Dear Parent,
Somewhere in your house, right now, there is a teenager who is doing something unusual. They are sitting at a desk — perhaps the one in their bedroom, perhaps the kitchen table, perhaps a makeshift study space in a corner of the living room — and they are working on physics problems that would challenge many university students. The problems are not from their textbook. They are not part of their homework. They are problems from the British Physics Olympiad, and your child has chosen — of their own free will — to spend their evenings and weekends wrestling with them.
You may not fully understand what they are doing. You may not entirely understand why. And if you are reading this letter, it is probably because you want to — not because you need to solve the problems yourself, but because you need to understand the experience your child is going through, and how you can best support them through it. This letter is for you.
What Your Child Is Actually Doing
The first thing to understand is that your child is not simply "studying physics." If they were simply studying physics, they would be reading their textbook, completing their homework, and revising for their exams — all of which are important, and all of which they will still need to do. What they are doing instead is something qualitatively different. They are learning to think in a new way.
When your child sits down with a BPhO past paper, they are entering a world where the answers are not at the back of the book, where the questions do not tell you which formula to use, and where the path from problem statement to solution is not a straight line but a landscape that must be explored, often with many wrong turns before the right one reveals itself. This is not the kind of thinking that most schools teach — not because schools are failing, but because the constraints of a national curriculum simply do not allow time for this kind of deep, open-ended exploration. The BPhO exists precisely to fill that gap.
What your child is developing, in other words, is not just knowledge but intellectual character. They are learning to persist with a problem long after most people would have given up. They are learning to tolerate uncertainty — the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing how to solve something, and the patience to sit with that feeling until a way forward emerges. They are learning to communicate complex ideas clearly, because the BPhO awards marks not just for correct answers but for the reasoning that leads to them. These are skills that will serve them for the rest of their lives, in whatever field they eventually pursue.
The Things You Will Notice
Over the coming months, you may notice some changes in your child. Some of them will be subtle, and some of them will be less so.
They may become quieter at dinner. This is not because they are unhappy or disengaged — it is because their mind is often still working on a problem, even when the rest of them is at the table. The kind of thinking that olympiad physics requires is not easily switched on and off like a tap. It hums in the background, and sometimes the most productive thinking happens when the student appears to be doing nothing at all.
They may become more frustrated than usual. This is normal, and in a strange way, it is a good sign. Frustration is the emotional signature of learning — it means that your child is working at the edge of their ability, which is precisely where growth happens. The problems they are attempting are supposed to be hard, and the fact that they find them hard is not a sign of failure but of engagement.
They may talk about physics in ways that surprise you. You may hear them muttering about pendulums or capacitors under their breath. You may find them staring at the ceiling during a car journey, lost in thought about a problem they are trying to solve. You may even — this has been known to happen — find them attempting to explain to you the difference between a damped oscillator and a driven one, with an enthusiasm that suggests they have not noticed you have no idea what they are talking about.
What You Can Do
The most important thing you can do is also the simplest: be interested. You do not need to understand the physics. You do not need to be able to help with the problems (in fact, most parents could not, and there is no shame in that). What your child needs from you is not expertise but attention — the kind of attention that says, "I see that this matters to you, and I care about that."
Ask them what they are working on. Not in a testing way, but in a curious way. "What kind of problem are you doing tonight?" is a perfectly good question. "Did you figure it out?" is even better, because it signals that you understand this is a process, not a test. "Do you want to tell me about it?" is perhaps the best question of all, because it gives your child permission to share their excitement without requiring them to justify it.
Create space for the work. This might mean keeping the noise down on an evening when they are trying to concentrate. It might mean making sure they have somewhere quiet to work. It might mean being flexible about household tasks on the weekends before an exam. These are small things, but they matter, because they signal to your child that their work is valued — not because of the result it might produce, but because of the effort it requires.
