Most of us want the best for our kids, and it's natural to think that pushing harder will pull better marks out of them. But a laser focus on ATAR scores often does the opposite. When the pressure at home gets too high, motivation drops, sleep suffers, and the marks usually follow them down.

So, the more useful question isn't "how hard should I push?" It's "what kind of home turns study time into good results?" That's where you have real influence, and it's worth getting right, because the habits your teenager builds now are the same ones they'll lean on at university.

Why nagging backfires

Nagging feels like motivation. It rarely works like it. As psychologist Marilyn Price-Mitchell explains in Psychology Today, it sets up a power struggle: when one of you wins, the other loses, and the family loses either way.

There's a tipping point with encouragement, too. A bit of healthy expectation helps. Past a certain point, stress stops being a spur and becomes a handbrake. The side effects work directly against learning: low motivation, broken sleep, and trouble focusing. None of that shows up well in a WACE exam.

What support actually does for exam results

This is the part worth holding onto: family support has a measurable effect on a teenager's wellbeing and their results. Students who feel backed by the people around them tend to do better under exam conditions and cope better with the stress of them. During the WACE run, when the stakes feel high, that support matters most.

Here are five practical things you can do to build a study environment that helps rather than hinders.

1. Keep good food within reach. Fresh fruit and vegetables, hummus, peanut butter, boiled eggs, yoghurt and nuts keep both body and brain fuelled through a long study session.
2. Plan your check-ins, don't ambush them. Agree on a regular fifteen-minute break together: a walk outside, ten minutes with the dog, or a coffee and a chat. If motivation is flagging, this is a good moment to talk about where they're headed and why, rather than the next exam.
3. Go easy on caffeine, energy drinks and junk food. Anything heavy in fat, sugar and salt drains energy and dulls concentration, which is the opposite of what they need at the desk.
4. Protect their sleep. An all-nighter feels productive and isn't: a sleep-deprived brain genuinely underperforms. Cramming parks facts in short-term memory, but exams are answered from long-term memory, and that's built by rest.
5. Remind them the ATAR isn't the only door. A strong score opens things up, but it's far from the only way into university. There are alternative entry pathways into Murdoch University, and knowing that takes some of the all-or-nothing pressure off a single set of exams.

The longer payoff of backing off

There's a bonus to all of this. The more room you give your teenager to think and act for themselves now, the better prepared they'll be for what university asks of them. Before long they'll need to manage their own time, motivation and decisions without you in the room. Helping them become curious and self-driven today sets them up for far more than one exam season.