Parenting During College Acceptance Season

A friend of my son got his first college acceptance in the fall. My family was still editing college essays and trying to understand which were "reach" schools and which were "safety" schools in a world without SAT scores and in-person visits, and they were sitting pretty with one good option in hand. Then, they got another college acceptance. While I was happy for them, I was envious that they had at least one answer to the great question, "what's next after high school?"

That is a struggle for many parents. It's been two years of uncertainty, trying to ensure that our children learned what they needed to learn, demonstrated accomplishments, and survived remote learning. After all that work, we crave certainty and a sense of success.

Below are a few things parents may be experiencing and how to calm those thoughts.

College Acceptances as a Grade for Parenting

For many parents, college acceptances are the ultimate brag right. In the absence of clear, concrete standards, we look to others to provide the standards. College acceptances show that your child has succeeded in school, has met some socially-valued standards, and is off to a good start.

Parenting is notoriously fraught with judgment. From the moment of conception, mothers are subjected to advice and judgment about every decision they make – to the degree that in some states, being pregnant can open the door to prosecution for making unhealthy choices. The only way to prove success as a parent is for that child to be successful: win awards, excel athletically or otherwise achieve.

Acceptance into a high-status school provides external validation of every choice made by a parent up to the point of high school graduation. Moreover, acceptance to college is a very public demonstration of status – the more exclusive the school and lower the acceptance rate, the higher the status!

Otherwise, what was all the tutoring, transporting, and nudging for? Grades, awards, accomplishments come and go, but college decisions live forever. The need for validation and to demonstrate successful parenting can drive parents to act unethically (at worst) and sleepless nights (at best).

Solution: Remembering What the Actual Goal Is

It's important to realize that college acceptances and rejections are not personal. There is a great deal more randomness in the process than most schools would want to admit. And, for some schools, it is purely a numbers game, divorced from consideration about unique students. More importantly, the status of schools is often related to the percentage of applicants that a particular school admits. The lower the admit rate, the higher the status.

While it is easy to boast that your child got into a school that is difficult to get into, but admissions rates say nothing about whether or not a particular student is going to be successful at that school. Admission rates say nothing about whether that student is going to find friends, feel like they belong, or take a class from that instructor that makes all the difference.

There are hundreds of colleges and universities, and research shows that engagement with a campus contributes more to future success than the institute's ranking. As parents, our goals are to raise self-sufficient adults – financially, emotionally, and socially. While college acceptances appear to validate our parenting choices, it is an illusion.

A high-status school is no guarantee of any of those things. Instead of fixating on rankings and acceptance rates, look at the opportunities for engagement, friendship, and growth that each school offers.

College Acceptances as Fulfilling a Parent's Goals

In addition to demonstrating success as a parent, children can provide vicarious satisfaction of the parent's youthful ambitions. Brummelman (2013) has shown that when parents feel that their children are extensions of themselves, those parents are more likely to use their children to meet their unfulfilled ambitions. While the stereotype might be of stage mothers and little league dads living through their children, parents are often hoping that their kids can have all that the parent did not have, regardless of the children's desires.

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Solution: Separating a Child's Accomplishments From Parental Worth

It is not necessarily bad to want your child to have options and choices that you didn't have. However, it is important that the child have options and choices that fit for them – and that they have the chance to make wrong decisions. While we want to smooth the road for our children, rough roads and wrong roads build character. Rather than looking at our children as opportunities for vicarious goal attainment, parents should spend this transition time reestablishing their own goals.

First, parents should recognize that although the goals of the past may be unattainable (e.g., neither they nor their child will be valedictorian), new goals in related domains (e.g., winning a pub trivia) are possible.

Second, parents should take time to remember who they were outside of being a parent. Psychologists use the "20 Statements" activity to help people understand who they are. In the activity, people complete the sentence "I am" 20 times. While "parent," "school volunteer," "scout leader," "spouse" might be the first few completions, other identities emerge in the later answers. Doing the task might help people remember who they are outside of one's role as a parent. Doing the task might reveal other commonalities and directions for establishing oneself outside of being a person.

For example, if many answers have to do with mentoring or coaching kids, people might look for opportunities to continue mentoring through mentoring programs, coaching, and volunteering. If the activities all relate to being outdoors, people might look for ways to get involved with trail building or tree planting. Or parents might set a goal for themselves outside of a social group, such as completing a triathlon, learning to cook, or completing another physical challenge. These options can help a parent stop focusing on their child as a means of goal accomplishment.

In short, to survive college acceptance season, parents should remember that the actual goal is for their child to find the school that meets their emotional, intellectual, and social needs. There are hundreds of high-quality experiences waiting for teens, rankings and acceptance rates say little about how any individual teen will do.

Parents should remember that their child's outcomes are not their own. They have raised individual humans who are responsible for their outcomes. As parents reinvent themselves as individuals responsible for their outcomes, the ups and downs of college acceptances should be easier to bear.