As a dad, how much say should I have in my daughter’s GCSEs?

It’s time for my daughter to pick her GCSE subjects – but I wasn’t prepared for the questions it would cause me to ask about my own parenting choices, writes Will Gore

My daughter may be slowly moving into a different phase of her life; yet as a consequence, so am I (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

We all make hundreds of life choices. Some we know are critical at the time; most only reveal their significance in retrospect. And there are many others which cause a ton of stress, but which turn out to be utterly inconsequential.

Children make fewer choices than adults. It’s one of their perennial complaints – although, seeing my son’s emotional distress this week when he had to decide which curry to have at my parents’ local Indian restaurant, it’s clear that eight-year-olds don’t always cope well with multiple options. At least his anguish over a chicken bhuna was unlikely to have major long-term ramifications.

By contrast, choices made by my daughter this week may be the start of her life’s future course. Along with thousands of other children in year 9, she has spent the last few months being prepped by her teachers to think about her GCSE choices – drama or art? Cooking or engineering? History or RE? This week, it was crunch time.

My fatherly advice, however likely to be ignored, was not to worry too much about it. After all, with seven mandatory subjects (maths, a foreign language, two English and three science) already determined, room for manoeuvre was pretty limited in any case. Pick what you enjoy and what you’re good at, I said. None of it matters much at this stage.

But what if I’m wrong? Go online and you’ll discover that choosing the right GCSE options is “vital”, according to Ucas, as they have the potential to affect what you do further down the line. There are guides on how to help your children choose their GCSE subjects, and one for teens headlined “19 questions to ask yourself”. Nineteen!

Then again, you’ll also discover despairing threads from kids who don’t know what to do because they “hate all the subjects equally”. Thankfully, my daughter was not in that boat. Indeed, she seemed more or less to have made up her mind about GCSE choices months ago: a second foreign language, history, and drama. Those were her final decisions, and she arrived at them with great independence and maturity. She seems not in the least bit sorry to be ditching art, music and the various subjects that fall under the technology umbrella. And when I think of how much I hated my geography GCSE, I can’t help but feel she’s been wise to bin that off too.

It’s conceivable, I suppose, that computer science might come in handier down the line than German, but we can’t all be coders. Either way, it was very clear that this was not my decision to make. In fact, as I reflected on the choices my daughter had made, I realised that this was the first time my eldest child had been truly in charge of decisions that will – even if only quite marginally – impact on the way her life pans out.

And when I think back to my own GCSE years, they do feel significant: the point at which I began to take control of my destiny; to grow up. Everything before then is lumped together in my memory firmly as childhood. From year 10 onwards, it was all stepping stones to adulthood, with further key choices along the way.

All parents say it, of course. You have tiny babies one minute, mardy teenagers the next; and before you know it, your kids have flown the nest entirely. But my existential trepidation has certainly crept up a notch this week – even if (or perhaps because) my daughter has taken the whole thing entirely in her stride.

It’s not a wholly negative thing. The realisation that your child has enough sense to make positive decisions about their own life is a joyful thing in many ways. I might be losing control, but only because my offspring is ready to take a little for herself.

Nevertheless, this week has definitely been a marker of time passing, of things changing. My daughter may be slowly moving into a different phase of her life; yet as a consequence, so am I. Not for the worse by any means, but it’s just that I don’t think I saw it coming. Maybe I’ll be better prepared when I turn around and discover she’s off to university, or moving out to get a job. Or perhaps I’ll just be a mess with even greyer hair.

At least my eight-year-old still needs my advice and intervention. As he wept over whether to have rice or a naan with his chicken bhuna, I was happily able to step in and make the choice for him: have both. It’s what dads are for.