Can My Child Succeed at a Demanding University While Struggling Constantly?
It’s 10:17 PM on a rainy Tuesday, and I’m folding mismatched socks on the couch when my phone lights up with a FaceTime from my oldest, Lila. She’s a sophomore in mechanical engineering at our state’s flagship honors program, the school she spent all of high school obsessing over getting into. When she answers, her hair is stuck to her face, there’s a coffee stain on the sleeve of her gray hoodie, and a stack of problem sets towers so high next to her laptop I can barely see her desk lamp. She doesn’t even say hello before she starts crying. “I don’t know how to do this,” she says, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I failed my thermo midterm. I haven’t slept more than five hours a night in three weeks. I didn’t call sooner because I was embarrassed. Is it even possible to succeed here when I struggle this much every single day?”
I’d been suspecting this was coming for months. She’d gone from calling every Sunday to texting once every three days, always too busy to talk. She’d brushed me off at Thanksgiving, saying “It’s just hard, everyone’s busy,” but I could see the dark circles under her eyes even through the car ride home. After that call, I grabbed a jacket, texted my husband I’d be back tomorrow, and got in the car. It’s a three-hour drive, mostly highway, and I spent the whole time replaying every choice we’d made: should we have talked her out of the honors track? Should we have pushed her toward the smaller liberal arts program she was also accepted to, where classes are half the size and no one fights for research spots as a sophomore? I’d always prided myself on letting my kids choose their own path, but sitting there in the dark, I was convinced we’d let her make the wrong one.
When I got to her dorm, it smelled like old takeout and lavender laundry detergent, with socks stuffed in the crack of the window frame. I didn’t give her a pep talk. I didn’t tell her everything would be okay, or that she was smart enough, because that’s what she’d been hearing from her professors and she said it just made her feel worse. I just ordered a large pepperoni pizza from the place down the street she loved during orientation, we ate half of it sitting on her twin bed, and then I helped her sort all the papers on her desk into three piles: things due in the next seven days, things due the following week, and things that could wait until after midterms. That’s when we started picking apart her schedule. She was taking 18 credits, three of them advanced electives she’d signed up for because she thought she needed them to get into grad school. We looked up the drop deadline, and the next morning we walked with her to her advisor’s office to drop one. That freed up six hours a week.
Her advisor told us something I’d never considered before: most students who struggle at demanding honors programs don’t struggle because they don’t belong. They struggle because they’ve never had to struggle before. They spent high school at the top of their class, acing tests without studying much, so when they hit a curriculum that’s designed to push even the best students, the struggle itself feels like proof they don’t fit. We got her signed up for a weekly 30-minute therapy appointment through the university counseling center—something I didn’t know saved slots for exactly this kind of ongoing, low-acuity stress, no long wait list required. I also changed my check-in habit: before I’d ask “How are your grades going?” and that would shut the conversation down immediately. Now I ask “What’s one thing that annoyed you this week, and one tiny thing that went right?” It sounds small, but it works. She doesn’t get defensive, because it’s not a test. Most of the time the annoying thing is her lab partner never shows up, and the tiny thing is that the dining hall had her favorite chocolate chip cookies that day. But it keeps her talking, instead of letting her hide how hard it is.
A lot of people I talk to say that if you’re struggling that much at a top school, you don’t belong there. I used to think that too. We see all these stories of kids who graduate with perfect 4.0s and land dream jobs straight from undergrad, and we assume that’s what success at a demanding university looks like: no struggle, just smooth sailing. But what I’ve learned over the past year is that struggle is normal there. It’s supposed to be hard. The problem isn’t the struggle—it’s the unspoken expectation that high-achieving kids shouldn’t struggle at all.
It’s been a year and a half since that 10 PM phone call. Lila still struggles. Some weeks she still calls me crying at 10 PM, because she pulled an all-nighter on a lab report and still got a C, or she didn’t get the internship she applied for. She doesn’t have a 4.0. She’s never going to be the kid who aces every test without trying. Last month she got accepted to a summer research program working on sustainable energy materials, the thing she’s wanted to study since she was 16 and built a solar-powered phone charger out of old junk in our garage. She called me after she got the acceptance email and laughed, and said “I still struggle every single day. I just don’t think that means I shouldn’t be here anymore.”
I still don’t know how this will turn out. Some semesters, when she’s really stretched thin, we sit on the phone and talk through what transferring to the smaller regional campus closer to home would look like, and that’s always an open option, no shame attached. Right now, though, she’s moving forward. She shows up to class even when she’s tired, she asks for deadline extensions when she needs them, she takes a 1-hour walk around the campus lake every evening with a friend who’s also struggling through thermo. Success doesn’t have to mean no struggle, it turns out. It can just mean showing up, even when it’s hard, and deciding that your struggle is worth it. That’s enough for us, right now.
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