From Everyday Parenting, a podcast by Swetha Vigraham, founder of Bricks and Blocks Coaching
Anisha had two of them lined up back to back. Her boys are two years apart academically, which meant one PSLE year, then another PSLE year, with no gap in between to recover in. She had not sat the exam herself, having grown up in Pune and studied in France before arriving in Singapore twenty years ago, so she was going in without the muscle memory that local parents at least have to draw on surviving the PSLE year. There was also a great deal happening at work at the time. And before any of it started, she did something most parents do not think to do at all. She picked a word for the year.
"I really wanted to make it a memorable year, not a miserable year. My leading word was actually fun."
The part she remembers now, two PSLEs later, is not the result.
Almost everything written for PSLE parents is about the child: the timetable, the practice papers, which subjects to drop, whether to add another tuition slot. Anisha starts somewhere else entirely, with a question about herself. She asked what she wanted out of the year, and she was specific that this was not selfishness but structure, because the alternative was twelve months of everyone grinding against each other.
"I thought, OK, if I need to do this for myself, yes, it's great, it's my kids PSLE, but what do I want out of this year for myself?"
Her answer was growth and some lightness, in a year that was going to be heavy whatever she did. That became the thing she measured decisions against. And her reasoning for why it matters is the uncomfortable bit: a lot of what we frame as being there for our children turns out, when examined, to be about what we want for ourselves. She is not apologetic about that. She thinks naming it is what stops it distorting everything else.
The reframe she settled on sounds light and is not.
"the PSLE is not a child's exam. It's actually a bit of a family sport and you have to figure out how you are working closely together. It's a team sport... everyone has to be kind of in on supporting one another and catching one another when they fall."
The consequence of taking that seriously is that the adults are players rather than spectators, which means their state is part of the result. It also means the year is a shared project with a shared frame, rather than one person's trial that everybody else observes anxiously. For her the other consequence was unexpected and good: it turned out to be genuinely high-quality time with her sons, arriving at precisely the point just before secondary school when children start wanting their own lives.
Her work did not have to be sacrificed to it either. She was direct with her manager about what she needed on the domestic front for those two years, got flexibility to work from home over the summer months, and says plainly that it did not derail her career progress. She ended up surprising herself by handling both.
Three things, in her account, and none of them is a score.
This is the part Anisha calls a plot twist, and it is the most useful thing in the episode because nobody warns you about it.
"your teenager needs you around, but they don't want you around."
PSLE arrives exactly when a child turns eleven, twelve, thirteen and starts pulling away. So a high-stakes exam that genuinely requires adult involvement lands in the same months as the first real push for autonomy. She is honest about how that felt, which is rarer than it should be in parenting content.
"part of me was dealing with a little bit of hurt and a little bit of detachment because I wanted to be present, but... they were just kind of like, let me be, they were pushing back a little bit, right? And it did sting for a few months"
A few months of stinging, not an afternoon. What eventually resolved it was not a technique but a change in the question she was asking. She had started, years earlier, with the one most parents carry: am I doing enough? That question never resolves, because there is no amount that answers it.
"it then became, what does my child need from me right now. And sometimes the answer was back off and sometimes it was sit closer."
Her description of what the children wanted from her is the best line in the episode: a punching bag and a security blanket, both at once, and your job is to be whichever one is needed without taking the first one personally.
Her advice, in the order she gave it.
Her second PSLE is behind her and she is glad about it, in those words. The boys are twelve and fourteen now and still pulling in different directions, the younger one still putting in effort that does not always match the outcome and feeling the gap. Nothing about that was fixed by a good frame.
What the frame changed is what she has left over from those two years. She has quality time she would otherwise have spent anxious, a working relationship with her manager that survived being honest, and a different question to ask the next time one of her sons needs something from her. If you are starting your PSLE year this week, the word you choose now is the only part of it fully within your control.
Anisha's preparation was deciding what she wanted the year to feel like before it began, and choosing a word to measure decisions against. She treats the parent's own frame as the first piece of preparation rather than an afterthought.
She reframes it as neither, calling it a family sport and a team sport where the adults are players rather than spectators. On that reading the adults' state is part of the outcome, not separate from it.
Expect it, because PSLE coincides with the age when children start wanting autonomy. Her shift was from asking whether she was doing enough to asking what her child needed right then, where the honest answer was sometimes to back off and sometimes to sit closer.
She did, through two of them, by being specific with her manager about what she needed at home for that period. She got flexibility to work from home over the summer months and says it did not set her career back.
Her own framing is that the exam is part of a longer journey and that a child does not have to peak at twelve. She told her sons that directly, so their expectations and hers were aligned before the result arrived.
