Dr Katharine Ayivor-Nygard, Chartered and HCPC Registered Clinical Psychologist and Founder of Alula Therapy, gives us insight into how to spot if your child is worrying about A-level results day, and how you can help them.
Updated: 04 Aug 2026
I'd like to start by setting the context to this piece. For many families, A-level results day feels like a gateway to adulthood, and for some the stakes are genuinely high: the funded place, the specific course, the first person in a family to go at all. In that situation a suggestion that this is "only a moment in time" will not feel supportive.
What I will offer instead is this perspective: our children are still very young. The adolescent brain is still developing; particularly the systems for planning, weighing risk and holding perspective when there are big feelings involved (Casey, Jones and Hare, 2008; Choudhury, Piera Pi-Sunyer and Blakemore, 2023). This is part of why a single result can feel like the whole future. There is a great deal of growth, and a great deal of life, still ahead.
Before anything else, it is worth being honest with yourself about how much of the pressure in the house is your child's and how much is yours. We invest so much in our children that their results can start to feel like a verdict on us. We are human, acknowledging and naming this is not a failing. However, children are perceptive, and they are likely to sense it if your reassurance isn't coming from a grounded place. If you are frightened or exhausted, remember - you do not have to be perfectly calm to be helpful. The goal is not a serene parent but a present one, and looking after your own state, leaning on someone you trust or your GP, is part of the job rather than a distraction from it.
It helps to keep the system in perspective too. From around the age of four or five years old, our children are moved through a near-continuous pipeline of assessments, and we are all conditioned to focus on a single exam result as a prediction of the future of our child. But a child's curiosity, character and ability cannot be captured by some coursework and a set of questions answered under time pressure, and the meaning we attach to a result can become the narrative they live by: I am a failure; I am no good; I am clever; I am capable.
How we respond to a disappointing result shapes what a child takes from it, and there are two things I think are important here. The first is how we frame failure. That is whether failure is viewed as something fixed, "I'm not good enough" or as a more fluid discovery, "this is information about what to try next." The formal "growth mindset" programmes built on this idea have shown mixed results, so I would not oversell them (Dweck and Yeager, 2019; Macnamara and Burgoyne, 2023; Yeager et al., 2019). However, the underlying message, that ability and setbacks are not fixed verdicts, is a simple one to model at home.
The second important highlight is providing comfort and reassurance. It may be tempting to think that letting a child struggle alone toughens them up, but that is not really how resilience works: there is evidence that a moderate amount of navigated difficulty leaves people better able to cope than either none at all or a great deal (Seery, Holman and Silver, 2010), and the key word is navigated. It is the support around a setback, far more than the setback itself, that builds the capacity to meet the next one. The most useful response is a warm one, not a withholding one.
Every young person shows distress differently, and so I would steer you away from over scrutinising with a list of symptoms in hand. I believe, the most reliable guide is your knowledge of your own child, and what you are watching for is a genuine, sustained shift from their usual baseline: quieter and withdrawn or wired and harder to pin down; clingier, or pulling away; changes in sleep, appetite or mood. If your child already lives with anxiety, low mood, an eating difficulty or is neurodivergent, this period can hit harder, and you are likely to already have a sense of what helps them.
It is worth remembering, too, that results day now plays out in public and in real time, with grades and comparison all over group chats and social media as they happen. It may be helpful to agree together to step back from the phones for a while. Across all of this, the single most useful thing is to stay engaged: spend ordinary time together, and let your child know well before the day that you are proud of them whatever happens and that you will work things out together.
There are clearer signals that need more than reassurance: low mood or anxiety that is severe or not settling, withdrawal that intensifies, and in particular any thoughts of not wanting to be alive, self-harm, using substances to cope, or a marked rise in risk-taking. If your child is in immediate danger, treat it as the emergency it is and call 999 or go to A&E. If they are in crisis but not in immediate danger, NHS 111 has a mental health option at any hour. If something concerns you but is not acute, your GP is the right place to start, and you do not need to wait until things are severe.
If your child has seemed very distressed, and especially where there is a history of self-harm or serious difficulty, or it is something you have talked about before, it is right to be able to ask directly. Many parents and carers hold back for fear of putting the idea in a child's mind. The available evidence is clear that asking openly does not increase risk, and it can actually bring real relief (DeCou and Schumann, 2018) as a child can feel less alone with big emotions.
You do not need to have the perfect words, something along the lines of; "I can see how much you're struggling, and I want to ask you honestly, have you had any thoughts of not wanting to be here, or of hurting yourself? You can tell me, I just want to help." I would not suggest asking these questions to a child who is simply disappointed about a grade, this is more where there is an existing context of suicidal ideation or self-harm.
Far more valuable, most of the time, is the quieter groundwork of letting your child know, in ordinary moments, that whatever is going on, however dark or alarming it feels, they can bring it to you, and you will help rather than judge. If you do ask and the answer worries you, stay with them, take it seriously, and get support; the Papyrus HOPELINE247 advisers help both young people and worried parents.
If you are the young person reading this, the basics matter more than they sound: protect your sleep, eat, keep some contact with the things you enjoy, and have someone to talk to. And let yourself think through a plan B before A-level results day, not as pessimism but so that you are not making big decisions in a panic. For the adults around them, the emotional part is really significant; children tend to do better when feelings are acknowledged and sat with rather than fixed or waved away (Gottman, Katz and Hooven, 1996; Brumariu et al., 2025).
