We just did a dry run for a college application (in this case applying to a summer program with one very short essay) and folks – it was rough.
To begin with, S25 hates writing. He manages well enough at school with the paint-by-numbers approach taught in AP courses but doesn’t enjoy it and tends to put off writing assignments until the last minute – and then glower his way through them.
Writing a personal essay seems to send him into a new circle of hell. We sat down yesterday to brainstorm an outline for his essay about a summer he spent in France. Getting him to reflect on his experience and talk about it was already painful – he was impatient and sour for most of the time. But I asked a lot of leading questions and helped him pull together an outline. When it came time to write the actual essay, somehow the whole was less than the sum of the parts. It felt lifeless – uninspired – repetitive. The funny anecdotes he remembered didn’t make it into the essay, or did so in such abbreviated form as to be unrecognizable. The conclusions he drew were facile. It was impossible to read this and divine anything about my kid other than a vague sense of going through the motions.
I’m trying to get him to edit it and getting a lot of pushback. But people – if this program is in any way competitive, he’s not going to look very strong. And this is just a taste of what it will be like when he starts having to work on college essays in a couple of months.
So, my sense is that we have a multi-layered problem:
a) he generally doesn’t like communicating in writing – which is a fundamental life skill that he will need to master.
b) he doesn’t like revealing things about himself and seems deeply cynical about personal statements in general. But this means people don’t really get to know him.
And also (trying not to catastrophize here, which is why I’m dumping this into an online forum instead of having this conversation with my husband): I worry that
c) somehow he really isn’t very reflective. I don’t think he talks about feelings and experiences with his friends. He sure doesn’t like to reflect about things with us. We get little flashes here and there, doled out unpredictably. But if he’s not processing life experiences either orally or in writing – if I can only get him to do so by effectively interviewing him, and even then he groans and acts tortured – what does this mean for his ability to understand himself and grow?
Oh, and how the hell are we going to get through college admissions in one piece?
Disclaimers: no, he doesn’t have any kind of documented learning disability. He’s not on the spectrum (we just had an updated psych-educational evaluation). His verbal IQ scores are in fact really high across the board. He learned to read at age 3 and would sit with a stack of books for hours from a very early age. In fact he preferred reading to most other activities, at least until screens crept into his life. (Curse the screens.) He does have mild ADHD. But as a fellow ADHDer, I tend to process things verbally – in conversations with a friend, in writing, in talking to myself even. I don’t think I was an outstanding writer as a kid but I don’t ever remember being reluctant to write the way he is, or reluctant to process things.
He was similarly taciturn during our one attempt at therapy at a younger age and resents even the quarterly meetings with his psychiatrist to get his meds updated (because she asks him questions about himself.)
One unfortunate side effect of this reluctance to disclose/communicate with other people about his experiences: his teachers really don’t know him, and so getting meaningful recommendations from them is going to be a bit of an uphill battle.
Would love to know if anyone else’s kid has been in a similar place. I don’t think that this is as simple as hiring a writing tutor although it’s something I’m exploring. The problems feel so fundamental.
