How to Get Great Grades in College After Struggling in High School Due to Depression: What I Learned As A Parent
I was folding mismatched socks last week when my 20-year-old son Liam tossed his fall semester transcript on the coffee table next to me. Three As, two A-minuses, and a little eye-roll when I paused to stare. “It’s not that big of a deal,” he said, before grabbing his hiking boots and heading out the door. But it is that big of a deal, because I still remember the afternoon three years ago when he dropped his junior year high school report card on this same table: two Ds, one F, and a typed note from his guidance counselor that read, “Does not engage, rarely completes assignments, may benefit from a non-college track.”
We didn’t see Liam’s depression coming at first. Like a lot of parents, we wrote off his sophomore year changes as typical teen behavior: the skipped dinners, the locked bedroom door, the way he quit the cross country team he’d loved for four years. By the time we got him in to see a therapist and got a formal diagnosis, he’d already missed 18 days of school that semester, and his GPA had dropped to a 1.7. We got him into treatment, adjusted his medication, worked with the school to get him accommodations, but the damage to his grades and his belief that he could ever do well in school stuck. He graduated high school with a 1.8 overall GPA. He told me more than once that he was just “bad at school,” that he’d never be the kid who got good grades. But he still wanted to go to college—he’d always loved being outside, wanted to study forest management, and he was determined to give it a shot.
We went into his first college semester with zero expectations around grades. Our only goal was that he wouldn’t drop out before the end of the first semester. What we didn’t expect was how many small, simple changes would let him turn things around faster than any of us thought possible. None of it was some big, fancy fix. It was all just adjusting the rules to fit his brain, instead of forcing him to fit the standard rules.
First, we threw out the standard 15-credit full-time semester. Liam started with 9 credits his first semester, and 9 again his second. That means he’ll graduate a year and a half later than most of his high school classmates, but that’s never mattered to us. With fewer classes, he doesn’t have to juggle five big assignment deadlines at once, and he has time to walk his dog, rest on bad days, and actually work through the material instead of cramming the night before a test. When people ask us why we didn’t push him to take more credits to graduate on time, I tell them no one asks you what age you were when you graduated college at your 10-year reunion. It’s not a race.
Second, we worked out a simple script for him to use with every professor during the first week of classes. He doesn’t beat around the bush. He just says, “I struggled a lot with my mental health in high school, and I’m still getting used to college-level work. Would it be okay if I checked in with you every couple of weeks to make sure I’m on track?” That’s it. It’s honest, it’s not asking for special treatment, it’s just letting people know what’s going on. Almost every professor has said yes, and many have gone out of their way to help. One professor gave him a simple breakdown for writing research papers that he still uses for every assignment. Another connected him to the college’s free tutoring service before he even had to ask. The shame of hiding his depression was what made everything snowball in high school. Now that he’s just open about it up front, that shame doesn’t have room to grow.
Third, we adjusted his living space to work for him. He originally planned to live in the dorms like most freshmen, but after walking through a dorm during orientation, he said the noise, the constant crowds, and the idea of sharing a tiny room with a stranger made his chest tight. We found a tiny, $600 a month one-bedroom apartment 10 minutes from campus, through a local landlord who rented to students. It’s not fancy, but he can keep the lights low when he’s having a bad day, he doesn’t have to talk to anyone if he doesn’t want to, and he can keep his hiking gear by the door so he can go for a walk whenever he needs to clear his head. That one change cut his average weekly anxiety levels in half, he told me. People always talk about how living on campus builds community, but for a kid still recovering from depression, having a safe, quiet space to come home to matters more than any forced dorm activity.
He also started breaking every big assignment into 15-minute chunks, using a simple free to-do list app. A 10-page research paper isn’t just “write paper” on his list. It’s “pick topic (15 min)”, “find 3 sources (15 min)”, “write topic sentence for first paragraph (15 min)”, and so on. He does one or two chunks a day, so he never has to pull an all-nighter, which would tank his mood for a full week after. It sounds too simple to work, but for someone who’s spent years avoiding big assignments because they feel impossible, cutting them into tiny pieces makes them manageable.
As a parent, I also had to change how I talked to him about school. I stopped asking “what grade did you get” first when he mentioned a test or paper. Now I lead with “did what you need to do get done work for you this week?” If he says he had a bad week and missed a class, I don’t panic and ask how he’s going to catch up. I just ask if he needs gas money to get to campus extra the next week, or if he wants me to send over his favorite soup to heat up. That small shift in how I talk took a lot of the pressure off both of us.
It’s not all perfect. He still has bad weeks, where he can’t get out of bed, where he misses a class or two. Last month, he had a bad stretch of seasonal affective disorder that left him missing three days of classes, and he had to ask for extensions on two assignments. Because he’d already checked in with his professors at the start of the semester, they both gave him the extra time he needed. He got a B on one assignment instead of the A he was hoping for, and that was okay.
We still don’t know what the future holds. He might change majors, he might take another semester off if he needs it, he might never get a 4.0. But for a kid who was told he’d never make it through college at all, getting great grades on his own terms feels like more than enough. Most of the advice you read about this says you just need to “believe in yourself” or “work harder,” but that’s not what did it. It was just slowing down, being honest, and building a life that fits what he needs, instead of trying to fit the life everyone else says you should have.
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