Keeping your family steady

This process will take more of you than you expect. It takes up psychological room. It sits in the background of your fall and your winter, and it has a way of turning ordinary evenings into logistics meetings (and ordinary car rides into silent protests). Knowing that going in helps a little, because you stop being surprised by it.

Find other things to talk about

There will always be a high school conversation available, always, and the urge to make it the only one is strong. Resist it. A quiet teenager is not an invitation to ask whether they've thought more about their essays, or about the school on the bubble, or where that enigmatic kid in their friend group wants to go.

Protect some fall fun

Put a couple of family outings on the calendar before the season fills up, or, if you're a houseful of introverts, some unstructured quiet time with nothing to accomplish. And adjust your expectations about big trips: the weeks before the January deadlines tend to get eaten by essays and decisions.

Divide the labor

When a student has more than one parenting adult in the picture, give one of you the logistics (the calendars, the deadlines, the forms) and the other the essays and the kid-facing work. Trying to do all of it together, hovering over every detail, is how families end up snapping at each other in the car. And don't let the admissions project crowd out the relationship underneath it. If you're parenting with a partner, an occasional ice cream date (shout out Mitchell's) keeps you steady enough to support your kid.

Expect it to test you

If you haven't run a big project together as a family before, this will be eye-opening. Tempers get short. The stakes feel enormous because you love your kid. Try to remember, out loud and often, that you're on the same side, and that the goal is a good outcome for one specific teenager you happen to love, not a flawless process.

That's most of what we've got, and we're wary of pretending it's more solvable than it is. You'll probably lose your cool at least once. So will your kid. That comes with doing a hard thing that matters to you. So be a little gentler with each other than feels necessary, especially in the weeks when it's at its worst.