Senioritis in a teenager is a lot like puberty.  The first signs appear up to a year before it happens , there’s some temporary relief when it actually kicks in. Then suddenly they’re adolescents, and the whole family’s  fully involved in the changes and challenges of the next transition.

Senioritis makes its initial appearance in both generations the spring of junior year, sparked  by practice SAT’s and  college tours during school vacations. It reappears  in September, with the acute awareness that this is the first of  a long list of  “last”  things to come – especially, the last year at home as a  family, with everyone in their accustomed roles.  The usual back to school flush fades like freckles  in early fall, replaced by college board anxiety that strikes in mid- October and isn’t over till the exams are.  That temporary relief lasts for a few days;  like malaria, the fever returns  with the approach of the application deadlines. It breaks and symptoms disappear for a time; grades may fall off and enthusiasm for everything except independence fade, but as colleges make their choices known the fever reaches new highs that recede until your teen makes his or hers.  And then it’s dormant until the next stage of the college transition -letting go – begins.  You’ll live through that, too.

There are practical things you can do to minimize the effects of Senioritis on your family.  Sit down with your teen and have a serious talk about college – what your and their expectations are, how realistic they seem, what you and they can and will do to help them achieve their goals. Provide tutors, classes, experiences to improve their record? Hire a college counselor to advise them, stay on top of the application process, steer them to the right college, or use the high school college counseling service?  Then make a list of things to be accomplished – deadlines for exams, essays, applications,  references, etc. Set aside one conference a week to talk about what’s been accomplished or needs to be, and by whom.  And then try very hard not to let the topic of College or your senior’s future plans take over the family or the conversation the rest of the time.

Increasingly, college admissions offices are less patient with late-bloomers than they used to be; academic readiness is mostly judged on the junior year scholastic record, not just by the grades earned but  the kind of courses chosen. Advanced placement and International Baccalaureate classes count for more than regular courses, and junior year SATs are often scrutinized more carefully than those taken in fall or winter of senior year.  High school guidance counselors look to junior year performance to guide senior applicants in their selections; while students whose high school grades get progressively better during all four years can be expected to apply successfully to many colleges, those seeking early admission, especially to private schools,  need to demonstrate particular academic strength in their third.

That doesn’t mean college planning needs to go into overdrive around the same time your teenager gets his driver’s license.  But keeping up with his classes, teachers and  performance this year is even more important than it will be next September.

Or maybe they’re not.  Just because they’re complaining, whining or overreacting doesn’t mean they’re not adjusting to college – venting all their discontents, big and little, is part of the process, especially during the first semester.   All teenagers vent their worries, complaints and frustrations on their parents. But when they do it from a distance, in a place you and they expected to be the culmination of their dreams, it’s difficult for both of you to keep things in perspective.

They need to unload and you’re the one who’s always been there to sympathize – it’s still part of your job description.  Handle it by reaffirming, mirroring and empathizing with their feelings rather than engage them on the specific issue. . Don’t minimize their concerns but don’t overreact, either. Maintain your perspective; you may not be getting the whole story. Let them vent without cutting them off. When they’re finished, offer support and reassurance .Unless they actively request help, don’t problem-solve with or for them.  And accept that you won’t always give just the right response at the right time and that eventually they’ll forgive you for it.

I’m not saying it might have changed my friend’s mind about the timing of her divorce, but it would be useful to have known, as it might be if colleges were truly intent on including programming specifically for parents during at least part of their orientation programs. , which are widely seen by universities as central in student retention as well as adjustment.

College orientation programs are as different and unique as colleges themselves.  In a survey of the various offerings, efforts to include parents range from a brief welcoming reception at which information about university policies and resources is provided to more extensive efforts to program to parents’ as well as students’ needs. While understanding how to recognize and respond to the developmental changes that will occur in their children is usually addressed, only a few orientation programs make any serious effort to help parents understand and recognize the parallel developmental changes in themselves that are catalyzed by launching a child into college.

A good orientation program gives a chance to discuss issues in letting go, even if it’s just a 15 minute Q&A with a college counselor following a lecture, video, or staged vignette, which is common on many campuses.   An even better one helps parents focus on adjustment and change in their own lives as well as strategies for planning for separation when college begins.  Some colleges offer parents themselves as a resource for learning through interacting with each other; while they can read or be told about the letting-go process by the institution, parents place more credibility and learn better from their own peer group.

The best college orientation programs have a dual focus; challenging parents to confront issues and focus on their own growth and learning as well as helping them understand the changes their kids are going through and how best to support them during this new stage of life. Recent research findings make a compelling case for colleges and universities to develop parent programming during orientation and beyond that’s predicated on keeping family members attached in a renegotiated relationship rather than just teaching them how to let go.

The goals of a truly parent and family-inclusive college orientation should be supporting parents at a time when they have an acute need for it; helping parents recognize changes taking place in their children’s lives, their own development and the family system; providing an adaptive, bilateral model of the separation process as it applies to parents as well as their young adults; assisting parents in fostering their own development; and conveying the college’s concern for parents.  (If you’re an educator interested in more info on how to include these components in your orientation program, contact me and ask about “It’s Your Transition, Too.”

