The Eleven Plus and Leisure

If you were not preoccupied with helping your child towards the eleven plus, what could you, and THE CANDIDATE, do with all this extra time?

You will have been monitoring your child very carefully over the past months – trying to make sure that you do not force your own anxiety onto your child. You may have a pretty fair idea of what your child thinks about doing a paper on a sunny afternoon – but may be less sure of what goes through your child’s mind last thing at night and first thing in the morning.

The other area where you have no control of the pre eleven plus situation is when your child is with his or her peers at school. You don’t really know exactly what the class bully may or may not have said to your child about the eleven plus.

We may possibly have heard of some children who have reverted to bed wetting or stealing or extreme rudeness. The eleven plus examination in itself can not realistically have caused concern in a child. A more likely trigger could be how the eleven plus is handled by family, school and peers.

Parents have to temper their ambition for their child with a just assessment of what their child can achieve.

This call for a balance must carry across into sports and leisure activities. A child who wants his way all the time will not easily gain entry to the `inner circle’. Likewise a child who is a complete namby-pamby will only find play mates when he, of she, has learnt to stand on his or her own feet.