English course they want if they get a B in design technology at GCSE.

With anxiety levels constantly being racked up, we wonder what it will take to ensure our offspring stand out from the competition. Are they doing enough? Are we doing enough? This is why the private tutoring industry is booming. Everyone from retired teachers to newly qualified graduates and anyone else who fancies exploiting parental anxiety is offering one-to-one revision sessions costing up to £40 an hour.

Forget Easter being a period of rest, relaxation and quiet reflection.

In some homes, parental rumour has it, hot-housed children have their meal times and even lavatory breaks slotted in to a carefully mapped out revision schedule. And so the panic spreads.

I don’t remember being half as stressed out over my own exams when, rather like my boys now, and blissfully unaware of the challenges that lay ahead, I believed everything would simply fall into place.

But of course, that’s not how it looks once you’re a parent. Son number four takes his GCSEs next year, closely followed by AS and Alevels, so it doesn’t look as if this revision hell is going to stop any time soon. The 11-year-old, in his last year at primary school, hasn’t even started on the exam treadmill yet, but can’t help absorbing some of the anxiety: “We’ve only got around two weeks after the holidays before our SATs start,” he said the other day.

“Don’t even think about worrying about those,” I warned him.

We do, after all, have a much bigger problem looming. Once his two oldest brothers have finished their exams, they have to find jobs. That, I suspect, will be their toughest test.

THE 20-year-old dislocated his little finger playing football for his university team and told me over the phone how it’d been left misshapen. When he arrived home, one of the first things he did was to stick his little finger under my nose: “Look,” he said. “Ugh, Charlie, I see what you mean. It’s all knobbly and horrible.” He looked aghast. “That’s my good finger, I was showing it to you first so that you could compare.”

THE London School of Economics has carried out research which reveals that shouting at children makes their behaviour worse. Bit late for that in our house. While I would love to be the sort of mother who patiently reasons with her children in the dulcet tones of Mary Poppins, there are times when it is only the act of bellowing at them at the top of my voice that stops me from tipping over the edge.

How do non-shouty parents manage to bite their tongues and keep their heads at the same time? Now, that would be worth researching.

  • Follow me on Twitter @Mum_at_Large