Many students at Liberty strive to be accepted into the college of their dreams, working hard in school and in extracurricular activities to achieve their goals, and many of them have their parents’ support in their endeavors.

Normally such parental aid is a positive thing, but if taken too far, it can be detrimental to a student’s learning experience.

To a student, having a mom or dad remind them that their project is due the next day, point out a missing assignment, discuss a test grade with a teacher, or maybe even do all three may seem great at the time, but they need to learn to manage things like this for themselves: in college there won’t be anyone there to keep them on track.

After four years at Liberty, a student should have gained many skills that will help them later in life, but some parents focus so much on helping their child get accepted into the best possible university that they deprive their kids of this opportunity. If a student gets too much assistance from their mom or dad in high school, they won’t ever learn the life skills, such as work ethic, time management, organization, or responsibility, that they will need to succeed in college.

Although parental guidance may be able to help a student get into a more prestigious university, it won’t give students the experience they need to thrive in such a rigorous environment. The expectations students will encounter later in life will be much more difficult to meet than the ones posed by high school, so if a student doesn’t learn to handle these standards without parental assistance, how can they be expected to survive in an even more demanding school setting?

With this in mind, the best way for a parent to help a student succeed may not be to constantly assist them with their school work, but to take a step back and merely act as a safety net.

Compared to college or a professional workplace, high school is an extremely forgiving environment for students to make mistakes in, so it makes sense to let students learn to take responsibility for their actions now, where the consequences of their mistakes will be minimal. It is better to have to retake a class in high school than to flunk out of college.