It was a relief to know that as surely as night follows day, the rigors of recruitment travel would soon be replaced with the pleasures of reading applications of teenagers eager to be admitted.  When I was bleary eyed after reading the Nth application in lonely solitude, it was time to come together as a staff to make decisions about whom to admit.   Weeks of decision making in marathon sessions behind closed doors with good colleagues and way too much sugar and caffeine birthed a class as well as an esprit d’corps for having survived it.  The day the decisions were sent was always so bittersweet, filled with excited thoughts of kids we loved whose applications we championed, coupled with real sadness for passing by so many for whom there was no space.  That day would quickly morph into preparation for that final outreach to the admits in a campaign to win their hearts, minds and an acceptance of our offer.  Finally, after the big push was over, it was time to review our goals as an office, to learn what had worked and what had been ineffective and to begin planning for the next class.  After some desperately needed R & R, it was time to begin the cycle all over again.

Cycles are great for such intense jobs as admissions.   They relieve the pressure and help reset the mind.  The memory of spring makes the late winter bearable.  

In the coming weeks I’ll describe these four seasons of admissions in detail so that you can better understand the world of the college admissions officer.  I’ll offer advice about how and when to approach admissions staff and help you understand what to expect from those encounters based on the season.   As with all things in life, timing is everything.  For example, just as you wouldn’t think of calling a neighbor at midnight to chat about mundane neighborhood business, you shouldn’t contact an admissions officer during reading season to ask general questions about their school.  A question that might be interesting during Recruitment season can be viewed as an annoying waste of time during Selection when their energies are directed to a different task.  Having an awareness of this sensitivity will make you a more effective advocate for your child during the process.

Marilee Jones’ Four Rules of the Game for Parents:

Given that this is the most competitive era of college admissions in history, and that you can control neither the outcome nor your child’s anxiety about the outcome, I’d like to suggest a better way to look at the college admissions process and four specific rules of the game to help you navigate it gracefully.

Sure, you can do what most people do now:  listen to everyone with an opinion about the topic, feel depressed, get upset with your child for not being more proactive, get depressed, feel as if you have to fight for your child’s very survival, get really depressed.  Or you can see the college admissions process in a different way.

The college admissions process is the closest thing to an initiation that we have in this secular society. There are initiations in many religious traditions, but not in our secular sphere.  Initiations are designed to help us formally allow our children to grow up and join the adult world.

An initiation is a process and not an event.  It always carries an element of anxiety and fear.  It calls on all skills previously learned, and most importantly, it can only be done by the initiate and no one else.  It is the process by which our kids are granted permission to show us what they can do, to show us that they can manage anxiety and still function successfully, that they are ready for adulthood.

At the very moment that we should be cheering them and helping them though the process, some of us actually cripple them by not trusting them to write the best essay, to interview well, to make the best choices of college.  We can send signals, overt and covert, that can make our children feel that they are not ready, not truly capable of applying to college in our absence.  We see it as helping out – helping them with editing or even writing their essay, helping them connect with the ‘right’ people who can get them in, taking over the planning and management of the process.  But to our kids, the message can often feel as if they are not good enough, not smart enough, not mature enough, not ready to go through the process on their own, at the very time when they must prove publicly that they are ready to be an adult.  By jumping in to help them in this way, we are essentially tackling them at the knees when they need to stand the straightest.  We are actually hurting them in their moment of glory.

You do have a role in your child’s initiation and make no mistake – your role is crucial.  I’ve outlined four basic steps, rules of the game, to help guide you through the entire process in a graceful way.  They may seem simple, but like all Zen-like principles, they are actually quite challenging.  If you follow these rules, however, you will not only model good adult behavior for your child – the main point of the exercise – but you will also maintain an excellent relationship with your child that will last for years to come. Remember, you are modeling for your child how an adult acts under stress and your child is watching you all the time.

