Daughter may not be ready for college? Wellesley

Excellent distinction Proud Patriot. But I have seen many students with anxiety the disease go to college and graduate and even thrive. Accommodations help a lot, as does medication and counseling. If it is chronic rather than temporary, there is no assurance that time out will help or hurt. The family would know best as you said. It also works fine to do college p/t, commute, do school online or through low residency, all kinds of options. But those can come after trying a traditional path as well as instead of…

Our tuition refund insurance did not require hospitalization. But that may have applied only to disorders like bipolar 1 or schizophrenia, I don’t remember.

@compmom - I have also seen kids with the disease go to college and thrive. My concern with the OPs daughter is whether she has the coping skills to go in August. It may help her to wait a year and go when she does have them. Perhaps she can develop them over the summer. I think only she, her therapist, and her parents can make that decision.

“I think a deferral could be a life-changing mistake.”

Can you describe what you mean? I have never met anyone in the OP’s position whose life was negatively impacted by a gap year.

A lot of the posters have made great points thus far! I agree wholeheartedly that you should definitely try to include her mental health professionals/resources in the process of helping her make this decision.

Some things you all should think through are:

  • her previous academic preparation. If she did IB, she will probably whiz through the academics. If her high school was rigorous, she will probably be fine with the academics. If she went to a less rigorous high school (even if she was at the top of her class), with the added burdens of depression and anxiety she could potentially have a VERY hard time at Wellesley, academically. If she hasn't been challenged academically before her entrance to Wellesley, it's really kind of a toss up as to how she will react once it starts happening. Some will bounce back from their failures and rise to meet the (often truly ridiculous) demands of academic life, and some will come to see these failures as indicative of their own inadequacy and crumble under the pressure.
  • her ability to develop an academic support system & academic 'networking' skills. Is she the type of person who reaches out for help when she needs it? Does she ask lots of questions? Do you think she would be comfortable talking one on one with professors with multiple degrees from Ivy League universities? It sounds silly, but that can be VERY intimidating. Especially if you are not confident in yourself (academically or otherwise), and already have social anxiety. If she ever has a problem in her classes, she will need to be able to talk to her professors about it. And sure, she could get a tutor from the PLTC (which would be another student rather than a professor), but even that requires meeting with and getting a form signed by a professor first. And to be honest, she should be not only getting help from her professors on her coursework, but actually befriending them, since they will be the ones recommending her for opportunities, supporting her job-search, etc. But if that's not possible for her, then at the very least, she should be able to ask for help from them. Most professors at Wellesley are very kind and do their best to be approachable, but I can guarantee that that doesn't matter much to someone who feels unworthy of or overwhelmed by their attention.
  • her ability to develop a social support system. You mentioned she doesn't currently have many friends. Does she normally have difficulty making friends? Does she have difficulty making friends with other girls? This may not be a deal-breaker on its own, of course, since a lot of kids blossom socially during their college years. However, it can also be really difficult to muster up the energy to socialize when you're being steam-rolled by the academic struggle-bus. The best thing for her might be to immediately, when she gets there (whether it is this year, or the next), start a study group with other girls in her classes. This will help her to create a social support system that doubles as an academic support system; it will also help her stay in front of her school work, and realize that other girls struggle to keep up with the work, too (because they do, even if it doesn't seem like it). The one thing that can really hinder a girl like her is isolation. Feeling isolated will make it difficult for her to perform academically (she might scrape by, but she won't perform at her best) on top of making it borderline impossible to feel happy there. Having a mother that loves her and will listen to her complain on the phone every once in a while is wonderful, but it will not replace the support of peers who enjoy her company.

She’s lucky because as a freshman, she’ll be shadow-graded (when I was a freshman, this was not the case). A lot of students do poorly their first semester, especially if they lacked adequate college preparation, and shadow-grading is Wellesley’s answer to that. She won’t have to worry too much about her first semester grades, and will be able to try out more difficult coursework without worrying about it impacting her GPA. She should think of the first semester as a tutorial semester; four months to learn the game, and how it is played.

Also, is she already on medication for her anxiety and depression? If she’s not, and she thinks she might be interested in starting on it, she should definitely defer (in my opinion). The last thing that you want is for her to be trying out a whole bunch of different medications while trying to manage all of the new stressors of the college environment. Treating depression and anxiety is, as I’m sure you know, not as easy as popping a pill. Pills have side effects, and often take long time to kick in. It can take months to find one that actually works for any specific person, or who knows, the first one she tries might work perfectly. It’s all highly variable, and it would be best for her to already be stable and on a medication that works for her, if she is going to go that route.

As a final note, I am someone who did everything wrong; so note that all of this advice is tainted with my own bias. I was forced (by my parents) to go to Wellesley when I was not ready. I was emotionally fragile and my depression was as of yet undiagnosed. With a LOT of support from the Stone Center and my class deans, I got through it with a slightly above average GPA. But it was not a happy experience, and I feel like I have very little to show for it in terms of friendships, internships, and/or feel-good memories. I felt like I was being steam-rolled almost the entire time. And that’s not because it’s a bad school; I thought often about how if I was just… in a better place, I might have been happy there. But I wasn’t, because I was not ready.

