How can I help my teen deal with college-application stress?

If you are reading this NurtureNook entry, you are likely a parent of a teen who is approaching the end of her/his high school experience. This also means that you are negotiating the “next step” with your teen. The first decision is whether the next step is college, the workforce, or perhaps taking a gap year experience. If college is your child’s next step, get ready for an intense ride. Gone are the days of old when kids would pick five places that looked “cool” and apply with pen and paper. Now it feels like we need a full-time consultation team to get our kids into college. Is this true?  Do we really need to spend a fortune of money and time to get our kiddo to the next step? I think the answer is a bit of “yes” and a bit of “no”.

A recent article in The Washington Post (August 2022 by Allison Slater Tate) emphasized important steps to keep in mind throughout the college application process. These suggestions included ideas such as doing your own research on colleges before your child does, setting up a specific appointment time to talk about college with your teen and giving a lot of hugs and encouragement to your teen throughout the process. The goal of this and many other articles is to tell parents how to avoid making the application process more stressful for your child than it already is for your teen. I want to focus on the real reason(s) college applications are stressful for parents in 2022.  Regardless of how brilliant, prepared, or self-motivated your teen is, parents’ anxiety about college acceptance still exists. Why? Because parents (and I’m including myself in this group), make the college application process about fulfilling their own unconscious wishes and fears. Let’s unpack that a bit.

What do I mean by an unconscious wish and fear? Sigmund Freud first developed the idea of wish fulfillment (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900) as an unconscious desire that is repressed by the ego and superego. We’ve come a long way from Freud’s work (fortunately), but I believe this aspect of his therapy still holds true. From the moment we become a parent, we have unconscious wishes for our child. These are often so deeply buried in our unconscious, that we do not fully understand how they impact our dynamics with our children until they threaten to derail the relationship. If you’re lucky, the college application process is the first time that a major disruption in the parent-child relationship threatens to occur.  How can we avoid this?  You must be willing to be completely honest with yourself. Often this involves talking with your partner, friends, trusted family members or a therapist about your hopes and fears for your child’s college career. Let’s look at a few good questions to consider…

Questions for Parents to Ask Themselves

• What kind of experience did you have in college, and how does this inform your hopes for your child?
• What does your child’s college acceptance say about you as a parent?
• What pressures do you feel from your peers and family about where your child attends college?
• How many hours a week do you think that you should spend helping your child apply to college? 

Think very honestly about these answers. Then consider that wherever your child attends college, he/she will be the only one attending that college. You will be at home!  That is both bad and good news. The bad news is that you won’t be there to help with the errors in judgment in class, the conflicts with peers and roommates, the confusion over operating the campus laundry machines, or choosing healthy food options. But the good news is that your child will be better off figuring out all the stressors on her own. She will learn more from mistakes than from your instructions on how to do it correctly. And if SHE is truly the one who did 95% of the work in applying to colleges (let’s face it, you’ll want to edit the essay or hire someone to do it), then SHE will be the one who was meant to get into that college.

The clients who seem to do the best during the college application process are those who allow their child to review the colleges that his/her college counselor suggests. Some parents also hire a college counselor to work with their child for selecting the college, gathering materials, and writing their essay. These parents let their child take the lead in the process. For those kids who struggle with organizational skills, these parents know this and initiate meetings with the high school counselor or hire a private counselor to walk their child through the process. These parents understand that even with their child’s challenges, they should be leading the application process. These parents also focus on which type of school will help their kids enjoy school, become their own independent selves, and succeed. These parents truly understand that it sets their child up for failure if the adults direct the college application process instead of the child. 

Remember, getting your child into the college that best suits her/him is more important than getting him/her into the most prestigious school. Remember, your child is the one who must attend college and succeed there. If they don’t have the skills, scores and extracurriculars to get into the college, then that means they wouldn’t do well there. Getting your child into a “dream school” that isn’t really his or her “dream” is setting him up for failure. But, if done right, the college application process can be an opportunity to learn about your teens’ blossoming interests, collaborate with them during a big life transition and help them launch with the confidence that they are ready for what challenges lie ahead.