The Neurotic Parent

I had a lovely weekend.  I cheered the inspirational runners of the LA marathon as they paraded through my own neighborhood.  I won a wine tasting at a silent auction for an excellent cause.  And I attended a book swap/Scrabble event at the cool home of a gracious friend in Venice.  But at every stop along the way, I ran into the nervous parents of high school seniors.  Most of their kids have already received several acceptances, and most have excellent choices, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Berkeley, WashU, Syracuse, Indiana and UC Santa Cruz.  According to their parents, several of the acceptees are thrilled with their current options.  But most are still waiting to hear from a dream school or two. 

One mom on the sidelines of the marathon said her son really wanted Brown, but then added that she herself really wanted a pony.  Another parent said her child had attended several accepted-student events, but remained obsessed with Wesleyan, a super reach.  A couple at the Scrabble gathering had driven down to San Diego to show their son San Diego State in case he didn't get accepted to USC, his dream school.  But the tour guide had used the word "conveniency" three times, and that turned the whole family off.  

The Neurotic Parent Institute was on the verge of funding a study to determine whether, in the case of college admissions, the desire for something better than the bird in hand is classic human nature.  But after speaking to the parent of nearly-perfect student (All As, two 800s on the SATs and two more on the subject tests), who was shockingly rejected from MIT, the Institute has formulated a different theory.  "He worked so hard," said the dad, whose son had an internship in a bio-medical ethics lab at UCLA and had won contests in fields I had never heard of and cannot pronounce.  Another mom, whose daughter is waiting to hear whether her Penn deferral will be reversed, echoed this sentiment: "She deserves to get it because she had no life all through high school."

So it's not just prestige or "wanting something better" for our children that makes us crazed in this process.  It's the idea that our kids spent hours studying for AP exam after AP exam, attending debate after debate, robotics competition after robotics competition, and then, for whatever lame, crapshooty reason, the "top" schools didn't want them.

The Neurotic Parent has a solution to the "He Worked So Hard and Sacrificed His Childhood Syndrome": encourage your children to slack off a little.  Let them sleep late and have some other sucker be president of the chess club.  Spend a weekend playing video games.  That way, when your son or daughter gets turned down, you can say that at least she had a life in high school, and she will now be going off to a fine school like Wisconsin where she will get a great education and get to have a life in college as well.

"Finding employment is extremely difficult for today's college graduate," Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) said. "Our current economy offers few options for the millions of young men and women desperate to join the workforce."

"Were we to freeze these graduates at the height of vigor and ambition, however, there's a chance we could revive them during a more prosperous time," Hutchinson continued. "When the economy finally bounces back.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_college_graduates_to_be

Two nights ago I received a call from the mom of MUNC (Model UN Champ), asking me to recommend a hotel in Nashville, TN.  Yes, once again it's that time of year: another crop of juniors are donning their Northface jackets and traipsing across the country in search of the perfect place to investigate the impact of globalization.

After a brief discussion about Marriotts vs. Hampton Inns, MUNC's mom realized, in horror, that she had booked all the wrong flights on all the wrong dates, because she had incorrectly calculated the start of the Passover holiday.   This was particularly distressing because her more-competent daughter had secured the last spots on two out of three college tours. 

First CTAT score:  1570 (thanks to a very low percentile on the Holiday Comprehension/Calendar Reasoning Skills section)

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The Neurotic Parent told MUNC's mom to be thankful that she had booked all travel on Delta, which gives you the option of a "morning-after pill" of sorts, allowing a full refund for any flight you have booked within the last 24 hours.  And luckily MUNC is only visiting three schools on this trip – Vanderbilt, Duke and Emory (she already loves Georgetown) – so rebooking was not the nightmare I experienced when I had to change my entire eight-state itinerary after discovering the Northwestern was on Spring Break the date we had originally scheduled to visit…It was comforting for MUNC's mom to learn that arranging college tours is a challenge, even to the Neurotic Parent.

So we started over, attempting to reserve tours, hotels and reasonably-priced flights with minimal layovers.  Ninety minutes later we had a plan that seemed to work, until we discovered that Emory did not have room on their 3/31 morning tour and Vanderbilt had no information session space at all on Good Friday.  Plus, the only conveniently-scheduled flight from Nashville to Atlanta was on a tiny Cessna turbo-prop on an oddly-named regional airline that neither of us had heard of, called Pacific Wings – I kid you not.  We decided to take a break and continue our tour planning in the morning.

Second CTAT score: 1830 (because of a disappointing performance in Southern Tour Scheduling Skills)

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The next morning, we booted up our computers and got on the phone, each with two #2 pencils and a TI calculator.  Our perseverence paid off.  We ended up with a not-too-hectic schedule that saved $366 on flights, $40 on hotels and seven hours of traveling time when compared to the original itinerary.  In the end, we did have to include the Pacific Wings flight, but we determined that it was okay after we checked its safety record…The alternative would have been a four-hour road trip through Chattanooga, which MUNC's mom refused to attempt because she hates driving in the rain, and she was convinced that it will definitely be raining in Tennessee on the afternoon of March 30th.  But other than one undesired travel leg, MUNC's mom was thrilled with her final CTAT score: 2260, good enough to earn MUNC admission on a tour at any highly selective college.