As admissions decisions begin to arrive in full force, here are two reminders for parents about how to handle the news.
How to build rapport with teachers and counselors
Part of being successful in high school is developing good working relationships with teachers and counselors. Here are some past posts on how to do just that:
- Things teachers notice about you in class
- A guideline for parents on how to communicate with teachers over email
- A post for students on how to get (and earn) help from teachers
- Two guidelines–mine and NACAC’s on how to work with your high school counselor
- And a final post on how to start the conversations when you need help from anyone, not just teachers or counselors
Who’s driving the bus?
Bus passengers know where they want to go, but are passive observers in getting there. The driver is actually in charge.
The most successful college planning happens when kids drive their own bus. They don’t have to do it alone. Parents can guide, encourage, and cheerlead from the sidelines. But if Mom and Dad research all the colleges, schedule the activities, make appointments with the counselor, call the colleges, complete the applications, etc., they—not their kids—are driving the bus.
Parents, if that sounds like your family’s current college planning process, step back, take a seat, and invite your student to take the wheel.
How to learn financial aid terminology
Esoteric jargon makes the financial aid process much more complicated than it needs to be, especially when those terms appear on every description, instruction, form, etc. Mark Kantrowitz of Edvisors offers up this 1-page glossary of financial aid terms, with a full list of over 750 terms here.
To use them, I have a few suggestions for families and for counselors who are less familiar with financial aid:
1. Learn the terms on the 1-page summary as if you need to explain to someone else what they mean (a reality for most counselors).
That level of understanding—to teach it well enough to pass that understanding on to someone else—is much deeper than the ability to recite a definition. When you really know the terms, you’ll find most parts of the process simpler and less intimidating.
One note on the definition—while grants and scholarships are different, they share one crucial trait: free money that does not need to be paid back. Grants and scholarships are always good news. They’re like discounts off the sticker price.
2. Bookmark the more complete list so you can reference it quickly and easily whenever you come across an unfamiliar term.
Avoiding the overparenting trap
Julie Lythcott-Haims, who spent ten years as the Dean of Admission at Stanford, has a book coming out in June (available now for pre-order) called How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.
Her TED talk, just four minutes long, is also worth a watch.
Always welcome
Here’s a 2012 Today Show segment featuring teen psychologist Madeline Levine who is a founder at Challenge Success and the author of Teach Your Children Well: Why Values and Coping Skills Matter More than Grades, Trophies, or ‘Fat Envelopes’.
Even before recently becoming a new parent myself, I knew there was no manual my wife and I would be issued when our son was born. And it’s become clear to me just how many disparate styles and reportedly expert theories exist for everything from pregnancy, to child-rearing, to helping your teen become a happy and successful adult. What works for one family may not work for another. And as parents, we’re all just doing our best.
But I’ve also been working with and around teenagers for 15 years at Collegewise. My counselors and I have worked with thousands of families from all different backgrounds, with kids of all different levels of academic achievement, and with parents of all different styles of parenting—from the hands-off to the helicoptering. We’ve never looked at this work like a research study, but if we had, I think this would be a statistically sound sample group.
The students we see whose parents support without hovering (as Levine describes in the clip and in her book) are happier, more confident, and from our perspective, more prepared for college.
Do they necessarily get into more selective colleges? No. But neither do those with the helicopter moms who orchestrate their kids’ every move. Some of those helicoptered kids get into the most prestigious colleges. Most of them—like everyone else in the applicant pool—do not.
If your goal is to see your kid attend a prestigious school, it’s entirely possible that helicoptering and ratcheting up the pressure might work. But a growing body of research—and anecdotal experience with counselors at Collegewise—shows that the risks (depression, anxiety, inability to cope with day-to-day challenges) of that parenting style are real.
This is the point in my life when I am least likely to judge another person’s parenting. Your kids are your kids after all and you know them better than anybody else.
But if your goal is to raise happy and healthy kids, kids who may or may not go to an Ivy League school but who are far more likely to challenge themselves confidently, to deal with failure maturely, and to progress successfully through the trials and tribulations of high school, college, and life, I think it’s pretty clear which route to take. It’s the route I’ll be taking at home and the one we’ll keep encouraging other parents to take.
I won’t do it perfectly and neither will anybody else. But maybe that’s a lesson kids can learn from our example? You’ll screw up along the way. But if you try your best and are good to your family, you’re always welcome at our dinner table at the end of the day.
Don’t take the initiative out
When a student shares with a Collegewise counselor that she volunteers at a hospital, works at a summer camp, or participates in any activity outside of school, we like to respond with some version of:
“Wow. That’s great. How did you get involved in that?”
The answer reveals a lot about the student’s initiative. We love it when a kid tells us that she called the hospital and asked if they were looking for volunteers. We love when we hear, “My friend told me about the camp, so I went online, filled out an application, and got called in for an interview.”
Kids with those answers tend to be a lot more engaged and enthusiastic about the activity than those who tell us that a parent found and secured it for them.
