March can be the cruelest month for families with seniors applying to college. Students can face rejections they didn’t expect, and that nobody can explain.

Parents, you have one job: Create the most supportive home environment as you can, ideally before decisions come out. Your goal is to reinforce that your child’s merit and worth is not determined by the 12 minutes that admission officers take on average to review your child’s application. Instead, it is the 12 years of effort they have put in towards their studies, extracurriculars, and family commitments that make them ready to thrive in college. The colleges that admit them will be lucky to have them.

What To Do Before Decisions Come

But what’s a good way to do this? I offer the following advice:

Act Relaxed: It is natural for parents to be just as anxious as their child about admission results. But if you act overly tense at home, that tension will be apparent to your child, making them worry more. The more relaxed you act about admissions, the more relaxed your child is likely to be.
Maintain Open Communication: While you should act relaxed, make sure your child knows that they can come to you with any worries or concerns about upcoming decisions. If they do, validate their feelings, and empathize with them that this is a major moment in their lives.
Acknowledge their effort: Your child may have spent hours on each application, working to get their essays just right. Let them know you are proud of that effort and all the effort in school leading up to that.
Your opinion of them won’t change: Reassure them that your opinion of them won’t change one bit no matter what the decisions are. Remind them of their unique talents and qualities that make them what they are.
Keep enjoying life: Plan enjoyable activities during March the same way you would any other month. It could be a family dinner out, outdoor activities such as hiking, or seeing the latest movie together. Don’t make these activities contingent upon getting good results.
Setbacks are part of life: It’s natural for students to hope for acceptances from all colleges, especially reaches. You can agree that scenario would be wonderful, but temper that expectation by saying it may not happen. Rejections occur for qualified applicants, because highly selective colleges have far more qualified applicants than room to accept them all.

Handling Unfavorable Decisions

The vast majority of seniors applying to selective colleges will get unfavorable decisions. If that happens to your child, here’s how to support them:

Be excited for the acceptances: If you followed my advice on how to create the perfect college list, every college your child applied to was one they were willing to attend. Be excited for every acceptance your child gets, including the safeties.
Sympathize: For the waitlists and rejections, sympathize with your child, but only for a while. A few days of disappointment is ok, but dwelling on them for weeks doesn’t help.
Help your child move on: By mid-April, you should be guiding your child towards getting mentally ready to attend one of the colleges that accepted them. This doesn’t preclude getting on waitlists (a topic for a future post), but they shouldn’t expect to attend one of their waitlists.
Where You Go Is Not What You’ll Be: This is a title of a Frank Bruni book that would have been ideal reading two years ago. But now, a key takeaway is that your child’s success will mostly be determined by their drive, not which college they attend. For example, the CEO of one of the most valuable companies, Apple, went to Auburn. The CEO of the US company with the most employees, WalMart, went to the University of Arkansas. Successful people come from every type of college.