Gall in the family
By Marianne Szegedy-Maszak
The stories would be easy to caricature if they didn't happen so often–and the stakes weren't so high. Take the mother feverishly rewriting her son's college application essay. Or the father insisting that he doesn't care which schools his daughter applies to–as long as one of them is his alma mater (a school she hates). The meticulous résumé-building that begins not in freshman or sophomore year of high school, but in fifth grade. The earnest references to "our application" during the college visit.
Looked at one way, this can be considered just another example of how parenting has become "the most competitive sport in America," according to psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld, coauthor of Hyper-Parenting: "If you can put a Harvard, Yale, or MIT sticker on the back of the BMW, you've won." But even for less compulsive parents, the college application process is fraught with so much anxiety that it's easy to see how one psychiatrist described it as a kind of "mania."
For beneath this "competitive sport" lie complicated psychological dynamics intrinsic to every parent-child relationship: separation and individuation, power and control, mastery and dependence. These dynamics wax and wane throughout the typical developmental steps of childhood (and parenthood), but they seem to flourish most during that autumn and winter when college applications need to be filled out.
Once they get over the shock of the imminent tuition bills, many parents feel as if they are facing a decisive referendum on their parenting. A child's admission to a top-ranked school provides some parents conclusive proof that from the Apgar tests to the SATs, they did everything right. (Forget about the 34.4 percent of the students who enroll in four-year colleges but fail to graduate within six years or more, or the eating disorders, depression, and worse.)
Screaming or kvelling?
On the other side is that high school senior, anxious about the future, impatient but ambivalent about leaving home, stressed out by the unyielding warnings that getting into college is tougher than ever. The result? "It's always stressful," says 19-year-old Liz Panarelli, who deferred her admission to Harvard last year to take a year off to pursue other interests. "But whether or not it turns into a positive thing that they go through together, or a negative experience, depends on a family's relationship in other ways," she adds. "If they are a family that always talked about things, or a screaming, slamming doors, disagree-for-the-heck-of-it kind of family, that will be what the application process is like."
Panarelli intuitively understands what many psychologists, admission counselors, and deans of admissions at schools have observed: The application process is the culmination, even the distillation, of about 18 years of the parent-child relationship. It can encompass the full spectrum of parental involvement, from the hands-off approach–sometimes very positive, sometimes not–to the preposterously intrusive. Or as Amherst College director of admissions Tom Parker describes it, from "the healthy helpful to the controlling fearful, with a few prestige- seekers thrown in for the mix."
Sometimes "healthy helpful" can mean surprisingly uninvolved. Consider Martha Stansell-Gamm and her son Drew Liming. Drew was at the start of his senior year at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Va., when he told his mother that his college applications were "a kid-managed process. Don't worry," he said, "if I need something from you, I will let you know."
For some parents this would have been a clarion call for massive intervention, but Stansell-Gamm had long experience with Drew's independent style. At the end of second grade, for example, he stopped doing his homework. She and his father explained to him that if he wanted them not to poke their noses into his work and monitor its progress, he had to be reliable about getting it done. This might not have worked for many second graders, but it did with Drew–and it stuck throughout elementary school, middle school, and high school. "He didn't get straight A's," Stansell-Gamm says. "But my sense was it was more important for him to experience responsibility and control."
That attitude was embodied in Drew's approach to applying for college. He came up with a list of six schools, figured out all the deadlines, and completed the applications without enlisting his parents at all (except when it came to paying the fees). He was accepted by three schools, wait-listed by two, and rejected by one. (He will be attending the University of Virginia in the fall.) When his mother asked him later if he regretted that he didn't get more help from them to get into all six schools, he looked at her astonished: "I needed to know that they accepted me, Mom, not you."
Not all children are as self-directed as Drew, nor are all parents as self-controlled as Stansell-Gamm. But one element of this approach is applicable to everyone: Most control should rest with the child. The application process occurs at a particular developmental stage when children should be separating biologically and psychologically from parents and assuming greater responsibility in taking care of themselves. The technical term is "separation-individuation," and it is a process that continues throughout childhood, in a sense culminating in the major step of leaving home. And while the timetable can be different for every child, the need to do so is common to all. At its best, says Linda Shapiro, a Massachusetts psychologist and independent college counselor, the process of applying to college "can be a wonderful segue from being dependent on one's parents for doing things and making decisions, to being more self-sufficient and taking charge of the process."
Get out!
With competition so fierce, this is not easy, especially within the baby boom culture. For many parents, being deeply involved in the college application is no different from being deeply involved in their child's sports, music lessons, academics, and social lives, says Virginia psychologist and therapist Wendy Zevin. "This is not because people are not good parents, but because that overinvolvement has been established as the way things are done. So if parents drive too much of the application process, the student's sense of mastery over separating is compromised–at a particularly crucial time."
Indeed, one great liability of the overinvolved-parent approach is that children are never able to truly experience a sense of control over a process, a genuine joy in success and true resilience in the face of failure. "For high-achieving kids, this may be the first time that they are trying to get something that they can't have," says Robin Mamlet, dean of admissions at Stanford University. "It is important for parents to stand close enough by, and far enough away, so they can behave like the grown-ups the kids need them to be."
In the end, the application process becomes an important way for high school seniors to assert their true identity. This can also be thwarted when the choices of schools are more focused on competitive rankings rather than on what is actually best for the child. For that, there is no substitute for the real hallmark of individuation: self-knowledge. Says Mamlet, "Applying to school is definitely a freighted time. You want it to be a joyful coming together around the student's interests, who he or she has come to be, and discovering what kind of place is best for them." The application process is at its worst, then, when the person the student has become is eclipsed by a parent's worst fears, best aspirations, darkest failures, and deepest envies. But at its best, it can be that important first adult decision that will lead to many, many more.
