The College Counseling Mom Podcast: It’s Fine, I’m Fine, My Kid’s in High School.

Your kid's course schedule is one of the very first things a college looks at, and it is the single biggest piece of the application you actually get to shape on purpose. Not the test score. Not the essay. The classes.

And it is not just a senior thing. Every year of high school, that schedule is telling a story. In this episode I walk you through what that story should sound like, grade by grade, freshman through senior, with one r...

Six moms hit reply on my last email asking the exact same question: which test should my kid even take, the SAT or the ACT? It is the right question, and almost nobody asks it early enough.

In this episode I give you the honest truth about both tests in 2026, starting with the fact that almost everything you remember about them is wrong now. Both tests got shorter. The SAT is digital and adaptive and algebra-heavy. The ACT is quicke...

Picture two versions of you. July you, iced coffee on the porch, essay not written but honestly not worried about it. September you, up at eleven at night while a blank personal statement blinks back and the supplements pile up out of nowhere.

The only thing standing between those two women is one rough, messy, kind of bad first draft, written in the next two weeks.

The Common App opens August 1, so let's use the calm while we still ...

Here is a little secret from my school counselor years: the new school year does not really start in August. It starts now. The first couple weeks of July are when the system quietly rolls every kid up to their next grade, no ceremony, no announcement. So congratulations, mama. As of this week, you are officially the parent of a brand-new freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior.

And if there is a little voice asking what you are supp...

Picture it: dinner table, and your well-meaning person lobs another "what about writing about your Eagle Scout project?" across the table while your kid slides so far down in their chair they're basically eating horizontal. Friend, I have lived this exact scene, in my own kitchen, with my husband Jeff and our son Jake.

If "how's the essay going" has become a fighting word in your house, this one's for you. I'm walking you through ho...

Okay, real talk. It's 10 PM, you swore you'd put your phone down, and instead you're deep in a college admissions thread reading about somebody's kid who's apparently curing diseases between AP exams. And there it is. That pit in your stomach. The one whispering that your kid isn't doing enough and you're already behind.

Friend, that feeling is lying to you. And this episode is your permission slip to put it down.

I'm not handing you...

If your teenager has been through something hard, a loss, a stretch of anxiety or depression, a family rupture, a health scare, a year that left a mark on the whole house, you have probably had a quiet thought you would never say out loud. That would make a powerful college essay. And then, right behind it, a wave of guilt for even thinking it.

This is the warm, honest conversation about that exact knot in your stomach. Lindsay, a f...

I came home from the IECA conference in Baltimore this month with one observation I cannot stop thinking about: almost nobody in our industry is naming the MENTAL LOAD moms are carrying through their kid's college process — and nobody is building the toolkit to take any of it off her. In this episode, I take you back to my kitchen during Jake's senior year (the eighteen months of carrying it all alone), into my kitchen now wi...

Fresh off the IECA conference and a campus tour day at Dickinson and Gettysburg, Lindsay walks through the four myths that keep most moms from putting liberal arts colleges on the list. The "my kid wants STEM" myth, the cost myth, the "no grad school = no opportunities" myth, and the "small school = limited social life" myth. Plus what to look for on a visit, ten questions to ask the tour guide, and a regional roundup of underrated...

By the time senior year starts in August, what do you actually want for your kid? Lindsay says: a confident kid and a relieved parent. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because of three quiet things you do between now and August that almost no one in the admissions industry is talking about. In this episode: lock the June testing plan, do the activities brain dump, and have the money conversation before applications go li...

A mom-to-mom honest talk about the quiet grief that hits at every grade of high school, not just senior year. Lindsay walks through the unique grief of 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, plus what actually helps when the milestones (or the lack of them) sneak up on you. Permission slip included.

Key Talking Points

• The mom letter that started this episode
• 9th grade grief: the loss of access and being the center of their daily story
• 10...

This week I am talking about the thing most parents do not realize about AP exam season. Your job is almost never the thing that feels productive.

If you have a junior at home and they are absolutely cooked right now, you are not alone. May of junior year is the deepest valley of the academic year, and the most loving thing you can do this week often runs counter to every parenting instinct in your body. Less hovering. More smoothie...

This week I am taking you behind the curtain. The curtain of what the personal statement brainstorm actually looks like from the inside. Including the part nobody talks about. The messy middle.

The going-nowhere conversations. The short answers. The student who is convinced they are boring. The twenty minutes that feel completely unproductive right before the detail surfaces that changes everything.

This week I had two brainstorming ...

Every year I watch the same thing happen.

Families spend months focused on the personal statement. They feel ready. And then August 1 arrives, the Common App opens, and the supplemental essays appear. Multiple prompts per school. Multiplied across ten, twelve, fifteen schools. Suddenly the writing workload is enormous and senior year has not even officially started yet.

It does not have to go that way.

This week I am breaking down eve...

Last week I got an email from a senior mom that stopped me in my tracks.

I had sent a check-in note to senior families. She wrote back and said something I have not stopped thinking about: this process is just not what I envisioned it to be.

I felt that in my whole body. Because I think it is true for almost every family in some version. And I think it is one of the least talked about parts of this entire experience.

Today I am going ...

Every spring I hear the same thing from junior parents: my kid has nothing to write about.

And almost every time, I find out that is not true. The story is already there. They just have not found it yet — because they are looking in the wrong places.

This week I am coming off six college campus visits with Josh over spring break — Northwestern, Marquette, University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, Indiana University...

Spring break feels like a pause. But for junior families, it might be one of the most important weeks of the year — and most families do not realize it until they are standing on a campus somewhere thinking... wait. This just got real.

This week I am sharing what is actually happening in my house right now. Josh and I have been on the road doing college visits over spring break. ACT scores landed. We are in the middle of the t...

After years inside the school counseling system, I have something to say that I have been sitting with for a while.

At the end of this school year I am leaving school counseling. For good.

Not because I stopped caring about students. Not because anything catastrophically wrong happened. Because something has shifted — in me, in the work I am building, in what I know I am meant to be doing — and staying would mean choosing...

It's ten o'clock at night. Your kid is asleep. You've got seventeen tabs open, a notes app full of school names and question marks, and somehow you feel more confused than when you started.

Sound familiar?

The problem isn't that you're not smart enough or not trying hard enough. The problem is that you're trying to solve a navigation problem with information. And those are not the same thing.

Today I'm going deep on the "I can Google ...