I understand why many parents become irrational when it comes to their children’s college admissions planning. You want the best for your student. The process has become unnecessarily complex and stressful. You’re facing the impending departure of your former little baby to live on their own at college. It can feel like a perfect emotional storm of anxiety, empty nest syndrome, and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, one that can cause typically calm, rational parents to spiral temporarily out of control.

None of us is immune to occasional irrationality. When the rented heat lamp went kaput 30 minutes before a Collegewise holiday party was about to begin, the stress it induced in me was as if one of my family members had been kidnapped and held for ransom.

But if you’re treating the college admissions process like a life-and-death struggle, if you’re shedding tears over a standardized test score, if you’re viewing the outcomes as a measure of your student’s worth or of your worth as a parent, your actions aren’t just ruining the process for you—they’re getting in the way of you playing the role your student needs you to play.

Your most important job during this process is to be the parent of a college applicant. Your student needs you to guide, encourage, support, love unconditionally, and most importantly, set a good example for how a calm, mature, rational adult handles life’s occasionally stressful situations. Making the process about you, taking over the process for them, or doing anything else that resembles irrational behavior might make sense to fellow parents. But I promise you that it will only exacerbate whatever negative effects your student is experiencing during this time.

I’m not saying the job to be done is an easy one (most parts of parenting are not). But don’t worry.  Millions of parents before you have not only survived, but also sent their kids to flourish at thousands of different colleges. Combining good intentions with best efforts usually leads to the best results (even if it includes occasional admissions irrationality).