Can My Child Succeed at a Demanding University While Struggling This Much?
It’s 11:37 p.m. and my phone lights up with a FaceTime call from my oldest, Lila, who’s in her second semester at a top research university she worked four straight years of high school to get into. She’s sitting on the cold tile of her dorm’s communal bathroom, because her roommate is pulling an all-nighter for a pre-med midterm and Lila didn’t want to distract her by crying. Her favorite gray hoodie has a week-old coffee stain down the front, and her hair is stuck to her face from a cold shower she took to quiet the shaking from her latest panic attack. That’s how most of our calls go these days.
I knew college would be hard. I knew competing with every other valedictorian who got in would knock her down a peg. But I didn’t expect this level of constant, low-grade (and sometimes full-on explosive) struggle. Three weeks into the semester, she called to say she’d skipped three straight days of 8 a.m. lecture because she couldn’t make herself get out of bed. Last month, she drove the six hours home just to sleep in her own bed for 48 hours and didn’t even leave the house. When I sat across from her at our kitchen table, she pushed her favorite chocolate chip pancakes around her plate and said, “Is it even possible to succeed here when I’m struggling this much? Should I just transfer somewhere easier?”
That question has been bouncing around my head ever since. I spent hours scrolling parent forums, talking to other parents of kids at competitive schools, and even sat down with Lila’s academic advisor during parents weekend to ask it straight. What I found out surprised me, and it’s changed how I show up for her.
Half the kids in that school are struggling just like Lila, her advisor told me. They just don’t post about it on Instagram. No one talks about the nights they spend crying in the bathroom, or the classes they had to drop, or the B that feels like a failure when you’ve never gotten anything lower than an A your whole life. I talked to another mom after that meeting whose son is a computer science major there, and she said he calls her crying once a week too. He has a 3.4 GPA, which most people would kill for, but he’s convinced he’s falling behind everyone else.
At first, I did all the wrong things. I told her she was smart, she belonged there, it would get better. I told her to just study a little less, go for a walk, get more sleep. All that generic stuff that sounds good but makes a kid who’s struggling feel like you don’t get it. After that meeting with the advisor, I started changing small things, and they’ve made a bigger difference than I expected.
First, I swapped the questions I ask. I stopped leading with “How are your classes going?” or “Did you get that midterm grade back?” Now I open with “What’s one tiny thing that didn’t suck today?” It stops her from going straight to the list of all the things she’s messing up, and it gives us a starting point that doesn’t feel like an interrogation. Sometimes it’s just “the coffee at the library was good today” and that’s enough. Second, we cut out one non-negotiable thing that was dragging her down. She was taking 15 credits to stay on track for her major, but one of those classes was an advanced seminar that met three times a week at 8 a.m. and required 100 pages of reading a night. We helped her work with her department to drop it, and she’s taking it this summer at a community college near home, where the classes are smaller and it won’t pull down her GPA or her energy. No one but us and her advisor knows, and it cut her weekly workload by almost a third. Third, we made her mental health check-ins feel less like another chore. She didn’t want to go to weekly counseling because it felt like another assignment she had to prepare for. She now goes every other week, and she’s told her therapist she just wants to vent most weeks, not do worksheets or work on big long-term goals. That works for her.
It’s easy to look at a kid struggling at a demanding university and assume the problem is the kid—that they’re not cut out for it, that they need to leave to be happy. But what I’ve learned is that struggle is baked into these places. They take hundreds of kids who were the top of their high school classes, put them all together, and expect them to all feel like winners. Of course most people are going to struggle. That doesn’t mean they can’t succeed there.
What I tell other parents now who ask me this question is that you don’t have to fix the struggle right away. You don’t have to push them to transfer or push them to push through it no matter what. Small adjustments are almost always more helpful than big, dramatic changes. Most of the time, the kid just needs to feel like their struggle is okay, not a sign they’ve failed before they’ve even really started.
Lila still calls me crying at 11:30 at night once a week. She still gets stuck in cycles where she can’t get out of bed for a day. She still compares her grades to her roommate’s and feels like she’s falling behind. But last week she sent me a photo of the tiny basil plant she’s growing on her dorm windowsill. She started it from a cutting a friend gave her, and it’s the first thing she’s done all semester that doesn’t get graded. She got a B- on her last midterm, which is the lowest grade she’s ever gotten, but she celebrated by getting tacos with that same friend who gave her the basil cutting, and she said it was the best night she’d had all month.
I don’t know how this will end. I don’t know if she’ll graduate with honors, or get the job she wants right after school, or even stick it out for all four years. But I know now that struggle and success don’t have to be opposites. Right now, she goes to most of her lectures, she waters her basil, she calls when she’s sad and sends me dumb memes when she’s happy. That’s more than enough. Some days, that’s success.
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