Above all, resist the temptation to make the outcome more important than the process. The BPhO is a competition, and competitions have results, and results matter — for university applications, for scholarships, for the student's own sense of achievement. But if your child senses that your love or approval is conditional on their performance, something important will be lost. The BPhO is meant to be a joyful experience — a celebration of curiosity and intellect — and joy cannot flourish under the weight of expectation.
The Hard Parts
There will be difficult moments. Your child will have evenings when nothing works, when every approach they try leads to a dead end, when the problems seem impossibly hard and their confidence ebbs away. They may come to you feeling defeated, and you will want to fix it — to say the right thing, to make it better. The truth is that there is often nothing to fix. The difficulty is the point. The feeling of being stuck is not a sign that they are failing; it is a sign that they are learning.
What helps, in these moments, is not advice but presence. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is, "That sounds really hard. Do you want a cup of tea?" The tea is not the point. The point is the message it carries: "I see you. I'm here. This is difficult, and you are not alone in it."
There will also be moments when your child questions whether they want to continue. This is natural, and it does not necessarily mean they are giving up. Sometimes the most honest response to a difficult challenge is to step back, take a breath, and reconsider. If your child decides to take a break, trust that they know themselves well enough to make that decision. If they decide to continue after the break, trust that the decision is realer and stronger for having been questioned.
The Bigger Picture
It is easy, in the midst of the preparation, to lose sight of what the BPhO is actually for. It is not for the certificate, though that is nice to have. It is not for the university application, though that is a genuine benefit. It is not even, ultimately, for the IPhO, though that is a magnificent opportunity for the students who reach it.
The BPhO is for the becoming. It is for the person your child is becoming through the process of engaging with it. Every evening spent wrestling with a difficult problem is an evening in which your child is learning to be persistent. Every moment of frustration they sit with, rather than avoid, is a moment in which they are learning to be resilient. Every time they explain their reasoning clearly on paper, they are learning to communicate with precision and care.
These qualities — persistence, resilience, precision — are what will define your child's success in whatever they go on to do. They will matter in university, certainly. They will matter in a career, undoubtedly. But they will matter most in the quieter, more personal moments of life: in the relationships they build, in the challenges they face, in the decisions they make when no one is watching.
The Waiting
After the exam, there will be a period of waiting. This can be surprisingly difficult, both for you and for your child. The work is done, and there is nothing more to be done except wait for the results. You may find that your child seems restless, or that they swing between confidence and doubt. This is normal. The waiting is its own kind of challenge, and it passes more easily if you can find ways to fill it with other things — walks, films, conversations about anything other than physics.
When the results arrive, whatever they are, try to receive them with equanimity. If the result is good, celebrate — but gently, without making it into something larger than it is. If the result is disappointing, hold space for the disappointment without trying to minimise it or explain it away. Your child needs to know that your view of them has not changed, whatever a piece of paper says.
What Comes Next
In time, the BPhO will become a memory. The problems will fade, the results will be filed away, and the intense focus of the preparation will give way to whatever comes next in your child's life. But something will remain — something that is hard to name but impossible to miss once you have seen it.
Your child will have learned, through their own experience, that they are capable of more than they thought. They will have discovered that the world of physics is deeper and stranger and more beautiful than they had imagined. They will have met other young people — at training camps, at the exam itself, perhaps online — who share their passion, and some of those friendships will last for years.
And they will have learned something about you. They will have learned that when the work got hard, you did not look away. That when they were frustrated, you did not try to fix it. That when they were uncertain, you did not pretend to have all the answers. You just stayed. You made tea. You asked how it was going. You let them be difficult, and confused, and occasionally impossible, and you loved them anyway.
That, in the end, is what this letter is really about. Not the BPhO — though that is the occasion — but the quieter, larger truth that your child is growing up, and that the best thing you can do is walk beside them, at their pace, with curiosity and care.
The problems will get solved, or they will not. The results will come, or they will not. But the person your child is becoming — that is the work that matters, and you are already doing it, simply by being there.
With warmth and respect,
A friend of the BPhO community