Rule 1: Watch your Language:

Vow that you will never again refer to your child’s application or choices in the first person plural, as in, “We’re applying to Yale and Georgetown.” Your child is applying to college, not you.  It is their application process, not yours.  Every time you use the more inclusive language of ‘our’ or ‘we’, you are sending the message to your child that they are not quite ready for their initiation, that they can’t manage it on their own.  You are taking away their independence, holding them back just when they should be gaining strength to show the world that they are capable of handling the anxiety of describing themselves on paper, submitting it to strangers to be judged on unknown parameters and then being publicly judged with an acceptance, a waitlist or a rejection. It’s very easy to say ‘our’ and ‘we’.  I still find myself doing it occasionally.  But stop yourself every time you hear yourself say it, back up and rephrase the sentence.  “My child is applying to Yale and Georgetown.”

Rule 2: Watch your Attitude

Teenagers need to vent sometimes and thank your lucky stars if yours does that with you.  But if they complain about their teachers or their guidance counselor or how unfairly they are being treated in life, get into neutral and just listen.  It’s so important that you keep your attitudes about their situation in check because your opinions can contaminate their experience.  You can ask how you might help them, but otherwise, you should be modeling the old phrase, “been there, done that, life goes on and life is good.” In other words, keep reminding them that no matter what happens, everything will be fine.  When they are most frightened, you must ground them and help them stay calm, not spool them up with your own anxiety.  Stay steady and in neutral.  Their problems are not for you to solve.

Rule 3: Watch your Behavior

Behavior often follows attitude.  We know that sometimes a simple call from us could fix our child’s problem, but what would they learn from that?  If we had carried them everywhere to keep them from falling when they were first learning to walk, they wouldn’t be the healthy functional walkers they are today.  Humans learn best by trial and error. Since it’s your child’s initiation, vow never to intervene in their application process.  Vow never to do their work for them – ever.  Never threaten to sue anyone, or intimidate or act in any way like a jerk, because you’ll only regret that later and you will have missed the chance to model good adult behavior for your child who is watching you all the time to see how it’s done.  Cheer them from the sidelines.

Rule 4: Celebrate No Matter What

Parents frequently (and inadvertently, I’m sure) cut their child down by publicly criticizing the admissions decision or their child’s final choice of college after they have been admitted.  Many parents simply can’t hold their disappointment, which can be humiliating for their child.

No matter what happens at the conclusion of the college admissions process, you must find a way to make peace with the results. Many students feel as if they have let their parents down if they don’t get admitted to a specific school, and they carry that guilt for years. Remember that the main point is not for your child to get into to X, Y, Z college, but to pass through the hardest initiation of their life.

Take your child out when the letters come in and celebrate their bravery, their ability to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing the results for months, their uniqueness.  Now is the time to tell them how proud you are of them.  Find things you admire about them and speak that freely.  For example, you could tell him what an excellent friend he is and how you wish you were as good a friend to yours as he is to his, or tell her how much you admire her organization and stamina and how you want to be more like her that way.  Speak what is authentic and true.  If you cannot talk this way, write your child a letter and ask them to read it after you celebrate the decisions.  Do your best to focus on the successful completion of their firewalk, their initiation.  It’s not about the college that admitted them…it’s about how your child went about the process.  Be proud of them no matter what.

By Marilee Jones

Remember the story of Cinderella?  Raised by her jealous stepmother, she was treated very poorly by the family because she was beautiful.  Naturally, as in all good fairy tales, her Fairy Godmother intervened and made some miracles so that Cinderella could secretly attend the palace ball where the Handsome Prince was looking to pick a wife.  Cinderella’s ugly step-sisters hoped that he would notice and pick one of them, but then he saw our heroine, they danced, midnight came and in her haste to leave before turning back into her original raggedy self, she lost her glass slipper.  The Prince, frantic to find her again, took that shoe to every house in the kingdom where there were females, which brings us to the point of this story.  When approached to try on the slipper, the Ugly Step-Sisters each tried to jam their foot into the slipper, trying desperately to be someone they were not.

