Ask your child to think or write a paragraph about the values that are most important to her before she takes the exam. Ideally, do not ask to see it. Tell her, “This is for you alone.”
Drive your child to the testing site the week before so he can check it out. If kids can visualize the test in advance, they will feel more control over the situation when the big day comes.
Familiarize yourself with the more than 850 test-optional colleges and universities at www.fairtest.org. Knowing that plenty of great colleges don’t require standardized tests for admission can afford your son or daughter all sorts of Plan B options for college.
Plan for your child to take the ACT or SAT more than once. Kids do better if they know they can take a mulligan.
Know that a little stress actually helps kids perform better. But to keep an optimal amount of stress, make sleep a family priority, and talk with your kid about taking the ACT or SAT during a week when there is less going on at school and with extracurricular activities.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Who’s Ready for College?
MANY PEOPLE SEE college as the end of the road, and never stop to think of what it will be like when they get there. It reminds us of the way expectant parents (especially those expecting their first child) will fret over every aspect of pregnancy and childbirth. Then the baby comes, and the worrying doesn’t stop—in fact, they discover that the real challenges have only just begun.
The college environment is drastically different from most kids’ experience in high school, and many teens haven’t developed some of the fundamental skills they will need to function in that environment before leaving home. They may have worked their tails off to get good scores on their standardized tests, thrown themselves into their homework and extracurriculars, and finished their school applications on time, but it’s all been with their parents watching in the background, making sure the wheels don’t come off. For many, it’s chaos when their parents are no longer there to nag and remind and set limits.
Bill tested Suzanne for learning disabilities off and on beginning in second grade. Suzanne was diagnosed with ADHD, but with the help of Ritalin, she was able to do well throughout elementary, middle, and high school. She enrolled in an elite private university, and saw Bill for testing during her junior year. She complained that she often had to stay up all night to study for tests—and sometimes two nights in a row. The reason studying took so long was that she was having a harder time concentrating, and more trouble learning and remembering things. “I think,” she said, “that the Ritalin I’ve been taking all these years to treat my ADHD is rotting my brain.” She added that her mother felt the problem was alcohol.
“So how much do you drink?” Bill asked.
“About five drinks a night, four nights a week,” she said. Bill said that was enough for her to qualify as an alcoholic, to which Suzanne responded, “My best friend drinks twelve drinks a night, six nights a week.”
There is much to unpack in this story, but what is perhaps the most stunning is that Suzanne had to be led to connect her toxic behavior—sleep deprivation and binge drinking—to her difficulty focusing and learning. College affects many smart kids in similar ways.
This is because college is often a brain-toxic environment. Let’s consider for a moment the daily stressors that most college students experience:
An average bedtime of 2:00 to 3:00 A.M. One high school student Bill evaluated finally got his sleep problem under control with the help of melatonin. By the end of his senior year, he was able to go to sleep by midnight on most nights. Then he went to college and his regimen fell apart because his roommates always stayed up until 4:00. As another freshman client recently told Bill, going to bed at 3:30 is “pretty normal” because in college “everything happens between midnight and 3:00 A.M.” Extensive research has indicated that college students as a group are massively sleep deprived. The average student sleeps only six to six and a half hours per night—with some studies suggesting even less.1
There are practical obstacles to sleep, of course—when your roommate’s got the light on or the noise level is high, it’s challenging to go to bed. But college students also commonly have highly dysregulated sleep cycles, which Robert Stickgold calls “sleep bulemia” (binging on weekends and vacations and purging on school nights).2 Given school-related stress, the lack of regularity in their sleep cycles, and the sleep-impairing effects of binge drinking and technology, college students are at least as likely as older adults to experience sleep disorders. Students who do not sleep enough pay for it with poorer academic performance and increased risk for a wide range of emotional problems.3
But for many high school and college students, there’s also a strange psychological component at work. How little you sleep becomes a badge of honor, something worthy of bragging about.
Ned once had four back-to-back appointments with girls from an elite girls’ high school who had just finished their junior year term paper. The first girl looked pretty beat up. “I was up until, like, 2:00 A.M. finishing my paper,” she said. When she walked out and the second one walked in, Ned said, “Wow, Susie was really tired. Was the term paper rough?” “Yeah,” said the second girl. “I got two hours of sleep last night.” The third girl one-upped the previous girl. She’d pulled an all-nighter. And the last? She was like Daffy Duck having a meltdown about Bugs Bunny. “All-nighter? All-nighter? Ha! I haven’t slept in two days!!!” These girls, remember, were in high school. The problems only amplify in college, when parents are nowhere to be seen.
