Bonnie is the Program Coordinator at ������Ƶ. She has extensive experience working with gifted students and supporting them through the high school and college application process.

As the program coordinator for the Caroline D. Bradley Scholarship, I have been fortunate to get to know, work with and be guided by the experiences and expertise of independent school, college and university admissions deans and directors throughout the United States. This blog is a composite of what I have learned from dialoguing with them.

Last April, a few weeks after sending the acceptance and rejection letters to college applicants, a dean of admissions at one of America’s most selective universities told me the following story:

“Two days after we announced our incoming freshman class, I received a reply from an applicant’s father. It was curt and written on his corporate letterhead: ‘You rejected my son, he’s devastated. See you in court.’ The very next day, I received another letter, but this time from the man’s son. It read: ‘Thank you for not admitting me. This is the best day of my life.’”

All threats aside, receiving a letter like this never warms the hearts of anyone in admissions. It is the consensus of admissions professionals from preschool through college that more and more, today’s parents are getting too involved in their child’s school admissions process – and not merely at the college level. High school and middle school admissions staff have expressed horror stories about parental actions and involvement so completely out of hand that it seems impossible and implausible for otherwise rational people to behave in such off-putting ways. And this behavior never serves the applicant in obtaining the desired positive outcome.

The increasingly bad “parent etiquette” that admissions officers are seeing right now comes from a confluence of several characteristics of our boomer generation: our sense of entitlement, our suspicion of authority and our bad habit of sometimes living too vicariously through our children. It all adds up to some pretty ugly parental behavior often played out in front of our children. A college admissions dean told me, “Today, parents call the admissions office more than the student applicants, often faxing us daily updates on their children’s lives or asking us to return an application already in process so the parent can double-check his/her child’s spelling.” A high school admissions counselor noted a parent who asked whether they should use their official letterhead when writing a letter of recommendation for their own child. It’s not unusual to know parents who openly write their kids’ essays and even attempt to attend their interviews. They make excuses for less than stellar grades or tout athletic promise as “Olympic team potential.”

With many high school and college applicants averaging 6+ extracurricular activities, parents have assumed a new role in their children’s lives: parent-as-manager. Most kids are so busy now that they rely on their parents to attend to the many details associated with being a student, including applying to the next level of their education. Parents need to realize that their many efforts to be helpful are often misinterpreted by admissions officers and can actually be detrimental. When parents visit a high school or college campus and ask all of the questions on the tour, in the information session or at an open house, they may think that they are modeling positive, assertive behavior for their child. Instead, admissions officers may see a passive kid who is too lazy, bored or uninterested in the school to think of any pertinent questions. Ultimately, when parents dominate in any way through the admissions process, in attracting attention to themselves, they are detracting from the perception that their child is mature enough to handle this process on his or her own, whether it’s at the high school or college level. Parent over-involvement can also rob a child of a chance to develop resilience and self-confidence, two key components for a happy, fulfilling life that should begin to be developed in adolescence.

Students should be directed to do all of their own work on their applications, including calling for application materials, setting up interviews and asking questions on campus/school tours—yes, even at the high school level. It is a cop-out for parents to assume these roles with the argument that their son or daughter is “too busy.” Initiative is crucial for young adults because it is the act of trying their wings and acquiring a sense of personal accomplishment as the primary navigators of their high school or college paths.

Here are some “etiquette” tips for parents during the high school and college application process:

1. Ensure decision-making about applying to any prospective school is a two-way street, made by you and your child together. Ultimately, it’s your child who will be attending the school. Listen to your child’s pros and cons about a school and have a frank discussion, adding your thoughts after you’ve heard your child’s overview.
2. Don’t micromanage the whole process for your child or nag him or her about deadlines and tasks to do. If you absolutely can’t leave this area to your child, perhaps create a calendar in easy view or with easy access for your son or daughter listing due dates, etc. You can also put important deadlines into your child’s smartphone calendar or create a Google Calendar and set reminders that will come through to your child but not to you—there’s a big difference in the dissemination of this information.
3. Set a good example by being courteous and polite when you communicate with admissions officers. Thank them if they spend time answering your questions or meet you in person. Greet them with their proper titles. Encourage your child to research the schools before visiting and ask questions that show that he or she has put thought into them reflective of a particular school.
4. Let your child be himself/herself. Don’t try to overly “package” your child into something that you think admissions officers want to see. Schools value individuality and a student pool with a diverse range of experiences, passions, learning styles and accomplishments.
5. Don’t add your voice to your child’s essays or personal statements. You can review the essays by offering suggestions and offer to proofread for grammar and spelling, but do not try to control the content. Your voice is not your child’s voice, and more often than not, it will come off as wooden and lack the nuance and passion that counts more in the overall picture of who your child is than the more sophisticated vocabulary or syntax you are trying to add.
6. Self-advocating is an important part of life. Allow your child to be his or her spokesperson on all school tours and interviews.
7. Never make this an overly competitive process by comparing your child to friends or siblings. Provide your 100% support and encouragement. Your role as parent and primary adult figure is to help guide your child through the ups and downs, the stresses, successes and setbacks of the application process from first thinking about schools to ultimately enrolling. During this time—in between ongoing school, test prep, extracurricular activities, school visits and compiling the many parts of an application—do your best to help your child maintain a healthy lifestyle and stay focused on all that’s positive in the here and now—not only what lies ahead.
8. If a letter from a high school or college—or a highly competitive program such as the Caroline D. Bradley Scholarship—brings sad news, the appropriate response for frustrated parents is to realize that the decision is not a reflection on their parenting, nor is it a value judgment on the worth of their child. Most often, rejections are due to too many excellent applicants and too few available spaces. It’s that basic. The support and encouragement of parents are especially important when their child isn’t accepted to the school or program that they’ve set their heart on…and feel they deserve. Helping your child focus instead on other options and moving forward in a positive direction is the best way to model good adult behavior for the next generation of adults.