Colleges love to see initiative in an applicant. Mom and Dad (hopefully) will not be coming to college to find activities for their kid. But a student with initiative will bring it with her to campus. She’ll keep seeking out those opportunities. She’ll see the flyer on campus for an interesting club meeting and attend it. She’ll email, call, and knock on doors to find what she’s looking for.
For students are aren’t innate self-starters, initiative is a learnable skill. But students need the room—and maybe even a little encouragement—to learn it. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always resisted keeping encyclopedic binders in our offices of volunteer or internship opportunities to share with our students. Following a link on page 38 of a binder removes much of the initiating that student could have done.
Students, parents, and counselors, remember that the benefit from an activity isn’t limited to the awards, honors, or punchy title on a resume. Eventually those activities will be part of a student’s past. But initiative has staying-power. It’s fine to encourage and guide students who are looking for activities they will enjoy. But don’t take the initiative out.
How to raise smart kids
According to this month’s Scientific American, the best way to produce high-achievers in school is to help kids appreciate the value of the process rather than just the outcome (something that the author calls a “growth mind-set”).
From the article’s summary:
“Teaching people to have a ‘growth mind-set,’ which encourages a focus on ‘process’ rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high-achievers in school and in life. Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their persistence or strategies (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.”
Don’t miss the end of the article, which shares some excellent examples for parents on how to praise “…effort, strategies, focus, persistence in the face of difficulty, and willingness to take on challenge.”
Here’s a past post of mine on praising efforts over outcomes, and another with some similar advice from Dan Pink.
Parents: inject some celebration
I was at my best friend’s house when he received his letter from Notre Dame during our senior year of high school. He’d already been accepted to all of his other colleges, and when he opened the letter and shared the good news, all his dad said was,
“OK. Well, now you have to commit to one.”
I’m sure there were any number of reasons why his dad’s reaction seemed so muted (the potential price tag being one of them). But when Dad left the room, I remember saying to my buddy, “Dude. Does your dad not get that you just got into $%@# Notre Dame???”
I haven’t seen a lot of parents temper their excitement when an acceptance arrives from a prestigious college like Notre Dame. But I have seen plenty who, when acceptances arrive from schools they expected would admit their student, withhold their excitement in anticipation of the big acceptance from the dream school. Yes, they often do that because their kids seem to be doing the same thing. But kids take cues from parents, and your response sets a tone for how your family will progress through this potentially stressful time. That’s why we remind our Collegewise parents to celebrate every acceptance, even one from a safety school.
Colleen from our Bay Area office shares this article about the way successful couples connect over each other’s good news. And I think there’s a lot of application here for parents as your kids start to get acceptance letters.
Let’s say an acceptance arrives from a safety school. There are lots of ways to respond.
“Really? Nothing from Penn? The neighbor’s kid already heard.”
“OK. That’s good. Now we just have to wait and see what Michigan says.”
(While distracted by something else) “Oh, that’s great honey.”
Those responses don’t acknowledge that getting into college—any college—is a big deal. I’m not suggesting you should be insincere. But this is a huge bright spot in an otherwise stressful time. Amplify it! Show your student that you’re the proud parent of a college-bound senior.
I preach often here that one key to college admissions sanity is to focus on the elements that you can actually control. You don’t get to control what news arrives. But you can control how you respond. When it’s good news, use it as a chance to inject some celebration into your senior’s life.
A seat at the table
The family dinner table can really put everything in perspective, especially during the holidays. Take Christmas 1992, for example.
1992 was the first year my parents spent at home while both their boys were away at college. For the holidays, I came home from my senior year at UC Irvine, my brother from his freshman year at Harvard. I can’t remember a time I’ve ever seen my parents so happy as that first night at the dinner table together.
My brother and I liberally swapped college stories. He and his Harvard crew teammates had just beaten college archrival Yale. And his dorm neighbors had recently voted him as the student with the most deplorably unkempt dorm room.
Apparently, my brother was on quite a winning streak as a Harvard freshman.
I’d just been hired to run the UC Irvine summer orientation program for incoming freshmen, a job I’d been coveting for three years. And speaking of accomplishments, my roommates and I had always wanted to see if we could stay up all night playing video games. Two weeks earlier, we’d climbed that Everest and reached the summit.
It’s important to set goals if you want to be successful in college.
My parents never asked us what grades we were getting, or what we planned on doing after graduation. They didn’t tell my brother to keep his room clean or me to throw away my video games and opt for a good book. At that dinner table, all that mattered to my parents was that their two boys were home from college.
Wherever your kids go to college—from Harvard to Haverford, Duke to Denison, Georgetown to Juniata, Princeton to Purdue—they’re going to come home for the holidays and sit down at your dinner table. And as long as they have stories about how much they’re loving college, I think you’ll find that the names on their college sweatshirts really won’t matter to you all that much.
In fact, you’ll probably find as you sit together this holiday season that the “C” on the geometry test and the SAT score that didn’t quite break 1800 and the room so messy it could rival my brother’s dorm room won’t seem nearly as important as the time you’re spending together.
Dinner tables really can put things in perspective.
Thank you for reading, and happy holidays.
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