This one’s for parents of high school seniors looking ahead to college. Or grandparents. Or aunts, uncles, and friends — anyone who cares about a college-bound senior in high school.

You’re in an exciting season. Acceptance letters are arriving. Decisions are being made. It feels like the culmination of 18 years of work — yours and theirs. You are both on an intense emotional roller coaster. The anxiety of acceptances and the disappointment of rejections. But that’s not what I want to talk about here.

That struggle is often visible. We think we know what it looks like, and we tend to feel prepared for it.

I want to talk about something else.

What No One is Watching

Once your child is admitted to college, something shifts. Suddenly, you are both being courted. You are subject to an intense sales campaign. Schools roll out the red carpet — admitted-students weekends, receptions, swag, stickers, banners, and endless reminders of how special your child is and how much they “belong here” – all designed to convert your child from an “accepted student” to an “enrolled student.”

After a year of feeling like you were begging to get in from the outside, the emotional energy flips in the second semester of senior year. You hold the cards. It feels good. It’s fun.

Meanwhile back in high school, it’s award season. Senior nights. Banquets. Speeches. Trophies. Applause.

For the girls, bed-decorating parties. For the boys, fraternity rush has already started. And it’s all playing out publicly on social media.

Then the grad-party season. Calendars fill up fast. Choice dates are negotiated, and the gifts start pouring in from all the fans and supporters who have been on this journey with you. Your kid finally gets to put on the well-earned sweatshirt.

It feels good. It’s fun.

And behind all of this celebration, your child is being sold a very specific story:

You are about to have the best four years of your life!

We’ve told them that. We sincerely believe it, don’t we? If only we could go back and do it all again!

But while all of this is happening outside them, something very different may be happening inside.

The Reality of the First Semester

In just a few months your child will leave the highly structured life you’ve curated for them — a day-to-day environment you still largely control.

They’re about to enter a world that is far less structured and far less supervised. Where no one will check if they go to class. No one will tell them where to be or when to be there. No one may notice if they’re drifting. They enter this world as legal adults, which means you are legally barred from most of the helicoptering and snowplowing you and they are accustomed to.

They’re entering a world saturated with alcohol and drugs — far beyond what most of us experienced in our day. Meanwhile, their brains are still years away from full development. The part responsible for planning, emotional regulation, delayed gratification, and rational decision-making? Yep, that part isn’t fully baked – it is literally biologically immature.

And perhaps most importantly, they will enter this new world without the friendship network they’ve navigated the past few years.

Even the highly socially skilled, outgoing kids — even the social stars — can feel deeply lonely for the first time in their lives. Even kids who pledge fraternities or join groups may suddenly have dozens of acquaintances but in their first semester have not yet made a single close friend.

Even kids who go to college with a lot of friends from high school may find those relationships turned upside down by dorm assignments, bid night, or just being in a different time and place.

But we did it. We survived. Maybe, but we did it in an entirely different world – one without social media overwhelming our yet undeveloped brains with every detail of every person from every corner of the world and every tragedy, aspiration, comparison set, and every dancing cat – all day, every minute of the day.

We’ve played a different reel for them. We recreate our “best of” memories, edited by decades of hindsight. When we talk about “the best four years of our lives,” we’re usually not remembering the first semester — before we met our lifelong friends, before we found our footing, before college eventually felt like home.

That first year of college is often lonely. Loneliness can fuel anxiety and anxiety can fuel depression and depression can end in suicide.

An Important Clarification Before I Go Further

Before I share something personal, I want to be very clear: I don’t believe there was one cause of Manny’s death by suicide. I don’t believe there was one conversation, one decision, or one missed moment that explains it all. I don’t think suicide works that way.

I think Manny fell from a very tall tower of anxiety and depression — a tower built from many contributing bricks, stacked over time, from which he concluded he could not climb down – and no one saw it.

But I do believe there are important lessons in studying the individual bricks of that tower so you can see what I did not.

One Lesson I Learned Too Late
Manny called me in late September of his freshman year and said he didn’t feel right — that he didn’t want to be there. He asked if he could transfer.

My response came straight from the baseball dugout life coach playbook.  A version of rub some dirt on it – let’s get through this first inning – you’re going to be amazing – you’re just homesick – look where you are – be grateful – be happy.

I suspect many parents would have given the same response.

In hindsight, I wish mine had been different. I minimized his pain. I reframed it to fit the story we had all been sold — that he was supposed to be having the time of his life, and that if he just pushed through, all would be great.

Looking back, I don’t see that phone call as the moment it all went wrong. But what I do see more clearly now is that the preparation for that moment should not have started in September. It should have started months earlier — during his senior year of high school — during the season filled with celebration and pride, when we were creating the illusion that everything was going to be amazing now that he finally got into his dream school.

Here’s the Takeaway

• Enjoy this senior-year celebration season. Buy the sweatshirt. Go to admitted-students weekend. Go to the parties. Celebrate your child’s accomplishments — and your own.
• And at the same time, talk about the entire picture of what’s ahead.Talk about how nobody posts the strikeouts — only the hits — while every baseball player knows most at-bats don’t end in a hit. Prepare them for the fact that college may be great and fun — but it will be a major adjustment, certainly at the beginning. Indeed, all beginnings are difficult. Tell them they may — very likely will — feel lonely, confused, or overwhelmed at times. And that this is understandable and a normal part of the growth and development that is supposed to happen in college.
• When you’re on campus together, go see the stadium, the dorm, the dining hall, the rec center. And also walk with them to the counseling center and the medical center. Touch the door. Go in if it’s open.Not because you think your child needs it now — but precisely because you think they don’t. You’re opening the door to those resources and those conversations before they’re needed.

• Talk about what happens when we feel lonely, depressed, or like we don’t want to be there … or even Here.  Let them know you are — and will remain — open to those conversations.
• Dig through the scraps on the editing-room floor of your college highlight reel. Pick one up and share it. Let them see that you too were human—that you had ups and downs, false starts, and moments that didn’t make the final cut of the stories they have been hearing.
• Put a note on your calendar for a few weeks after drop-off. Prepare yourself for the call when your child doesn’t sound quite right. And when the emails about mental health resources arrive from the school, don’t assume they’re “for someone else.”  Those emails are for you. Because your child’s mental health and risk of suicide are not, not your problem.
• And when that call comes, resist the urge to dismiss it or talk them out of how they’re feeling — or to remind them how much “fun they’re supposed to be having.” That’s part of the problem.

Why Timing Matters

The high school senior celebration season starts now and these last few months of high school actually give you something that will very soon be very rare: quality time together.

The car rides and the flights to those admitted-students weekends and visits to campus – that’s a precious opportunity to have these conversations.

August is too busy. By October, you’re too in it. And by December, as it was with Manny, it may be too late.

Preparation for the “I’m lonely and having a rough time” phone call doesn’t happen in the fall when you get the call.  It happens now — this semester of high school — somewhere between senior night and graduation parties.

Walking through the college campus gate in that new sweatshirt with a more honest and complete story of what’s on the other side — beyond the story they’ve been sold — will feel good.

And it just may be what allows them to reach the fun beyond that first semester.

For help having difficult conversations about mental health and suicide  [INFORMAITON ABOUT MANNY’S BAND PRACTICE]