When Your Teen Asks “Can Someone Please Read My College Essay?” What Parents Need To Do
9:30 PM on a Tuesday in mid-October, I’m scraping congealed taco cheese off plates into the trash when my 17-year-old daughter Lila leans against the kitchen fridge, phone tucked in the pocket of her oversized hoodie, and says it exactly the way a hundred thousand other seniors say it this time of year: “Can someone please take the time to read my college essay?”
My hands are wet from soapy water, my glasses are smudged from wiping apple juice off them an hour earlier, and my first instinct is to wipe my hands on my jeans, hold out my hand for the phone, and get to work. That’s what I did three years ago with my oldest son, Sam. Back then, I’d spent months scrolling college admissions blogs panicking about how important the essay was, how it was the difference maker between an acceptance and a thin envelope in the mail. I read Sam’s first draft about the summer he spent trying to save an old oak tree in our neighborhood from being cut down, and I immediately started marking it up. I crossed out his tangents about eating popsicles with the old guy who owned the property, pointed out 12 grammar mistakes, and told him he should lead with the time he organized the neighborhood petition, that that was the impressive part, the part colleges wanted to see. Sam closed his laptop, didn’t let me see another draft for 21 days, and ended up submitting the original tangly version anyway. I still overthink that reaction sometimes.
So this time, I pause. I finish stacking the plates in the dishwasher, wipe my hands, and turn to her. “Give me 10 minutes to make coffee, okay? But first: what do you want me to do for you here?”
She huffs, kicks the base of the fridge a little, the way she does when she’s nervous. “It’s about the feral kitten I worked with at the shelter over the summer. The one that died after we got it, even after we did everything. I think it sounds boring. It’s not a big achievement or anything. I just… I need to know if it’s stupid, I guess.”
That’s the thing no one tells you about this question: when a teen asks you to read their college essay, nine times out of 10 they’re not asking you to rewrite it. They’re asking if their real, messy, unpolished self is okay enough to share with a stranger who holds the keys to their next step. That’s the part most of us miss, because we’re so busy panicking about getting them into the right school that we forget the point of the essay is for the school to get to know them, not us.
When we’re both sitting at the table with mugs of too-strong coffee, I tell her my rules upfront, the ones I learned from messing up Sam’s essay. “First, I’m only going to tell you two things: does this sound like you, and is there any spot where I got confused and stopped following your story. I won’t change your words to make them sound fancier. I won’t tell you to swap it out for a story about a big achievement. That’s your call, not mine. Cool?” She nods, and pulls it up on my tablet.
I read it all the way through once without marking anything, just to take it in. It’s messy. She rambles a little about how the kitten bit her three times and she still stayed late after her shift to sit with it. She has a comma splice in the second paragraph, and she abbreviates “vet” like it’s a text message. But when I finish, the first thing I say is, “This is 100% you. I can hear your voice when you talk about how mad you were that you couldn’t fix it, and how you realized you don’t have to fix every animal to do this job right. That’s the thing no one else is going to write, because it didn’t happen to anyone else.” I only point out one spot: she jumps from the kitten dying to talking about wanting to study veterinary technology in two sentences, and I had to go back and re-read that part to connect the dots. That’s it.
She stared at the screen for a minute, then said, “Wait, you really don’t think I should write about the fundraiser I organized for the new kitten wing? That’s, like, a thing I accomplished.” I told her, “Your transcript and your activities list already tell them about the fundraiser. This essay is where they get to meet the person who organized the fundraiser. That’s what this is for.”
I’ve talked to so many parents at senior year drop-offs who are hiring essay coaches for $300 an hour, rewriting entire drafts to make them sound “impressive,” fixing every tiny mistake until the essay doesn’t sound like a 17-year-old at all. It’s a waste of time, honestly. Admissions officers read hundreds of essays a day; they can spot a heavily edited parent-written essay in the first two sentences. And even if it gets a kid in, what happens then? You’ve just sent them off to college pretending to be someone you made up, before they even get there.
If you take nothing else away from this, the concrete thing you can do next time your kid asks is this: agree on your role before you open the document. Ask them what they need, whether it’s a grammar check, a second set of eyes for flow, or just reassurance their idea isn’t dumb. Read the whole thing all the way through once before you make any marks. Prioritize whether it sounds like them over whether it’s perfectly polished. A tiny mistake won’t sink an essay that feels like a real person.
We don’t know yet if Lila will get into her top choice for veterinary tech. Decisions don’t come out until March, and there are a hundred other factors that go into that that none of us can control. But last night, she was sitting at the table working on her second application, and she told me her next essay is about learning to change the oil in my old 2008 Outback, and how she messed it up three times before she got it right. She said she’ll ask me to read it when she’s done. That’s enough for me right now.
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