I witnessed this phenomenon in college admissions all the time. In their applications, students try to be who they think admissions officers want them to be.  They try to jam their foot into that glass slipper, trying so hard to be picked as ‘the one’, when in reality, they actually just need to be who they are.  The whole point of the college admissions process is to identify the match between student and school, between Cinderella and Prince Charming.  The good news is that there are several Prince Charmings for every Cinderella, several colleges for every applicant, and the secret lies in finding a match.  That can only happen when the applicant makes every effort to be himself or herself throughout the process, having the courage to wear their own glass slipper.

By Marilee Jones

I don’t know about you, but I was raised to believe that there is just one person for each of us out there in the world – our soul mate – and our main job in life is to find that person and live happily ever after.  This belief is both scary and self-limiting and best of all, is totally made up.  Who knows how many possible mates there are for each of us on a planet of 6 billion humans?  If we believed that there are endless possibilities in life, that there are many, many people we could choose to partner with over the span of our life, we would feel freer somehow and might make better choices.

It’s the same with choice of college.  There are so many colleges and universities in the US (2500+ 4 yr. schools alone, not to mention the 2 yr. and professional schools) that we can conclude there are many good matches for each applicant if only we can reject the notion of one soul-mate and stay open to the possibilities.  For parents this means that some of these choices may be schools we are not familiar with, not in the top ten schools nationally.  Just because we haven’t heard of some colleges doesn’t mean they aren’t good.  And many schools will be the right match.

By Marilee Jones

When we step into a young person’s life and dominate, making the decisions and deflecting responsibility, we actually hurt their path into adulthood.  Childhood is the time of experimenting, when roles are tried on and discarded, values tested and changed, when failure is a healthy option and the best teacher.  Just as keeping a child hidden away from the world to protect them only hurts their socialization in the end, becoming overly involved in their college process robs them of the chance to know themselves better, to have faith in their own choices, to develop the legs that must hold them in the world.

By Marilee Jones

If the hallmark of the Boomers generation is the focus on ‘me’, and the hallmark of Gen X is the need to control their own lives, then the hallmark of the Millennials is the need to be perfect.  Millennials have been the most protected, experienced, exposed, pressured generation in history and few of them feel that they’re good enough.  We adults have handed them a template of behavior by which they will know they are OK.  They are to: always make good grades; avoid drugs, alcohol and sex because all are dangerous now; take chances and show initiative but never fail because failure is the kiss of death; develop a ‘passion’ to appeal to college admissions officers; keep smiling; and love us no matter what.

Obviously, this is not as nature had intended and many young people are hurting from being made to feel ‘less than’ because they don’t fit the pattern.  In this culture based on bold action, what happens to the dreamers?  The visionaries?  The healers?  The thinkers?  The artists?  The hermits? The loners?  Everyone has unique DNA with unique talents and desires.  People are meant to be different from one another and the culture needs all of us.

There is no perfect.  Perfectionism is a disease, an addiction to be avoided at all costs.  Growth and ultimate success lies in the imperfection of failure and the resilience that develops as a result.

If your child is a perfectionist, begin to consciously celebrate imperfection within your family.  Offer compassion instead of judgment, express humor instead of anger.  Remember your many past imperfections and how they all worked out for you in the end and when you have that teachable moment, tell your child about them.  Through your own acceptance you’ll let them know that it’s OK and safe for them to be themselves in the world.  And the world will be grateful for this.

The Importance of ‘Barbie Time’

By Marilee Jones

I once asked a group of high school students how many daydream during the day and few raised their hands.  Most rolled their eyes and finally a boy in the back yelled out, “Dreaming?  Forget it, there are no awards for that.” Everyone laughed at the absurdity of the question.  No one in their lives valued the dreaming time, so they had no incentive and no time to do it anyway.

Every object outside of nature originated first in the imagination of a human being. Just take a moment to think about that and look around you to see the sheer diversity of human-made creations.  In one quick scan around the room, you will find hundreds of examples of the products of human imagination…your coffee cup, the pen you write with, every stitch of clothing you wear.

