How Much Should Parents Help With College Essays?

More than nothing. Less than you are tempted to. And in a different role than the one you are about to assume. That is the honest job description for a parent in essay season, and the hardest part is the reach you will have to resist.

Here is what happens when parents help too much, and we say this gently, because it comes from love every single time. The sentences get longer. The vocabulary goes up a decade. The rough edges that made the writing sound seventeen get sanded into something that sounds like a cover letter, and an admissions reader, who reads thousands of these, clocks the second voice in about a paragraph. The essay does not get rejected for it. It just stops working, quietly, the way a forged signature stops working.

The role that actually helps is closer to witness than editor. You have watched this kid for seventeen years. You remember the week they rebuilt the science project at two in the morning, the strange loyalty to a losing team, the sentence they said at eleven that the whole family still quotes. Offer the memories and let your student decide what they mean. That is real help, and no counselor can replicate it, including us.

There is a timing rule too, and it saves marriages. Do not read draft one. Draft one is a private conversation between the student and the page, and feedback that early edits an essay that does not exist yet. Wait for draft two, then answer one question only: what do you still remember an hour later? Say that, resist the pen, and go make dinner.

The season will test you. Deadlines make loving people grabby. But the application is the first document of your student’s adult life, and the best gift a parent gives it is fingerprints that belong to the kid.