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This post originally appeared on September 4, 2012, on . It has been republished here with the permission of the author, who is a writer and mother of three. This post is about her gifted oldest son leaving home for college. While it is not an experience limited to parents of gifted children, it is an experience many of you will have. It may come when you send your child to a boarding school because it is what will best fit his or her individual needs, or it might be when your child heads off to college, or it might be after college, when your child decides to move out. After years of advocating for them in school and supporting their unique needs, your gifted children will leave home and must learn how to support these needs on their own. And no matter how much you help prepare them for that, it is still difficult to watch them set out on their own.

On the day my eldest son left for college, my youngest son got his first zit. This had to be some kind of sign, I thought. Time marches on or some such thing.

Maybe this was God’s little joke aimed at a mom whose “baby” is no longer a baby and whose first child was flying the coop. If so: not funny.

So many words have been spilled on this very subject – the first kid leaving for college – that it feels unoriginal to be thinking about it, let alone writing about it. And yet it pierces uniquely.

In the months leading up to Jonah’s departure, I’d find myself crying at unpredictable moments. I’d wander past his closed door, hear the sounds of his guitar playing on the other side, and think: Starting in September that room will be empty and silent. Cue the tears.

As Jonah and I made our cross-country sojourn from the San Francisco Bay area to Brown University in Providence, leaving his two younger brothers (17 and 13) at home with my husband, strange coincidences ensued.

Jonah has always had out-of-the-mainstream interests. Two examples: he became borderline-obsessed with Napoleon Bonaparte in middle school and is endlessly fascinated by 19th-century French history; and his favorite musician is Mark Knopfler, known mostly by people my age as the lead-man and guitarist of the 80’s band, Dire Straits.

A couple of nights before we left home, Jonah played his guitar at an open-mic night at a music club in our hometown of Mill Valley. The song he played was Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” – a fairly obscure choice for non-Knopflerphiles.

A few days later, our rental car stuffed to the brim with Target purchases, we stopped for lunch on our way to Providence. The restaurant was playing music, 60’s Motown-type stuff. Then out of nowhere, we heard the sound of Mark Knopfler’s voice: it was “Romeo and Juliet.” I burst into tears, sending our alarmed waiter scurrying away.

When we got to the Brown campus on Friday, the very first kid we met was a history-obsessed young man from North Carolina with a special passion for Napoleon who, out of a class of 1500 freshmen, also happens to be in Jonah’s history seminar of 20 kids.

On Sunday I attended a parent seminar entitled “Saying Goodbye, Letting Go, and Learning to Live with a Brown Student.” Much of the discussion centered on being supportive without being intrusive. The faculty members and upperclassmen running the seminar did a few skits, re-enacting phone calls that typically occur between parents and children during the first few weeks of freshman year.

As one faculty member, playing “Mom,” phoned her “son” with a variation on the “you don’t call, you don’t write” complaint, parents in the audience laughed nervously. You mean they really won’t call? We were encouraged to give our kids some space; we were reassured that they’d get in touch eventually; we were instructed to let them try to solve roommate issues on their own.

As I sat in the crowded auditorium, I felt slightly better. I realized that while this experience was specific and personal, it was also universal. And it’s exactly what is supposed to happen. We raise our kids from babies to toddlers to children to adolescents to young adults, and then they leave us to begin their own lives. It’s only logical: if they never develop the skills to live independently, we haven’t done our job. Who wants to suck at being a parent?

And yet.

I didn’t feel ready for Jonah to go. I don’t feel like I had enough of his company during those short 18 years. I wish I had more time to see him interact with his brothers at the dinner table; to observe his thought process as he works through a research paper or a discussion about politics; to listen to him play guitar along with Mark Knopfler. I simply loved having him around, and the loss feels huge.

So as I watched him walk back toward his dorm before I left, his roommate’s arm slung around Jonah’s shoulder in a protective and brotherly way, of course I cried. But eventually, I had to drive away and to fly back home.

After all, I need to help Aaron with his college applications. And maybe we’ll see if we can do something about Henry’s zit, like introduce him to face soap. Life goes on. As for Jonah, he can’t get rid of me that easily: I just figured out how to use Skype.

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