I like to think of the imagination as the 6^th sense, an organ – not unlike the skin – that picks up information and translates it in ways that then can be examined, manipulated, inverted, reordered.  As far as we know, imagination is a uniquely human sense, the tool we need to create what we want in life.  The blueprints for anything to be created in the 3-D world, for all of human advancement, are formed there. The imagination is the thing that makes us all unique.  Within it lies that little pilot light of individuality that reminds us who we really are.

Yet adults constantly tell kids to stop daydreaming and get back to work. This is particularly troubling because adolescence is the period of intensive self-discovery, the time when kids are supposed to become attuned to their own uniqueness, the time when they begin to differentiate themselves from others.  They need a healthy imagination for that.

When my daughter was little, she loved Barbie dolls.  At first it was a struggle for me to accept, since I never played with dolls as a kid and I grew to become a feminist who believed that Barbies brainwashed girls into becoming focused only on their looks.  But as I watched my daughter script and direct complicated community plays throughout our house, I gave up my resistance and got over it.

One day, when she was five years old, Nora came with me as I ran too many errands for the time I had free.  After the 4^th store visit, I was heading for the mall when she begged me to go home for awhile.  “C’mon, Nora, we’ll run to the mall and have a girl’s-day-out lunch and then do some shopping there.  We’ll have fun. We’ll rest at lunch.”    No, she cried, “I need my Barbie time”.  I reluctantly returned home, whereupon she ran upstairs to her room to play with her Barbies and I collapsed on the couch, feeling resentful that my day’s plan had fallen apart because she needed to play with her dolls.  Forty-five minutes later, she came back downstairs, refreshed and ready for the mall.  I, in the meantime, had lost all of my energy and had to work hard to rally.

Just after that, I participated in the Meyer’s Briggs test where I came to learn how different people recharge their energy.  Some need to be outside in an external environment, around people and light and action – the mall -, like me.  Some need to be alone for awhile, to recharge in their own internal way, like Nora.  I came to see that she was using her Barbie time to recharge and refresh herself.  She was also using 100% imagination with no real point…imagination for the pure pleasure of it.

One of the most serious problems in our culture today is how we adults curtail our kids’ Barbie time, expecting them to do something socially responsible or leading toward an external reward.  A good friend of mine recently bemoaned that her daughter was having trouble fitting in at her new school.  When the child came home from school, she just wanted to go to her room and rest for the afternoon.  My friend was frantic because ‘resting is not achieving’.  She kept urging her daughter to study or read or write or practice her instrument, like the other kids do when they go home from school.  She worried that her daughter won’t be competitive enough to get admitted to a top school.  Her daughter was in 7^th grade, the worst year in all of Girl World.  No wonder her daughter wanted to come home and rest – she was fighting her emotions all day at school.  She needed her Barbie time, her recharging and imagination time, to figure out how to get through another day of catty, bratty girl behavior.

We have done a good job of educating kids about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, but we reward workaholic behavior, and in so doing we are substituting one addiction for another. Here’s the simple fact: it’s hard to access imagination and creativity when you are working all the time.

Most importantly, what does it mean for the future of our culture, especially American culture – built on innovation and creativity – when our children have no time to dream?

By Marilee Jones

If you want to assess the quality of your own life, take a step back and observe your child’s.  Chances are, they are so busy with every spare moment taken up with homework or extra-curricular activities, enrichment activities, the Internet, texting or twittering.  Our kids are the busiest young people on the planet, struggling to live up to adult expectations, participating actively with adults in all aspects of planning daily life.

I call this generation “human doings” instead of “human beings” because so much of their awake time is spent doing things.  We’ve trained them into the belief that we value them for the product they produce, the goals they score, the grades they earn, the attention they attract, the colleges they get admitted to.  We no longer seem to value their just ‘being’.

America is an action country and New York is its extreme.  In many circles, you are only as good as your last success and success is always based in action.  Because we want to help our kids get ahead, we expect them to win win win and we all know that winning takes preparation time.  Action is good and necessary for our overall happiness, but action without rest, without experiencing, is not the complete human experience and is the reason we live such stressful lives.

What is a life lived well?  In addition to action, it always includes rest, contemplation, reverence and fun.

