Parent Answers: Is It Possible to Succeed at a Demanding University While Struggling This Much?
Last Saturday morning, I was matching socks on the couch, the dryer still humming in the next room, when my 20-year-old daughter Lila called. She was crying so hard her words came out in gasps, and all I caught at first was “failed midterm” “haven’t eaten” “can’t do this.” She’s a sophomore in the honors program at our state’s flagship university, a program she worked four years of high school to get into, on a full merit scholarship. By 2pm that day, I’d packed a cooler with her favorite lemonade and pancakes, and drove three hours north to pick her up.
When I got to her dorm, she was curled up on her tiny couch under a dirty hoodie, her desk piled high with unopened textbooks and empty energy drink cans. She didn’t move when I walked in, just said she didn’t understand how everyone else seemed to handle the work so easily, when she could barely make herself get out of bed some mornings. “Is it even possible to succeed here when I struggle this much?” she asked me, over oatmeal at the diner on the way home. That question has been bouncing around my head ever since.
I grew up thinking struggle was a warning sign. If you couldn’t keep up at a hard school, that meant you didn’t belong there, that you should step back and find something easier. For the first 24 hours Lila was home, I worried that I’d pushed her too hard, that we’d both bought into the idea that a prestigious degree was worth any cost, and now she was burning out. But after she slept 14 hours straight, and ate a full plate of my bacon and scrambled eggs, she said she didn’t want to quit. She just wanted things to be more manageable.
Over the past two months, we’ve tried small, slow adjustments instead of big, dramatic changes like dropping out or taking a semester off. None of it fixed her anxiety, and she still has bad weeks that leave her crying on the phone. But it’s let her stay in school, and that’s answer enough for right now.
The first thing we did that made a difference was go with her to the university’s disability resource center to apply for accommodations. Lila has had a generalized anxiety diagnosis since she was 16, but she’d put off applying because she thought it would be too much paperwork, or that it would be cheating. I sat with her in her dorm common room and helped her draft the first email to her advisor, and I gathered the old diagnosis paperwork from my filing cabinet at home to send in. Two weeks later, she got approved for extended time on exams and permission to take tests in a small, quiet room instead of the packed lecture hall. She said the first exam she took in that room was the first time in a year she didn’t have a panic attack mid-test. That’s a concrete step any parent can help with: when your kid is too overwhelmed to tackle bureaucracy, you do the boring parts for them. It doesn’t mean you’re coddling them, it means you’re removing one more barrier when they’re already low on energy.
Next, we sat down and rewrote what success means for this year, and wrote it on an index card she taped to her dorm fridge. The list isn’t “graduate with honors” or “keep a 3.5 GPA.” It’s four short lines: 1) Go to at least two out of three classes every week. 2) Eat one hot meal a day (frozen pizza counts). 3) Don’t go two full days without talking to a friend in person. 4) Any GPA above 2.0 (the minimum to keep her scholarship) is a win. We have a 10 minute check-in every Sunday night where she just tells me how many of the four she hit that week. If she hits all four, we celebrate with her favorite salted caramel ice cream when I visit. If she only hits two, that’s fine too—we just talk about what got in the way, and adjust the next week’s goals if we need to. That’s way more useful than pushing her to hit some arbitrary standard that doesn’t account for how much she’s already fighting just to show up.
A lot of people I’ve talked to assume that if you’re struggling this much at a demanding university, you just don’t belong there. But Lila’s advisor told me last month that more than half of the honors students reach out for academic or mental health support at some point in their first two years—most just don’t post about it on Instagram. Struggle doesn’t mean you’re not cut out for it. It just means you’re human, and the system is set up to favor people who don’t deal with the things Lila deals with.
Last week, I drove up to visit her. Her dorm is still messy, there are still coffee cups stacked on her desk, and she hasn’t folded her laundry in two weeks. She got a B- on her last chemistry midterm, which she texted me about with three exclamation points, because that’s passing, and that’s more than she thought she’d get three months ago. She still has bad days: two weeks ago, her group project partners bailed on her two days before the deadline, and she called me crying at 10pm. She still waits three weeks for an appointment at the university counseling center, so we pay for a low-cost off-campus appointment once a month, which works better for her anyway.
We don’t know what the next two years will bring. She might drop the honors track next year, she might take a semester off if she needs it, she might graduate with a 2.7 and go on to grad school anyway, or she might pivot to a different career entirely that doesn’t require that fancy degree. The answer isn’t that everyone can or should stay in a demanding university while they struggle. But for Lila, right now, the answer is yes. It’s possible. It just doesn’t look like the shiny, perfect success the brochures sell you. It looks like messy dorms, bad days, small wins, and adjusting the rules to fit you, not the other way around.
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