apparently I have 45 parent handouts now

The session on parent engagement at this year’s IACAC regional conference in Hanoi might have been my favorite – or at least it was the one for which I’d scribbled down more notes and half-formed questions about how I could operationalize it across two languages. But within the strategy reflection, I found myself thinking more about family systems, and my role within them, than I expected.

After 12 years working in this industry, I’m quite comfortable asserting that the role of the university counselor (school-based as well as holistic IECs like myself) has expanded far beyond helping students build college lists and submit applications. Increasingly, we also end up helping families navigate uncertainty, interpret unfamiliar educational systems, manage expectations, support adolescent independence and executive function development, and hopefully guide them through processing the emotional intensity that now surrounds university admissions.

Much of my own experience comes from working with Vietnamese students and other international families applying internationally, particularly to the U.S. and Canada, but also to the UK, Europe, Japan, and Singapore. The more conversations I have with colleagues in different settings, with different cohort sizes and styles of practice, in different countries and with different professional paths into this field, the more I suspect these challenges are not unique to any one country or community. A sign of the times.

Parent engagement, in particular, looks very different across cultures and client populations. Some American parents arrive with a high level of familiarity with the admissions process, but are often applying frameworks and assumptions from twenty years ago that no longer reflect current realities. Other families are navigating international admissions systems entirely from scratch, sometimes in a second language, or fully through translation. Some parents hesitate to ask questions because they see the counselor as an intimidating foreign expert and prefer to rely on local intermediaries or support systems instead. And while “helicopter parenting” exists across cultures, it often manifests in very different ways depending on family dynamics, culture,  background, and prior experiences with educational authority.

What strikes me most during the conference discussion was that none of these situations can really be solved through admissions expertise alone.

Increasingly, effective counseling requires communication skills, cultural translation, expectation management, and an understanding of adolescent development alongside knowledge of universities and applications. Some of the most common parent concerns I encounter are not lyly about financial aid forms or extracurricular activity plans for summer. They are broader anxieties: whether certain career paths are still viable, whether their child is “doing enough,” or even whether they are parenting correctly during a high-stress phase of adolescence. Honestly, I’ve long suspected there’s room for a ‘wine and whine: parenting a teen’ support group, but I’ll save that for another application cycle.”

This shift changes the nature of the work considerably, for all of us. “Full service” IECs are expected to more and more, and school-based counselors manage growing caseloads and institutional responsibilities that already extend far beyond university advising.

But I left the session feeling optimistic, brain whirring with a few ideas that I wanted to game out back at my desk. The conversation wasn’t just about the increasing complexity of the work; the speakers shared creative and thoughtful ways counselors are finding to bring parents into the process more constructively.

One example that particularly stayed with me was hearing the counselors discuss parent book clubs built around works like “Who Gets In and Why” or “The Anxious Generation”. The philosophy behind it is great: creating structured spaces for parents to reflect together on higher education, adolescent development, institutional priorities, and the increasingly anxious culture surrounding admissions. I thought about how many parents I know would absolutely love to attend such a gathering, and could immediately see how that kind of structure would help families feel less isolated in the process. Greater shared language, perspective, and community among families navigating the process together – these are the things we want.

About three years ago I began making parent-facing handouts to explain some of the things I talk to the teens about… what the liberal arts actually means, how housing is selected, majors and minors, networking and recruitment fairs. I wanted moms and dads to understand the things their teen was thinking about, and the choices that teen would be making about their educational goals. When I talk to Amy or Ha Anh about communication norms in university, I send the handout to parents, including a few discussion questions to encourage conversation during a drive home or over dinner. I have 45 of them now. 😅 Parents often have so much more influence than counselors do over the emotional climate surrounding the process, and often over the choices themselves. Small shifts in communication can meaningfully change a teenager’s experience of these years, and might help families make more informed choices.

There’s probably no ideal model of parent engagement, given how many variables there are. But there is definitely a consensus that this is not an area to ignore.