SHANGHAI: An event held last weekend that was designed to provide free psychological counseling for students ahead of their college entrance exams ended up attracting more parents than teenagers.

Psychotherapists at Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai were surprised to find that 80 percent of the people who attended the sessions were nervous moms and dads.

Professor Jin Wuguan, who took part in the sessions, said teenagers are seldom as fragile or nervous as their parents might think. Many moms and dads assume their children are anxious and therefore give them excessive care and supervision.

But this kind of doting actually adds to students' anxiety, he said.

"Parents shouldn't ask their children if they are sleeping well at night or how their studies are going," Jin said. "More importantly, they must not set targets for them to achieve.

"In order to survive the exam period with their children, parents must first adjust their own way of thinking. They should be confident for their children and encourage them, instead of using depressing words like 'failure' or 'loser'," Jin said.

Shanghai Youth Daily quoted one father, surnamed Li, as saying: "I would wake up suddenly in the night, thinking that my son was going to fail his exam; then I would not be able to get back to sleep."

Chen Chen, a student preparing for the exam told Jiefang Daily: "I don't like my mother talking to me as if she is giving me orders, like, 'you must do this and that', or 'whatever you do, we don't care as long as you think about your future."

Another student, Liu Chong, said about his parents: "To tell the truth, they are more nervous than I am. They look at me full of expectation.

"Sometimes I would take a nap during my studying, but if my father saw me he would wake me up and tell me to carry on with my work. I complained to my mother and he stopped doing it."

While health supplements are widely used by students before exams, experts have warned them not to take too many.

One student drank so much herb tonic and chicken essence that he suffered from nosebleeds.

A student named Liu Chong said: "Now the weather is getting hot and dry, mom is cooking 'silver ears' (a white fungus) for me."

Counselor Sun Jiayi from the Zhiyin Psychological Center said that parents and children influence each other with their anxiety.

Children who show abnormal behavior worry their parents, and parents who overreact annoy their kids and make them tense when they otherwise would have been fine.

(China Daily 05/30/2007 page5)