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As a coach, I know how important it is for me to build a trusting relationship with my clients.

My students need to trust me to share their struggles and vulnerabilities so we can tackle these challenges together.  My goal is to establish a trusting relationship so that as an adult (other than their parent), so I can provide meaningful suggestions and support to help my clients navigate college life with ADHD. 

So many parents I talk to are over managing their son's or daughter's life. They feel incredibly lucky, proud, and relieved, to have gotten their child through high school graduation, so when the first year of college comes around, they are just as ready to be free from micro-managing their kid's life as their college-bound young adult is to embrace the liberating freedoms of adulthood.

The first two years of college are not exactly the most compelling in terms of course content. Most General Education curriculums, while valuable for building a foundation for higher order critical thinking skills, are kind of boring, TBH. Most students do not fail to notice that the first two years feel a bit like high school again with its repetition of History, Math, Science, and English requirements. For students who are compelled to learn based primarily on their interest in a topic, this can be a challenge, especially if they have not declared a major yet. If you're not especially interested in Environmental Science, then that course is simply going to be more challenging to learn. So how can a student who is struggling to connect with the material create more engagement (and better grades) with the content?

The beginning of the spring semester on a college campus feels very little like spring. With its January start date, most college students come back from winter holidays with suitcases jammed with thick sweaters and bulky hoodies, a wardrobe that suggests nothing of the fairer weather that mid-semester vacation plans promise. There is one thing about the spring semester that is consistent with the season, though, and that is a chance for a new beginning, a chance to hit the reset button on academic and personal goals.

Of all the things that college students have to master, the most important one, in my opinion, is how to master their time. One of my favorite things to say to students is, "Do your parents get to come home from work mid-day and watch a couple of hours of Netflix, take a nap, and play video games?"

Back in the day, one of my favorite productivity and quality-of-life gurus, Stephen Covey, coined the phrase, “Begin with the end in mind.” It’s so simple. Make sure you have a target, and visualize the look and feel of your outcome so that you can plan exactly how you will achieve it.

As parents, we are so motivated to protect our children and prevent any harm from coming their way, we focus less on their capacity for improvement and more on perceived threats to their growth and development; in other words, we focus on their weaknesses.

Whew! Congratulations! Another season of college parenting has come to an end.  You’ve dodged tackles, given locker room pep talks, and run offensive drills with your student for roughly 14 weeks. This long season began with a fresh and hopeful pre-season drop-off and continued with coaching from the sidelines about COVID safety and online learning. In the final quarter, you went #allin to get your student home safely at Thanksgiving and through finals week. Whether you have a Bulldog, an Owl, or a Tiger and the like, if you and your player aren't taking a well deserved nap right now, you should be. You parented through an especially hard-hitting season of college matriculation.

While some colleges and universities have decided to cancel final exams altogether, most are continuing with some form of comprehensive assessment for Fall 2020. There are also widely varying approaches to this from professor to professor and course to course at each institution. Some are giving a unit test; others are assigning large projects without an exam, while the old school adherents are sticking to the traditional cumulative exam (I was one of those professors).

Because of Covid-19 safety protocols, the last few weeks of 2020 pose a potential challenge for many college families.  College students are coming home for Thanksgiving, and in most cases, they will not return to their campuses until early to mid-January. It’s one thing to relish the nostalgic reunion, seasonal foods, and close family time inherent to the winter holidays.  It is another thing completely to pluck a young adult who has been practicing independent living for four months out of their new habitat and insert them back into the highly structured setting of family life for an extended length of time

Let’s face it, Spring 2020 was just a practice round for this whole “Online College: Pandemic Edition” experience. Now that we are firmly into Fall 2020, things are getting real, and students are witnessing what this new normal might look and feel like long-term. The popular Redbubble sticker and IG meme, “Zoom University,” is taking on (sur)real meaning.

As a parent of two young adults and a teen and as a College Student Success Coach, I find a lot of wisdom and encouragement from the classic Healthy Parenting Scale developed by Diana Baumrind . She distinguished between authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting. (Her colleagues expanded her work to include Abusive and Neglectful Parenting and Pathological types at a later time.) For our purposes in this edition of my blog, we are focused on what differentiates the original three styles. The primary difference is degrees of control.

The semester is finally over. Everyone breathes a deep sigh of relief; students and parents are ready to jump off of the not-so-merry-go-round of the academic year that was defined by a global pandemic. As much as you want to put on the summer break mindset or look forward to what we hope will be the better days of Fall 2020, there's one thing you must do before mentally and emotionally wrapping up Spring 2020.

When you were in school, what was your "go to" way to study? Did you employ the "read over your notes" method? How about the flashcard technique? Or maybe you were just an "all-nighter crammer." Of course, there's the "highlight everything" method. There are so many wrong ways to choose from; although, flash cards do earn an honorable mention. It's funny how we create these methods of learning without knowing much at all about how learning actually works.

Place is such an important element in building a living situation that supports learning. Our brains are wired for all kinds of connections, and the places we frequent and what those spaces are designed for send strong messages to us about how we behave in them. Beds are for sleeping. Gyms are for exercising. Classrooms are for learning. Hospitals are for healing. What spaces are reserved only for lucubrating? (Ask your student if they have lucubrated lately. It's a fun word to know when you have a college student.)

When my kids were younger (they are 22, 20, and 13 now!), one of our favorite family night movies was the Disney Pixar film Meet the Robinsons. Do you know this one, about Lewis, the intellectually curious little boy who grows up in an orphanage and shares a room with Mike "Goob" Yagoobian, who is reserved, unsure, and completely dejected? The two boys are different in every way other than their deep desires to have a family. Lewis channels his energy into inventing time machines and attempting to impress potential parents with his original designs (PB&J Maker, anyone?).