Can My Child Succeed at a Competitive University While Struggling This Much?
11:37 PM, I’m folding the same load of bath towels that’s been sitting in my laundry basket for three days, when my phone buzzes. It’s my daughter Lila, 100 miles away at the top engineering program she spent two years grinding to get into. The text reads: “I don’t know how much longer I can do this. Failed my first midterm. Can’t get out of bed before 10 most days. Everyone else here is fine.”
I’d known this moment was a possibility. Lila’s undiagnosed ADHD followed her through all of high school; we only got the official diagnosis the spring of her senior year, after she spent three months pulling all-nighters to finish college apps and missed three assignment deadlines even with extra reminders. She’d always tested well, and loved building things in our garage after school, so every admissions counselor flagged her as a strong candidate. But I sat across from her at the kitchen table after she got the acceptance letter and asked if she was sure she wanted a program notorious for 60-hour work weeks and cutthroat competition. She said it was the only place that had the renewable energy design program she wanted, so we went all in, got her set up with dorm life and the accommodations the school promised.
That weekend after the text, I packed an overnight bag and drove up. I met her at the picnic table outside her dorm, by the taco truck she likes that sells al pastor tacos with extra cilantro. She showed up in the same gray hoodie she’d had since high school, hair twisted into a bun that hadn’t been brushed in a day, eyes puffy from crying before I got there. She spent 45 minutes listing all the ways she was falling behind: she’d skipped three lectures in two weeks because she couldn’t make herself get up for 8 AM, she’d forgotten to turn in a homework assignment worth 10% of her grade, her roommate studied six hours every night in the common room and never seemed stressed. “I tricked them,” she kept saying. “They let me in here thinking I was good enough, and I’m not.”
We made an appointment with her academic advisor the next day, and that’s when everything shifted a little. The advisor didn’t tell her she should transfer to a less demanding school, or that she just needed to study harder. She pulled up Lila’s file and pointed out that her entrance test scores and high school project portfolio were just as strong as any other student in the program. The struggle wasn’t because Lila didn’t belong; it was because Lila’s brain worked differently, and the default university schedule wasn’t built for her.
They walked through small, concrete changes one by one. First, they dropped one of her four classes that semester. Dropping one brought her down to 12 credits, which was still enough to keep her full-time status for financial aid and housing, just cut her weekly workload by three hours. Second, they worked with the registrar to shift her remaining in-person classes to start after 11 AM, so she didn’t have to force a wake-up time her brain couldn’t handle. Third, disability services approved a peer note-taker for all her classes, so if she did miss a day because she couldn’t get out of bed, she didn’t have to scramble to borrow notes from a stranger. Fourth, the advisor connected her to a free weekly peer group on campus for high-achieving students with ADHD, so she could talk to people who got what she was dealing with instead of feeling like the only one struggling.
I drove home that weekend, and I started thinking about all the messages I see from other parents in my college parenting group, all asking the same quiet question: is it even possible to do this? To go to one of these hard, competitive schools and struggle this much and still make it? I used to think success meant checking all the boxes: graduate in four years, keep a 3.5 GPA, get the big job right after graduation. But what I’ve learned from Lila is that most of the default rules we follow are just that—rules someone else made, that don’t have to work for your kid.
For other parents walking this road, there are small, concrete things that have worked for us that don’t cost any money or take a ton of extra time. I stopped asking “how are your grades?” every time we talk. Now my opening line is always “what’s one thing that didn’t suck this week?” and I follow it up with “what’s one thing you need me to do for you right now?” Sometimes it’s send a box of her favorite peanut butter granola bars, sometimes it’s just leave her alone for 48 hours without texting. When she has to do something big like ask a professor for an extension or sort out registration issues, I help her write out a short script ahead of time on the phone, so she doesn’t freeze up when she’s talking to someone new. I also stopped panicking when she says she needs extra time. She’s taking 12 credits a semester instead of 15 right now, so she’ll graduate in five years instead of four. We have enough saved for that extra year, and if we didn’t, she could take a semester off to work and save. There’s no unbreakable rule that says you have to finish in four years.
It’s been a year and a half now. Last month she sent me a photo of a water filter prototype she built for her design class, a low-cost model she wants to test at local homeless encampments. She got a B+ on the project. She still struggles. Two weeks ago she texted me at 1 AM panicking because she forgot the deadline for class registration, and had to drive over to the registrar’s office first thing in the morning to beg for late approval. She still has weeks where she barely leaves her dorm, and cries to me on the phone that she doesn’t know if she can keep going. But she’s still there, still building the things she wanted to build, still moving forward at her own pace. Is that success? It’s not the success I pictured when she was 16 and filling out college applications. But it’s success, all the same. It is possible. It just doesn’t look like what everyone tells you it should.
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