My parents don't care about grades. If I come home with a C, they don't care (as long as I don't fail). I actually disagree with pressuring students to get good grades. To me, as long as the student tries hard to do the best they can, any grade would suffice. If my kids came home with Cs, I wouldn't care. It's the effort that counts.
I agree with this. When I was at school, I was always really really bad at Maths. Firstly, I remember finding it so boring that I just couldn't concentrate on it at all. I was really good at everything else, so I guess I got used to not really having to work for good marks, so Maths frustrated me and latterly I'd get really anxious about it. By the time my GCSEs came round, I was in the top class for Maths but I swear to God to this day I have no clue what I was doing there. I was getting E's when everyone else was getting A's, and I was working around the clock to try and get my head round stuff like trigonometry and whatnot and it all just went in one year and out the other. Most of my friends were doing really well and I remember how much it upset me when they were *****ing about getting A's and not A*s and I was struggling to scrape a D, let alone passing the subject, and I was working much harder than them. I mean, you can't be good at everything but they made me feel about 2 inches tall. It was like a skinny person complaining they're fat in front of a normal weight person- imagine how much of a heffalump that normal person is going to feel.
Now I'm a bit older and I've come to see those school days and grades in a completely different light: first, you leave school and find out very quickly that grades mean squat in the real world. It all looks good on paper but the fact is, the more time that passes between when you got that A and where you are now makes that A less relevant anyway because you won't be using half those skills from school in any feasible job. So, while of course you should aim to do the best you can, crying over getting a B in the long run is a huge waste of time when you could be doing something productive. That also applies to your parents, and maybe they should get a gentle reminder of that. I was never under any real pressure to get good grades from my mum, the pressure came from myself. I was always one of the gifted and talented students getting told constantly how smart I am, so I came to have an irrational fear of feeling stupid. You can only do well if you're doing it for yourself. Second of all, re the maths: I ended up getting a C, scraped in by 2 marks. Yes, many people did a lot better than me but do you know how freaking hard I worked for that C? To me, the fact I managed to pull myself up at the last minute was achievement enough.
I can't help you that much if you've got those kinds of parents who really think grades are the be-all and end-all. I can't change their mindset, so the best I can do is to suggest you explain how hard you worked, and that you feel you did well for
yourself, not for a bunch of national statistics. You're young, give yourself a break.