Are your teenagers getting adequate assistance in college planning? Make sure by getting to know their high school counselors early – freshman year if possible. Do they have additional training, experience and professional affiliations in the subspecialty of college counseling? What kind of individual attention can your teenager expect, and how involved and/or proactive will  school counselors  be in helping them through the college selection and application process? If the answer is “not very,” what are your other options?

The cost of hiring a private counselor for your college-bound teenager can range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. One determining factor may be how much you’re already involved with your kids’ college search. While only 6% of college-bound seniors surveyed by the College Board wished their parents to do less and 30% wished they did more to help them look for and apply to colleges, remember that your role is coaching, not managing, the process. Expect conflict and even open warfare with teenagers when you  spend all your time surfing college websites, meet with counselors without them,  take the lead in lining up their college references and recommendations, plan and schedule their courses and activities, or tell them which schools they may or may not apply to.  If they’re not doing most of those things themselves, there’s a reason – they just haven’t told you yet what it is.

These days it’s a much more intense and competitive affair, one that can cost as much as a year at college itself. Faced with shrinking budgets, most high schools have rolled the college admissions part of guidance counseling into a demanding job that involves truancy, teen pregnancy, drugs,  violence, drop-outs and delinquency – all the ills to which today’s teens are vulnerable. Parents of college-bound students typically spend $1500 to $3000 on an “education consultant,” although a  “name” counselor like Michelle Hernandez  of Hernandez Associates or Katherine Cohen of IvyWise can run upwards of $40,000. The test prep industry, led by the Washington Post Company’s Kaplan Unit and Princeton Review, Inc., with web-based review courses, group and private teachers, and active publishing units, accounts for $2.3 billion that parents spend every year to help their kids get into college. At $40 to $500 a session, one-to-one tutoring adds up.  And that’s not counting the other pre-college costs like fees for applications, exams,  and college tours.

Parents who want to make their kids’(or their own) college dreams  come true can opt out of the admissions arms race by targeting their spending.  Look for free review classes through your school, at the library and and on-line. Use a private consultant for two or three  sessions to advise your senior on the basics like matching grades and interests to specific colleges, choosing an essay topic, and creating a work/flow calendar. Invest  in pre-college  activities that  demonstrate your teenagers’ true passions, interests and achievements.  And then relax.  Because it’s not  the college they ultimately go to that matters to their future happiness and success – it’s what they do there that counts.

Self-reflection, insight and awareness are skills that call for a higher level of cognition – a more complex mental organization – than most teenagers possess.  They require not only the ability to recognize that other people have different views and perspectives than you do, but to take them into account for their own sake, not just whether they serve your own needs and wishes.  This skill set is the hallmark of mutual reciprocity, which is the basis of truly adult interpersonal relationships.

Children as well as teenagers are  practiced in what might be called “tit for tat” reciprocity – that is, if I promise to call if I’m going to be late,  they’ll let me use the car.  But mutual reciprocity -I’ll call when I’m going to be late because if I don’t, they’ll worry about me – is a different, higher level of thinking. It’s more characteristic of adulthood than adolescence.  So the next time your  teenager acts like one – narcissistic, self-involved, and blissfully unaware of how his actions affect anyone else but himself – chalk it up to his mind, which is still developing the complexity necessary to  consider your feelings as well as his own.

While not wholly opposed to that approach,  I think it misses the mark by ignoring the significance of senior year as a developmental event , the transition from adolescent  to young adult. While some teenagers may be ready to move on intellectually or even vocationally at 16 or 17, few are capable of the other tasks of the young adult  transition – differentiating from the family system, leaving home, exploring identity alternatives, developing self-discipline,  and managing  time, money, commitments and responsibilities. Even if the senior year of high school is just “a holding pattern,”, it’s the right place to be at the right  time for most teenagers, who, despite their demands for more independence, are also already experiencing  separation anxiety about leaving home. All through adulthood they will struggle as we all do to balance their needs for autonomy with their needs for closeness and connection – senior year is when they take the first step on that narrow wire.

• Are you responsible for their grades, conduct, or life choices?
• Do you have a right to know how they’re doing academically?
• What can you do to make their college adjustment easier?

Q. Our freshman daughter is flunking two courses, living off-campus, and generally running wild. She won’t listen to our advice, ignores our letters and phone calls, and just pierced her nose! What can parents do?

A. Unless you’ve tied your financial aid to her grade point average, her academic performance is between her and her college.  You might insist that she move into a dorm or find a supervised living situation until her grades improve and suggest that she take fewer or less demanding courses until she’s adjusted to college life. And ask her to take out her nose ring for Thanksgiving at Grandmother’s.

Q. My son has been on academic probation since the first semester and will have to go to summer school to stay in college next year. Why didn’t we find this out earlier when we could have helped him? And who should pay for his make-up courses?

A. In high school you had to sign his report card, but the Family Education and Privacy Act mandates that students, not parents, get their transcripts, regardless of who’s paying the bill. It’s his responsibility to pay for summer school, not yours, even if he has to take a semester off and get a job to accomplish this.

Q. Our daughter is so homesick she can’t eat, sleep or study. Should we suggest that she withdraw from college, come home and commute to a school closer to home?

A.Most freshmen go through a siege of homesickness, and in most cases it’s not severe enough to take such drastic measures. Many kids don’t feel like college is “home” until after Christmas vacation. Meanwhile, stay in touch through letters, calls and e-mails. Familiarize yourself with the counseling facilities at her school and suggest that she take advantage of them.