You're More Nervous About College Admission Decisions Than Your Kid Is

You told yourself you weren't going to be this parent.

You were going to be relaxed. Supportive. You read the articles about not tying your child's worth to an acceptance letter. You nodded along. You meant it. And now it's March, and you've googled "when do UC admission decisions come out" for the third time this week, as if the date might have changed since Tuesday. Your seventeen-year-old is on the couch watching something on their phone like a person who doesn't have a care in the world, and you want to scream.

But you haven’t screamed. You've said things like "just checking in" and "have you heard anything?" and "I'm not asking to pressure you, I'm just asking." You have, at some point, found yourself deep in a Reddit thread where strangers' teenagers are speculating about decision waves and release dates, and somehow it felt like intelligence gathering.

Meanwhile, your partner is doing one of two things. Either they're matching your energy, which means you're both spiraling in tandem and calling it teamwork. Or they're performing a calm so aggressive it makes you want to throw something. "It'll work out however it works out." Great. Thank you. That's very helpful. Please say that one more time so I can feel crazy for caring.

The Part Nobody Warns You About

It's a compressed insanity, and no one is really naming that. Decisions are landing. Waitlists and deferrals are landing, which in some ways are harder because they extend the uncertainty. Offers need to be accepted or declined. Financial aid packages need to be compared. Graduation is around the corner. And all of this is happening while you're still parenting, still working, still managing everything else that doesn't pause because your family is in transition.

It's a lot. It's allowed to feel like a lot.

Here's the other thing about this season that doesn't make it into the parenting books: it's not really about the school. You know that. You're a thoughtful person who understands that your kid will be fine at any number of places. You can say that sentence out loud and believe it.

But your body is running a different calculation. Your body is doing math that has nothing to do with U.S. News rankings. It's calculating distance. It's calculating the last time your house will sound like this, with the footsteps and the half-finished cereal bowls and the bathroom door slamming at hours that make no sense. It's calculating how many more times you'll hear them shout at their friends while gaming from the other room.

That's the part that gets you. Not the admissions decision. The leaving.

And because that's too big to sit with in March, when you're also managing work and taxes and possibly your own parents' increasing needs, it comes out sideways. It comes out as obsessing over whether the essay was good enough. Whether you should have pushed harder for the test prep. Whether you did enough. Whether you were enough.

The Couple Thing

If you're in a partnership, there's a possibly a version of this that's playing out between the two of you that neither of you has named.

One of you is holding the anxiety visibly. Researching schools, talking to other parents, tracking deadlines. The other has pulled back, either because they process differently or because your visible anxiety has taken up all the available space. You've started to read each other's coping strategies as character flaws. Their calm looks like indifference. Your concern looks like control.

You're not actually fighting about whether to visit campus again. You're fighting about how to metabolize the fact that your family is about to change shape, and you don't have a shared language for that yet.

And if you're doing this without a partner, or co-parenting across two households, there's a different layer entirely. Who does the dorm move-in? Both of you? How is graduation going to look? The prom parent photo gathering where you're standing three feet from someone you used to be married to, performing normalcy for an audience of other parents' iPhones. Every milestone becomes a logistical negotiation that's also an emotional one, and there's no version of it that isn't at least a little uncomfortable.

What's Actually Happening

Most of the discomfort you're feeling right now isn't about admissions. It's your nervous system responding to an impending separation that it can't control and can't prevent. The body doesn't distinguish between "my child is leaving for college" and "something important is being taken from me." It just registers the loss. The activation you feel, the sleeplessness, the disproportionate reactions to small things, that's not you being dramatic. That's a body preparing for a transition it hasn't fully processed yet.

And if you grew up in a home where transitions weren't handled well, where departures were chaotic or feelings weren't discussed, your system may be borrowing from old material. The intensity you're feeling now might not be entirely about this March. Some of it might be much older.

You don't have to resolve that right now. But it's worth noticing.

For What It's Worth

Your kid is going to get in somewhere, and they're going to leave, and the house is going to be quieter than you're ready for. That's real. You're allowed to feel the weight of it without packaging it into something productive.

And if your kid didn't get into their dream school, that's a whole other thing. It brings up its own grief, its own second-guessing, its own version of "did I do enough." These things often work themselves out in ways you can't see yet, but that's not particularly comforting in March.

What's worth saying is this: all of it is valid. The anxiety, the grief, the awkwardness, the disproportionate reaction to your kid leaving a cereal bowl in the sink again. You don't have to resolve any of it right now. And you don't have to sit in it alone.

If something here landed, I'd be glad to talk.

Margaret Sigel is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) in Santa Monica, California, specializing in somatic therapy for anxiety, trauma, and burnout. She works with adults in person and online throughout California.