How to Get Through High School: Real Tips From a Parent of a Recent Graduate
The rain streaked the windshield of my minivan last September, and the half-eaten order of salted fries in the cup holder went cold while my 16-year-old Lila sobbed into her hoodie. It was the third day of junior year, and she’d already decided she couldn’t do it. AP tests, soccer practice three nights a week, volunteer hours, the college application timeline taped to her locker, the quiet fight she’d had with her best friend over text that morning—none of it fit. “Everyone else has it together,” she gasped. “I’m just bad at this.”
I’d spent the first two years of Lila’s high school career buying into the idea that “getting through” meant “getting it right.” I’d helped her build a four-year plan freshman year, marked every test and deadline on my own kitchen calendar, nudged her to add that extra honors class because “it looks good for applications.” That night, after we got home and I made her hot tea with too much honey, I realized I’d been asking the wrong question the whole time. I wasn’t asking what she needed to get through the day—I was asking what she needed to get into the right college.
A week later, we dragged our crumpled list of commitments to the guidance counselor’s office. Ms. Henderson, who’d been working there for 22 years and kept a jar of lemon drops that were always a little sticky, pushed our printed plan to the side. “Half the kids I see don’t need better time management,” she said. “They need to cut something. No one is keeping score except you and your kid.” That stuck with me.
We went through Lila’s schedule line by line, and she decided to drop AP Chemistry. I went with her to talk to her teacher, who told us straight that a B in two advanced classes would look a lot better to admissions officers than a C+ in four. We made one small rule that first month: no homework after 9pm. If a big paper wasn’t done, she’d ask for an extension. Half the time her teachers said yes, and the other half she turned it in a little late and lost 5 points—it never tanked her grade. We kept a chipped ceramic mug by the front door, and after 9, her phone went in it. Most nights she’d sit on the couch and watch old Great British Baking Show episodes with me while I folded laundry, instead of staring at her laptop until midnight.
I also changed the question I asked her when she got in the car every day. I stopped asking “How was school?” which always got a one-word “Fine.” Instead I asked “What’s the dumbest thing that happened today?” Nine times out of ten, she’d laugh and tell me about the kid who set off a stink bomb in biology, or the teacher who wore mismatched shoes. It opened up conversations way easier than any big “we need to talk” talk I’d tried before. When she fell out with her best friend that year and started skipping lunch to hide in a bathroom stall, I didn’t push her to “work it out” or “make new friends.” I just started packing an extra chocolate chip cookie in her lunch every day, and wrote down the room number of the art teacher who let kids hang out in the back of her room during lunch, no questions asked. It took three months for her to start sitting with the other yearbook kids there, but small things stuck better than big dramatic talks.
It wasn’t all smooth. Senior year, she cried for three nights over her Common App essay, and I almost caved and told her I’d help her rewrite the whole thing to make it “impressive.” Instead, I reminded her of the no writing after 9pm rule, and we watched another baking episode. The next day she wrote about her summer job pulling weeds at the local plant nursery, and how she liked the quiet better than making small talk with customers. It wasn’t the perfect inspirational essay I’d imagined she’d write, but it was hers. She got accepted to the in-state environmental science program she’d been dreaming of, not the fancy out-of-state school I’d quietly pushed her to aim for freshman year.
I talk to a lot of parents now who are where I was freshman year, panicking about every grade and every activity, convinced that if their kid slips up once, their whole future is ruined. What I tell them is that getting through high school doesn’t require a perfect plan or a perfect kid. It just requires small, daily changes that are easy to do: cut one thing that’s draining them, change the question you ask at the end of the day, give them a quiet place to go when everything feels too much. None of these things take a lot of time or money, and they don’t require you to be a perfect parent.
Lila’s halfway through her first year of college now. She texts me once a week complaining about her 8am chemistry class (ironically) and the dining hall pizza that’s always cold. She still has bad days, but she calls me after them and we laugh about it, and then she goes back to her dorm. I don’t know if we did everything right. If we’d kept AP Chem, if we’d pushed for that bigger name school, things might be different. But what I do know is that Lila likes what she’s studying, she has friends she laughs with, and she doesn’t hate going to class every day. That’s more than any perfect four-year plan ever could have gotten her. Some days are bad. Some things get cut. That’s just how you get through it.
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