(Also, I hope I haven’t scared you too much with my account of my own experience. I just graduated, so it’s still pretty raw, but I assure you that I am doing fine, and even so, my experience seems to be VERY rare among Wellesley grads. Most new grads are absolutely bursting with love for the school, so I’m of the impression that it was mostly my own issues that made it so difficult, rather than anything wrong with the college itself. Just want to make that extra clear.)

You know your daughter better than I do, and you understand the extent of her illness. You are more equipped than anyone in this forum to say whether her level of anxiety is normal or not. Just know that there is nothing wrong with taking some extra time to nurture oneself! And there are lots of reputable programs that can serve as a nice intermediary for someone in her position, should she choose to take a gap year. I literally made an account to tell you this, because it’s something that I so desperately wish someone had told my own parents. I am taking my time now, although if I had done it earlier, I can see how my entire college experience might have been different.

Anyway, enough rambling from me. I feel deeply for both of you, and send you my sincerest well-wishes.

I think a lot of the advice here has been good and you know your child best, so observing her over the next several weeks and discussing the issues with the therapist will hopefully make the decision more clear. Even though she needs some professional help now and likely will in the future, it sounds like the majority of her fears and worries are pretty typical of students in her position, especially going to a place like Wellesley. However, it sounds like they have a lot of supports in place at the college and I think you can do a lot to get things set up to help her.

Even though her symptoms may end up being too severe and her functioning may turn out to suggest that she is not ready for college this year, in general, when treating anxiety, the most effective interventions involve facing the anxiety provoking situations (with the right supports of course) and learning over time that one can learn to handle them. That can be very empowering and lead to a lot of growth. Obviously each person is different in terms of when they decide to take on the challenges associated with facing fears.

My daughter also has some moderate anxiety at times and is starting at a somewhat similar college this fall. One thing that has helped tremendously is that she got involved in the Facebook group for students attending her college. She has made connections with a few people, has learned that she has much in common with some incoming students, and made a good friend with whom she texts every day. They have decided to be roommates too. While it remains to be seen how close they will be down the road, it has been fun for her to have people to learn about this summer and is making her much more excited to get to campus to meet them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/fashion/fear-of-failure.html

@compmom – I think that article deserves an entire thread to itself. It’s such an issue these days (actually, since time began but it seems especially relevant today) and I’m just as guilty as any other parent.

@droppedit a thread was started in the College Life subforum but didn’t get as much reaction there as it might have in the Parents Forum: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-life/2000594-on-campus-failure-is-on-the-syllabus.html#latest

droppedit maybe you’d like to start one! (My kids have had significant challenges including a life threatening injury with a long recovery. I do not suggest this way to deal with the issue but it does give them a mature perspective._

I’m wondering to what extent the crippling anxiety so many students are feeling is due to the fact they weren’t encouraged to go off on their own some during their high school years. Both my sons were involved in scouting, which entailed, initially, overnight trips close to home, then weekend trips an hour from home, and then 2 week summer trips on the other side of the country. My older son, now a rising college senior, had no issues adjusting to college, but we were determined that college was not going to be his first experience on his own. We have a peer who could never understand how we let our sons do these things. At 21, her son insisted on his mother accompanying him to the dr. I think it was a failure of parenting.

@CTDadof2, when my daughter was a HS sophomore, she spent six months in Spain, living with a family who spoke NO English and going to a local public school. She thrived over there, but was diagnosed with anxiety a year and a half later. So she certainly went off on her own! She said the atmosphere in her high school was just really tough - so much pressure to do well and go to “top colleges.” I wish we could get rid of that term!

Anxiety, like other brain conditions, has a strong genetic component. Please don’t look at it as resulting from coddling or a failure of parenting.

I think anxiety is a problem that ranges in degree of severity from individually manageable and low threshold up to a diagnosed mental condition. I don’t mean to dismiss a legitimate diagnosis. I remember from my own time in college some students didn’t return from Columbus Day weekend freshman year because they just weren’t able to adjust to their new environs. We lacked the vocabulary then, maybe it was severe anxiety.

It really isn’t useful to judge others. Once I had three kids instead of one, I learned not to do that!

Clinical anxiety is a very physiological condition and I don’t think going away from home or not going away from home is relevant at all. Experiences away from home might make a kid less nervous about going away to college (or not), but nervousness is different from clinical anxiety.

I think there’s a rush to grasp at diagnoses for problems which are multi-faceted and not easily understood. ADD and fibromyalgia come to mind. Worried people want to hear a doctor give a label to something they’re trying to understand, and the vulnerable can be hurt this way. I’m worried that these diagnoses are common now, when they weren’t commonly made back when I was college age. Has the population changed that much in a generation, is the medical community better at diagnosing problems previously overlooked, or is the college age population just more medically fragile now? I don’t pretend to have an answer.