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Parents Should View High School as a Staging Area for College. Gather Data! by Sophia K. Havasy, Ph.D.

Parents don't wonder if their 11 year old is ready to turn 12. They don't get a say in how long each year should last and when the next one should start. Parents do have a say over academic progression, but all too often, they treat it like the passing of the years. Going off to college becomes no more than a child getting a year older than they were in high school. But not all high school seniors are ready for college and sending them off with hope in your heart won't make them any more ready.

College is a big leap forward. To be successful, a young person must have problem-solving skills, social skills, intellectual and academic skills. They must be emotionally secure enough to leave home. They must be able to handle money. They will have to set goals and then meet them. They will need their own moral compass to guide them. In other words, they must be more than half-way towards being adults.

Midway through a child's senior year isn't the best time for parents to wake up to the realization that their child might not be ready for college. Parents should be collecting data on their child's readiness throughout high school and when they see areas of weakness, they should look for ways to build strength.

One of the key differences between parents and their children is that kids don't know what's coming. They are busy living their lives. The most important thing to a 10th grader is 10th grade. This is as it should be. Parents, however, can see over the horizon. They can know that 10th grade is just two years away from college and if their 10th grader is “borrowing" their credit card, running up huge cell phone bills and never has enough money for gas, that child is not spontaneously going to become an excellent money manager a mere two years later when they head off for college, credit card in hand. If experience is any guide, that child's first year in college is going to be surprisingly expensive.

A parent should view high school as a staging area for college. Parents should have a good idea of what they want their child to be able to handle when they go off to college and they should use those high school years to help their child gain the necessary skills. These skills are not necessarily academic. The school is focused on those skills. The skills a parent needs to monitor are emotional skills, life skills, social skills.

Skills can be built. Maturity can be advanced. For the teenager who has become a money pit, the parents might want to have a serious conversation in which they explain what they want to see before they feel comfortable sending that child off to college. Perhaps they will ask the child to save money towards their education. This is not for the purposes of helping the parents pay for school, but rather, it is to both help the child gain money-management skills and to demonstrate that those skills have been acquired.

If an 11th grader requires a marching band and prodding with sticks to get out of bed on time for school, that child isn't going to spontaneously leap from bed in college just because they have an early morning class. The child has got to develop a strategy for getting up in the morning that doesn't require the involvement of other people. Parents can help the child problem solve getting up. They can go together to the store and find the loudest alarm clock on the planet. They can figure out where in the room it will do the most good (right next to the ear, where it is the loudest, or across the room where the sleeper will have to get out of bed to shut the darned thing off). Then, after a couple of trial runs with parental support, the child can be left on their own to manage waking up in the morning. If they fail at the task, they will probably have to face some disciplinary action. If they simply can't manage it, you might want to consider professional help. The one thing that won't solve the problem is shipping that child off to college. The result will be a lot of F's in morning classes.

College students need good problem solving skills. I recently had a student explain to me that they were failing to do their English assignment because their math class was right after their English class and the second class was across campus from the first. If they wanted to get to math class on time, they couldn't stick around in English class and write down the assignment. In the student's mind, this wasn't his fault. Imagine how much further apart classes might be in college. Imagine how often scheduling conflicts might arise. To demonstrate good problem-solving skills, a student faced with the conundrum of classes distant from one another might have asked a classmate to write down the assignment for them, might have gotten the teachers e-mail address, might have looked for a web site where the assignments were posted. This sort of problem is solvable, but if a student lacks problem-solving skills, they too often just throw up their hands and say that failure to do the assignment wasn't their fault, it was the fault of the school for placing their classes too far apart.

For children with learning differences, another important area to explore is whether they are ready to advocate for themselves. Throughout their early schooling, parents have advocated for them, but when a child gets to college, they will have to make sure that they receive any accommodations to which they are entitled. I have had more than one college student with LD come to me after failing their first year of college and tell me that they never even went to the disabilities office. As high school progresses, parents of children with LD need to bring their children into the management process. They need to begin to gradually turn over the responsibility so that when they do go off to college, they are ready to be good self managers.

L. Kastner and J. Wyatt in their 2002 and book “The Launching Years," present a readiness survey. Parents are asked to assess their child's problem-solving abilities, necessary social skills for living in an unfamiliar environment, intellectual and academic skills, emotional security, good decisions about money, ability to handle romantic involvements, potential problems with homesickness, goal setting, and moral values.

It behooves parents to examine these areas of readiness early and often. The data they will need is there in front of them every day. Readiness is much more than willingness. If parents ask their teenagers, are you ready for college, the child will always say they are ready. And they are. They are ready to go whether or not they are prepared to succeed. It is the parent's job to make sure they are ready to succeed, not just ready to go.