In practice that means naming the feeling first, "I can see this feels disappointing, and it makes sense that you're upset," before reaching for solutions. And if yours is not the easy, talking kind of relationship, don't despair; presence does not require conversation. Sitting in the same room, giving your child a lift somewhere, watching a film together, all of it counts. The same is true if you are a grandparent, a carer, or anyone else standing in that role.
Acknowledge it before you fix it. In the first instance your job is not to start immediately forming a plan, but rather to be the steady one while your child feels what they need to feel, including grief for the future they had pictured. Do less than you think you should: sit with them, then do something ordinary and restorative, and celebrate the effort, which was real whatever the grade said. Try to keep an honest long view too. Careers are far less linear than they feel at 18; around a third of graduates end up working outside their degree field (McGuinness, Pouliakas and Redmond, 2017). I would be straight about constraints, though: a resit or a regroup costs time and money not every family has spare, and if that is your situation, the practical questions are real and worth getting good advice about. What does not change though, is that this is one point on a long road, with almost always more than one way forward.
Clearing can feel like a particular whirlwind: sudden, off-plan decisions on top of real disappointment. Where you can, take a beat; a day or two where results are not the focus, to let everyone settle before big choices are made. Try to keep some perspective, as well. Clearing is now a mainstream route, not a consolation prize, and when UCAS asks, more than nine in ten students placed this way say they are confident in their choice (UCAS). That is a near-term, self-reported measure rather than a promise about the years that follow, but it adds support to the idea that very little at this age is permanent, and depending on the circumstances it may be possible to resit, transfer, or change direction entirely.
The weight A-level results carry is not the same in every home. In some families and communities it sits inside a much larger story of sacrifice and expectation, and that context deserves respect, but it can also turn the pressure up to a pitch that is hard to bear. Whatever the meaning in your family, the message a young person most needs to hear is that our regard for them does not change with their A-level grades. If you can, take a little time, before the results come, to sort through whose anxiety is whose, and try to put things into a wider perspective. If we work until we are seventy, then at eighteen or nineteen there is a whole lifetime of experience and discovery still ahead. This is their journey to work out. Our job, in the ordinary hours as much as the big moments, is to keep our regard for them steady and unconditional, and to cheer them on from the side of the road, and remind them that they are so much more than just a grade.
In an emergency, if someone's life is at immediate risk, call 999 or go to A&E.
NHS urgent mental health: call NHS 111 and select the mental health option, available 24/7.
Samaritans: 116 123, free, 24/7, 365 days a year.
Papyrus HOPELINE247 (for under-35s and for anyone worried about a young person): 0800 068 41 41, text 07860 039967, 24/7.
Childline (under-19s): 0800 1111.
Shout (24/7 text support): text SHOUT to 85258.
NHS website and YoungMinds: information on symptoms, and guidance written for parents supporting a young person.
Dr Katharine Ayivor-Nygard is a Chartered Clinical Psychologist with nearly two decades of experience working with children, young people, and families across the NHS, family court, and specialist CAMHS settings.
She is the founder of Alula Therapy, a clinician-led platform built on a simple premise: that the most powerful support for a child happens in the 167 hours a week they spend outside the therapy room; with the parents, carers, and professionals around them. Alula works by equipping those adults with psychological frameworks that make a real difference day to day.
Dr Ayivor-Nygard is registered with the HCPC, is a Chartered Member of the British Psychological Society, and is verified on the healthcare review platform Doctify.
Brumariu, L. E., Nair, T. K., Waslin, S. M., Rodrigues, G. A., Moore, M. T., & Kerns, K. A. (2025). Parental emotion socialization and internalizing problems in childhood and adolescence: A meta-analytic review. Development and Psychopathology, 37(5), 2806–2826.
Casey, B. J., Jones, R. M., & Hare, T. A. (2008). The adolescent brain. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124, 111–126. (Seminal reference.)
Choudhury, S., Piera Pi-Sunyer, B., & Blakemore, S-J. (2023). A neuroecosocial perspective on adolescent development. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 5, 285–307.
DeCou, C. R., & Schumann, M. E. (2018). On the iatrogenic risk of assessing suicidality: A meta-analysis. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 48(5), 531–543.
Dweck, C. S., & Yeager, D. S. (2019). Mindsets: A view from two eras. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(3), 481–496.
Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1996). Parental meta-emotion philosophy and the emotional life of families: Theoretical models and preliminary data. Journal of Family Psychology, 10(3), 243–268. (Seminal reference; the origin of the emotion-coaching concept.)
Macnamara, B. N., & Burgoyne, A. P. (2023). Do growth mindset interventions impact students' academic achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis with recommendations for best practices. Psychological Bulletin, 149(3–4). https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000352
McGuinness, S., Pouliakas, K., & Redmond, P. (2017). Vertical and Horizontal Mismatch in the UK: Are Graduates' Skills a Good Fit for Their Jobs? National Institute of Economic and Social Research (analysis of the 2017 Annual Population Survey; approximately one third of UK graduates work in a field unrelated to their degree subject).
Seery, M. D., Holman, E. A., & Silver, R. C. (2010). Whatever does not kill us: Cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(6), 1025–1041. UCAS. Clearing and Confirmation applicant data and applicant survey (a large majority of students placed through Clearing report being confident they made the right choice).
Yeager, D. S., Hanselman, P., Walton, G. M., et al. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature, 573(7774), 364–369.
Receive a monthly newsletter packed with useful tips and updates to help you find the right uni.