The competition for who’s most exhausted is ridiculous, of course, but it helps to understand the reasoning behind it. If two roommates are taking the same chemistry midterm, and one goes to sleep at 10:00 P.M. while the other uses the time between 10:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M. to study, the one who sleeps may feel she hasn’t done enough to prepare (when sleeping is actually the best thing she can do). The one who stays up until 2:00 A.M. may think that the extra hours of study exculpate her from responsibility if the test doesn’t go well. Hey, at least she did everything she could, right? And on and on it goes.
Hours of unstructured time. College students aren’t required to sit in class, nor are they committed to a forty-hour workweek. One survey study found that they spend fifteen hours a week studying, while a second recent study found that students spent nineteen hours a week on education-related activities, and twenty-nine hours on socializing and leisure.4 That leaves many hours to fill, and for many kids, this is their first chance to decide how to spend their time on their own. It’s a great opportunity, but for many it can be dangerous. They will find themselves going from highly structured days where their classes are in sequentially planned forty-five-minute increments to total freedom, where classes are optional, meals are erratic, there’s a lot of eating after midnight, a lot of late-night partying, and little to no supervision.
A culture where binge drinking is the norm. A recent Harvard University study found that 44 percent of students at four-year colleges drink at the binge level or higher (a minimum of five drinks in a row for boys and four for girls).5 That is almost half the class. Full-time students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two are somewhat more likely to drink and to drink more heavily than their peers who are not attending college, suggesting that college life may actually encourage heavy drinking.6 Bill recently did a consultation with a student who just finished his freshman year at an elite private university. He told Bill that all the “social kids” in college binge drink on Tuesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday during the day, and Saturday night. He also said that they smoke weed every single day. In addition to making students more likely to get behind in their classes and engage in a lot of dangerous activities (vandalism, trouble with the police, unplanned and unprotected sex, and drunk driving), evidence is emerging that binge drinking compromises learning and memory, in part by affecting the development of ne
w neurons in the hippocampus.7
The drinking habits of teens have changed dramatically over the last few decades. Whereas once they used to drink to have fun, now they drink to obliterate themselves.8 This is not surprising, given that stress plays an important role in the chemical use of young people. Adolescent monkeys will double their alcohol intake under stress,9 and a recent survey study reported that smoking, drinking, and drug use increased 100 percent in human adolescents when they were under high stress.10 As we mentioned in Chapter One, young adults are more anxious than ever before, and when life feels out of control, you either cope or you give up. Binge drinking is the way many cope; it offers a profound sense of escape. When kids are drunk they feel more powerful and more connected. It’s a quick fix, but long term it’s disastrous.
Food-related issues. Many college students have never shopped or prepared food for themselves and don’t know how to eat responsibly. And, when you’re tired—as so many are—brain chemicals that regulate eating are out of whack. The inhibitory function of the prefrontal cortex, that voice which tells you to stop eating, is enfeebled. Those who eat in a dining hall may be vulnerable to the Freshman Fifteen, and full-blown eating disorders usually begin in college.11 In fact, 25 percent of college students try to control their weight through bulimia-associated behaviors.12 Eating disorders are often the manifestation of a rigid and unhealthy attempt to create an illusion of control when healthy opportunities are lacking.
Stimulant abuse. Adderall and other stimulants are used frequently and in an unregulated way by students who haven’t been diagnosed with ADHD but who are self-medicating. They are used most often by struggling students, usually in the mistaken belief that they will improve their academic performance. Stimulant users are more likely than other students to drink heavily and to use illegal drugs. Also, many students use stimulants to heighten their experience at parties when they are under the influence of other chemicals.13
Put this all together, and college housing may be the most stressful and dysregulated living environment outside of a war zone. We don’t shy away from making this connection when we speak, and recently we got this note from an audience member at one of our lectures: “I am a vet from Afghanistan. You are so right. What I see at college is nearly as bad as that was. At least there, we had commanders telling us lights out.” It’s no wonder that there’s a growing epidemic of mental health problems on college campuses, and that suicide is the second leading cause of death among college-aged students.14
Dr. Richard Kadison sounded an alarm about the “mental health crisis” on college campuses in 2004.15 His concern was based in part on the findings from a study of mental health trends at Kansas State University between 1988 and 2001. This study found a 58 percent increase in anxiety and stress-related problems over a thirteen-year period. The rate of depression nearly doubled, as did the rate of personality disorders, developmental disorders, psychiatric medication use, and suicidality.16 More recent studies have confirmed this trend. College freshmen now report the highest stress and lowest mental health levels in twenty-five years.17 In one survey conducted in 2010, 44 percent of students seeking help at a college counseling center were found to have very serious psychiatric problems, in contrast to the 16 percent who demonstrated serious problems a decade earlier. Although depression and anxiety are still the most common referral problems for college counseling centers, growing numbers of students report stress-related eating disorders, substance abuse, and self-injury.18
Given the brain-toxic lifestyles that many college students lead, it’s not surprising that they often don’t have much to show for their four or five years on campus. A recent book called Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa revealed that more than 45 percent of the 2300 undergraduates at twenty-four colleges who took the College Learning Assessment showed no significant improvement by the end of their sophomore year in critical thinking, writing skills, or complex reasoning. After four years, a full 36 percent failed to demonstrate significant improvement in these areas, despite the tremendous maturation in the prefrontal cortex that occurs during this period. Although Arum and Roksa attribute this striking lack of intellectual development to colleges valuing research over teaching, and students seeking easy courses and failing to study adequately, the fact that students’ brains tend to function at such a low level of efficiency is also highly relevant. Something is seriously wrong with this picture, and we think it has a lot to do with the lack of control kids have going into college, and the fact that their brains have not been allowed to mature effectively.19
Is your kid ready to manage the alternate universe that is college life in America? This is a question that it takes courage to ask—and one that we wish more parents were asking. In this chapter, we’ll help you prepare your kids for college in a way that develops their sense of control, and we’ll give you ideas for what to do if they’re just not ready. But first, you may need to change your own thinking about college.
