While it is not an outright rejection, a deferral is still a big let down.

What if your child’s early application decision is a deferral?

A deferral is the most common decision from an Early program since there are many applications and few spots available. Depending on the college, anywhere from 5%- 20% of the defers might get a final admission in the spring.  So while there is some face saving here, the odds are still against eventual admission and further applications must be completed within the next few weeks.

College Admissions Deferrals: Where the Parenting Gets Tricky

Deferrals offer hope. There is nothing more powerful than hope for a human being…and therein lies the rub.  Your child might not grasp the odds on being admitted now and might want to do everything possible to turn that deferral into a yes.  While I love that tenacity and grit, I’d strongly encourage focusing them on other schools.  This might take some finesse, depending on your child…or on you and your own ego needs.  :-(

Please do not keep stoking up their desire for that school because you are probably setting them up for more pain.

Yes, your child might be one of those 5-20%ers who is offered admission in the spring because we know that your child is a star.  (there’s that flicker of hope again.)  The problem is that you haven’t seen the others in the applicant pool.  I guarantee you that if you did, you’d be completely shocked.  As good as you think your child is, there are others just as talented and accomplished.  Plus admissions officers know that the student’s application is getting admitted, not the student.  There is a difference.   What others say about your child is just as important as your child’s record, and you’ll never know what has been said.  And then there is the fit factor…so it’s too complicated for you to strategize around.  Just take a deep breath and surrender…you have no control on this one.

Your role as parent in this moment is to be your child’s grounding cord.  Offer your love and support, give lots of TLC, remind them who they are because they just took a big hit. Tell them why you love them.  In that teachable moment, offer up a story or two from your past to prove that you went through hard moments before and actually prospered because of them.  Give them their privacy if they need it.

As a Parent, You Are Modeling How Healthy Adults Behave in A Moment of Crisis

Most of all, do not match your child’s energy.  Don’t allow yourself to go into grief over this.  Don’t complain about their guidance counselor or teachers or any other student from their school who got admitted just now.  You are modeling how healthy adults behave in a moment of crisis.  Disappointment and rejection are necessary to build inner resilience to face life.  You can’t protect your child from these feelings.  The best you can do is to encourage them to keep going, for they are surely having their initiation into adulthood through a baptism of fire.

Give them some down time as needed and then get them moving again on those regular action applications that are due shortly.   And no matter what, hold the confidence for you and your child that everything will work out fine in the end.

I travel in a professional world filled with adults who love kids and who believe in their futures.  This love is expressed through many different venues.   But the most heroic and rubber-on-the-road adults in this category are those who work at treatment facilities for teenagers with substance abuse issues.  These people dedicate their lives to bringing kids back from the brink.  I’ve met many and admire them all.

At a recent conference I met a team from the Resolution Ranch, a small facility for boys in rural Texas specializing in ranch life, complete with horses and horse care.  I love this concept because I believe every child on Earth needs to have a personal relationship with a dog and a horse, for both have magic, though in different ways.  Dogs heal the heart.  Anyone who has ever had a dog knows this.  They pour out their love to you and ask for nothing in return but for you to be you.  Horses, however, force you to balance your emotions and to be clear about what you want.  The famous Horse Whisperer Buck Branneman, in the excellent documentary about his life declares that you have to control your emotions to be a good horseman.  Some say horses can read your mind, but I’ve experienced that they actually read your heart and express whatever you are feeling at the time.  Trust me – you don’t want to feel fear or insecurity while sitting atop 1000 pounds of skittish power.

So helping troubled and lost boys bond with horses as a way to develop inner control is a genius idea.  The remarkable team at Resolution Ranch – Neal, Chris, Chelsea, Londa – take boys 13-17 years old for 6-9 months and help them find themselves again.

Scratch a troubled kid, find a trauma.  I urged them to look into EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), also known as tapping , because of its remarkable results in clearing trauma.  Talk therapy can only do so much when a child holds trauma at the cellular level.  I’ve personally witnessed miracles (including with me) resulting from energy psychology techniques.

