For parents who have been through the college admissions process before, your familiarity with the territory can lead to a much smoother, more enjoyable ride for you and for your younger kids. But it can also lead to frustration if your veteran expectations don’t align with college admissions reality. So here are five tips for parents who are about to go through the college admissions process again.
1. Expect it to be different.
It’s natural to let past experiences leave us feeling as if we know exactly what to expect the next time around. But like many of the milestones you’ve enjoyed with your younger kids, their college admissions process will likely not be the same—for them or for you—as it was when you navigated this with their older sibling. Instead of hoping for predictability, expect it to be different. Celebrate it as a sign that you’ve raised unique, interesting siblings, each with their own personality, goals, strengths, and weaknesses. Your past experience still has value—if you learned that visiting eleven colleges in four days is too exhausting for your family, you can make a different decision this time. Just don’t expect that tours, trips, or takeaways will be the same. You’ll enjoy this more if you don’t expect predictability from an inherently unpredictable process.
2. Don’t compare.
Life as a younger sibling can’t help but involve the occasional—or frequent—comparison to their elder cohorts in the house. But the college admissions process is one time when a student needs to feel like it’s all about him. Don’t draw comparisons to where elder kids applied, how many times they took standardized tests, or how their admissions results played out. It’s hard for a student to take—and feel—ownership of their college admissions process if it’s constantly being compared and contrasted with that of their older sibling. I’m not saying you need to discount the fact that someone else in the house has been through this before. But high school students get plenty of measurement and comparison to other kids just by preparing for college. Home should be the one place where there’s no curve to compare against.
3. Focus where you have control.
It’s tempting for parents who’ve been through this before to expect that as veterans, they’ll be able to engineer a flawless process with perfect results. But no matter how grizzled you may be, you can still only influence, never fully control, how your student approaches the college admissions process. And you certainly can’t dictate whether or not a college says yes. So focus on the parts that you can control. You can decide how you approach this process with your new applicant. You can resolve to enjoy this time. You can allow your student to take the lead. Accepting that you can’t control the process during this time is vital for both rookies and veterans. But parents who have experience need to understand that your newfound admissions knowledge won’t necessarily mean newfound control.
4. Recommit to your most important job.
A parent’s most important job during this process is to be the parent of a college applicant. Yes, you should let your kids take ownership of the process. But they need your guidance, encouragement, and occasional cheerleading. And even more importantly, they need you to show them how a mature adult handles stressful situations. Put more bluntly, your kids are taking cues from you, and they need you to not act like a lunatic on their behalf. This is not an easy job to do. But the best place to apply your learning from previous experience is to yourself and the important role you need to play. This applicant is different from your last applicant. But your overarching—and most important—job is not.
5. Let your most important lesson inform you.
Parents who’ve gone through this process before have probably learned the single most important college admissions lesson—things eventually work out. With all the anxiety, heartbreak, and other drama that so often accompanies this process while it’s happening, the long-term reality is that no lasting damage is done by one grade, test score, or admissions decision. Most kids get in someplace and enjoy life in college. Families emerge unscathed and enjoy life together on the other side. The process itself will be different this time. The collegiate outcomes likely will be, too. But the end result will almost certainly be the same. A suspenseful movie isn’t so tense when you’ve watched it before. And for this particular story of college admissions, you already know the wonderful spoiler.