College Is Not an Entitlement
For many kids, college is a really expensive party. They are usually excited to go, but they look at us blankly when we speak about the long hours they’ll need to spend studying.
Todd was bright, and his high SAT scores got him into an excellent school in the Northeast. But all his accomplishments in high school depended on the structure his parents provided. They hounded him to go to bed at night, dragged him out of bed in the morning, restricted his use of television and electronic games, and tried to police his homework. When he went to college and that structure was removed, it all came crashing down. We weren’t surprised when Todd was placed on academic probation after his first semester. That summer he was placed on academic leave and was required to take a semester off. It ultimately took two more false starts—and a lot of emotional and financial resources from his parents—for Todd to finish college.
We see lots of kids every year who, like Todd, go off to college before they can independently get themselves into or out of bed, manage their own academic work, hold a part-time job, or regulate their use of their cell phone, video games, and other electronic entertainment. Many of them have had parents or guidance counselors who have essentially force-marched them down the straight path to college, reinforcing the idea that it’s more important to try to make kids do well than to help them truly understand that they are responsible for their own lives.
We need to overhaul the way we think about college. Currently, in many middle-class and upper-middle-class families, it’s seen as an entitlement, not something that’s earned. Bill frequently hears parents say things like, “I know he’s not ready for college, but I can’t talk him out of going”—as if it were a God-given right. Parents should consider sending their kid to college just as they’d consider a business investment—because it is a huge investment. Youth may be wasted on the young, but that’s nothing like the education misspent on students who are not yet ready to learn. Would you invest $50,000 for each of the next four years in a company without a proven track record of sound decision making? Of course not. So don’t invest money in an experience a kid isn’t ready for. Almost 50 percent of the students who enroll in four-year colleges don’t graduate.20 And when they don’t, it’s painful to the kids and costly to their parents. Kids who attend a four-year college for two or three years commonly have nothing to show for it beyond their student loans. We’ve seen way too many parents who have not saved for retirement because they’ve put that money into their child’s education instead. This is a serious financial decision with real consequences for everyone in the family, so we need to be smart about it.
Do They Go or Do They Gap? (How to Tell if They’re Ready)
There are many reasons why adolescents might not be ready to go to college right after high school. They may lack the adequate academic skills. They may lack self-awareness or self-regulation skills, or struggle with anxiety or depression. They may not be ready to manage the details of
living independently. Or they may be burned out from four years of going pedal to the metal in high school. They may be prone to social isolation. Or their brains simply may not be developed enough. Remember, just as kids develop physically at different rates, the same is true of their brains.
Some questions to ask when determining your child’s college readiness include:
Does your child accept responsibility for his own life?
Who initiated the college search? If a student is not able to complete his applications and college essay independently, or with some help that he seeks out, he is probably not ready to start college. Some kids are so sheltered that they reach the age of seventeen without much of a sense of how to take care of themselves—or even what it would take to do so. Can you really send your child to live on his own in an unregulated environment if he’s never once thought of taking care of his laundry or cooking a meal? Ned once tutored a kid who had no idea what a sieve was. “Oh,” Ned said, “it’s like a colander.” The kid looked at Ned blankly. “You know,” Ned said encouragingly, “if you’re making spaghetti, after it cooks you put it in the colander to drain the water out. It’s that metal thing with the holes in the bottom.”
“I don’t cook. No one in my family does,” the kid said.
“Wow, you must eat out a lot,” Ned mused.
“Duh, Ned,” the boy replied, “we have a housekeeper.”
The Self-Driven Child Page 29