So here’s a big shout out to my new buddies at Resolution Ranch.  What boy down deep in his heart wouldn’t want to live on a ranch, cowboy style, and learn what it means to be a man?  Troubled or not, they are the lucky ones.

One of the reasons I always loved working as a college admissions officer is the cyclical nature of the business.  Its sequence of events is so dependable that I began to think of admissions as having four distinct seasons, very much like Nature’s own. These four seasons are called Recruitment, Selection, Yield and Assessment.   They each have different goals and timing, and they require different behaviors and skills from admissions officers.

It was a relief to know that as surely as night follows day, the rigors of recruitment travel would soon be replaced with the pleasures of reading applications of teenagers eager to be admitted.  When I was bleary eyed after reading the Nth application in lonely solitude, it was time to come together as a staff to make decisions about whom to admit.   Weeks of decision making in marathon sessions behind closed doors with good colleagues and way too much sugar and caffeine birthed a class as well as an esprit d’corps for having survived it.  The day the decisions were sent was always so bittersweet, filled with excited thoughts of kids we loved whose applications we championed, coupled with real sadness for passing by so many for whom there was no space.  That day would quickly morph into preparation for that final outreach to the admits in a campaign to win their hearts, minds and an acceptance of our offer.  Finally, after the big push was over, it was time to review our goals as an office, to learn what had worked and what had been ineffective and to begin planning for the next class.  After some desperately needed R & R, it was time to begin the cycle all over again.

Cycles are great for such intense jobs as admissions.   They relieve the pressure and help reset the mind.  The memory of spring makes the late winter bearable.  

In the coming weeks I’ll describe these four seasons of admissions in detail so that you can better understand the world of the college admissions officer.  I’ll offer advice about how and when to approach admissions staff and help you understand what to expect from those encounters based on the season.   As with all things in life, timing is everything.  For example, just as you wouldn’t think of calling a neighbor at midnight to chat about mundane neighborhood business, you shouldn’t contact an admissions officer during reading season to ask general questions about their school.  A question that might be interesting during Recruitment season can be viewed as an annoying waste of time during Selection when their energies are directed to a different task.  Having an awareness of this sensitivity will make you a more effective advocate for your child during the process.

A Better Way to Look at College Admissions:

Marilee Jones’ Four Rules of the Game for Parents:

Given that this is the most competitive era of college admissions in history, and that you can control neither the outcome nor your child’s anxiety about the outcome, I’d like to suggest a better way to look at the college admissions process and four specific rules of the game to help you navigate it gracefully.

Sure, you can do what most people do now:  listen to everyone with an opinion about the topic, feel depressed, get upset with your child for not being more proactive, get depressed, feel as if you have to fight for your child’s very survival, get really depressed.  Or you can see the college admissions process in a different way.

The college admissions process is the closest thing to an initiation that we have in this secular society. There are initiations in many religious traditions, but not in our secular sphere.  Initiations are designed to help us formally allow our children to grow up and join the adult world.

An initiation is a process and not an event.  It always carries an element of anxiety and fear.  It calls on all skills previously learned, and most importantly, it can only be done by the initiate and no one else.  It is the process by which our kids are granted permission to show us what they can do, to show us that they can manage anxiety and still function successfully, that they are ready for adulthood.

At the very moment that we should be cheering them and helping them though the process, some of us actually cripple them by not trusting them to write the best essay, to interview well, to make the best choices of college.  We can send signals, overt and covert, that can make our children feel that they are not ready, not truly capable of applying to college in our absence.  We see it as helping out – helping them with editing or even writing their essay, helping them connect with the ‘right’ people who can get them in, taking over the planning and management of the process.  But to our kids, the message can often feel as if they are not good enough, not smart enough, not mature enough, not ready to go through the process on their own, at the very time when they must prove publicly that they are ready to be an adult.  By jumping in to help them in this way, we are essentially tackling them at the knees when they need to stand the straightest.  We are actually hurting them in their moment of glory.