Now consider that many of our kids live their lives in kinetic energy, all action, doing, producing, with little rest time or time to think.  The problem with constant activity is that there is no time for creativity, imagination, even happiness.  Because they can get so out of balance, it isn’t long before some kids begin to get sick.

This chronic action state has serious consequences for our culture.   More on this later.

By Marilee Jones

Can Our Parental Help Really Hinder Our Kids?

So many parents today are completely mystified about the college admissions process, and for good reason.  If we didn’t go to college, or if we studied in another country, we might find the college admissions process to be intimidating.  If we attended college, we probably remember a simpler admissions process, one unaccompanied by box loads of view books, monthly emails and phone calls from eager admissions staffers and student interns working to establish brand loyalty earlier than the competition.  Our own admissions process consisted of hearing about colleges from friends/older siblings/adults, taking the SATS at the last possible minute with no preparation, filling out and submitting the application to a college.  Most often, our parents were not involved because we Baby Boomers and Gen Xers lived in Kid World, rarely intersecting with the adults around us.  We applied, we got in, we enrolled. Pretty simple.  Not a lot of angst about choice of school.  Most of us applied to colleges in our own local areas in the era before so many colleges became ‘national’.

Now we are witnessing our own child getting mail from colleges, maybe from test-coaching businesses, years in advance. Our child might be disinterested or scared or out of the house doing extracurricular activities to get into college, too busy to even think about choosing one.  We might be choking with the thought of how we’ll pay the tuition- especially now when banks have limited lending – or how we’ll live without our child around or how fast our life is moving now.  Our child, in turn, is practicing their independence and may be making life very difficult for us in characteristic teenage fashion.  No wonder we want to take charge.  Taking charge just feels better than having life happen to us. In desperation, we wonder how can we help our child get the edge…

This is where the trouble begins and boundaries get crossed.  This is when we feel pressure to intervene, to make the process of applying to college as easy as possible for our child, because we can’t bear to see them hurt, anxious or more stressed.  We can figure out what to do.  There is always a means to an end, right?

Unfortunately, being overly involved in your child’s life and taking too much responsibility for your child’s college application process can actually be harmful to them.  While you think you are being helpful to your busy child by making all of the phone calls to college admissions offices, and managing the application process, the admissions personnel on the other end are drawing a range a conclusions about your child, and all of them are bad.  For example, when they hear only from the parent, they can assume that the student isn’t interested in their school (not good in this competitive climate), or that the student doesn’t know how to prioritize (too busy to talk to us?  Not right for us), or that the student is too passive and connected to parents (not ready for college).  In addition, by stepping in to ‘help’, you are sending the message to your child that they are not good enough/smart enough/mature enough to apply to college on their own.  It undermines their confidence at the very time they need to gather their strength to move through this difficult passage.  Worst of all, by taking the actions your child should be taking, you are training them to be passive when colleges are actually looking for whole healthy people with intellectual curiosity, drive to answer questions, curiosity to ask previously unasked questions.  Colleges are looking for people poised for success, who have already developed baseline skills to prepare them to handle a rigorous professional life, people with the emotional intelligence and social competence to work hard while having professional longevity and joy in their career.

Sadly, we see many parents so committed to their child having an outstanding college application that they miss out on some of the joy of raising children.  They fear that unless their child keeps up with their over-scheduled friends they will lose out in college admissions and not be admitted to a good school.  The tragedy here is that not only is this not true, but the very cornerstone of a healthy relationship between parents and children – quality time – is often dropped in the rush for perfection.  Arranging the finest opportunities for their children is not a parent’s best opportunity for influence, just as shuttling children between activities is not quality time.

Nothing will create children poised for success in college and in life more than the knowledge that their parents are absolutely and unconditionally in love with them.  This love and attention is best demonstrated when parents serve as role models and family members make time to cherish one another.  The most valuable and useful character traits that will prepare their children for success arise not from extracurricular or academic commitments, but from a firm grounding in parental love and guidance.  It’s about raising happy, well-adjusted adolescents for whom there will be the right college, not trying to force a child to become someone they are not just to get into a college they will hate while making the parents look good.