You do have a role in your child’s initiation and make no mistake – your role is crucial.  I’ve outlined four basic steps, rules of the game, to help guide you through the entire process in a graceful way.  They may seem simple, but like all Zen-like principles, they are actually quite challenging.  If you follow these rules, however, you will not only model good adult behavior for your child – the main point of the exercise – but you will also maintain an excellent relationship with your child that will last for years to come. Remember, you are modeling for your child how an adult acts under stress and your child is watching you all the time.

Rule 1: Watch your Language:

Vow that you will never again refer to your child’s application or choices in the first person plural, as in, “We’re applying to Yale and Georgetown.” Your child is applying to college, not you.  It is their application process, not yours.  Every time you use the more inclusive language of ‘our’ or ‘we’, you are sending the message to your child that they are not quite ready for their initiation, that they can’t manage it on their own.  You are taking away their independence, holding them back just when they should be gaining strength to show the world that they are capable of handling the anxiety of describing themselves on paper, submitting it to strangers to be judged on unknown parameters and then being publicly judged with an acceptance, a waitlist or a rejection. It’s very easy to say ‘our’ and ‘we’.  I still find myself doing it occasionally.  But stop yourself every time you hear yourself say it, back up and rephrase the sentence.  “My child is applying to Yale and Georgetown.”

Rule 2: Watch your Attitude

Teenagers need to vent sometimes and thank your lucky stars if yours does that with you.  But if they complain about their teachers or their guidance counselor or how unfairly they are being treated in life, get into neutral and just listen.  It’s so important that you keep your attitudes about their situation in check because your opinions can contaminate their experience.  You can ask how you might help them, but otherwise, you should be modeling the old phrase, “been there, done that, life goes on and life is good.” In other words, keep reminding them that no matter what happens, everything will be fine.  When they are most frightened, you must ground them and help them stay calm, not spool them up with your own anxiety.  Stay steady and in neutral.  Their problems are not for you to solve.

Rule 3: Watch your Behavior

Behavior often follows attitude.  We know that sometimes a simple call from us could fix our child’s problem, but what would they learn from that?  If we had carried them everywhere to keep them from falling when they were first learning to walk, they wouldn’t be the healthy functional walkers they are today.  Humans learn best by trial and error. Since it’s your child’s initiation, vow never to intervene in their application process.  Vow never to do their work for them – ever.  Never threaten to sue anyone, or intimidate or act in any way like a jerk, because you’ll only regret that later and you will have missed the chance to model good adult behavior for your child who is watching you all the time to see how it’s done.  Cheer them from the sidelines.

Rule 4: Celebrate No Matter What

Parents frequently (and inadvertently, I’m sure) cut their child down by publicly criticizing the admissions decision or their child’s final choice of college after they have been admitted.  Many parents simply can’t hold their disappointment, which can be humiliating for their child.

No matter what happens at the conclusion of the college admissions process, you must find a way to make peace with the results. Many students feel as if they have let their parents down if they don’t get admitted to a specific school, and they carry that guilt for years. Remember that the main point is not for your child to get into to X, Y, Z college, but to pass through the hardest initiation of their life.

Take your child out when the letters come in and celebrate their bravery, their ability to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing the results for months, their uniqueness.  Now is the time to tell them how proud you are of them.  Find things you admire about them and speak that freely.  For example, you could tell him what an excellent friend he is and how you wish you were as good a friend to yours as he is to his, or tell her how much you admire her organization and stamina and how you want to be more like her that way.  Speak what is authentic and true.  If you cannot talk this way, write your child a letter and ask them to read it after you celebrate the decisions.  Do your best to focus on the successful completion of their firewalk, their initiation.  It’s not about the college that admitted them…it’s about how your child went about the process.  Be proud of them no matter what.