Welcome to Making Caring Common’s resources for families, parents, and caregivers! We offer activities, tips, resource lists, discussion guides, and more to help you raise caring and ethical children who are concerned about others and the common good.
Intense achievement pressure, particularly in affluent communities, can generate high levels of stress, anxiety, and/or depression in young people. As parents, we need to be mindful of how we contribute to this pressure. These questions from Harvard’s Making Caring Common can help parents be alert to red flags that they may be putting too much pressure on their child(ren) in the college admissions process.
Read MoreParents and other primary caregivers shape their children’s moral development in myriad ways. They also often influence every phase of the college preparation, search, and admissions process.
Yet the troubling reality is that a great many parents are fundamentally failing to prepare young people to be caring, ethical community members and citizens. That’s true in part because of the degree to which parents have elevated achievement and demoted concern for others as the primary goal of child-raising.
In these guideposts from Harvard’s Making Caring Common, we explore how parents can guide their teen ethically, reduce excessive achievement pressure, and promote key ethical, social, and emotional capacities in teens in the college admissions process.
Read MoreAs a parent, you have a vital role to play in ensuring that the college admissions process reinforces important values and motivates your children to undertake activities that will allow them and others to thrive as adults. The discussion guide below is intended to help parents and their children ensure that the college admissions process is meaningful and constructive.
Read MoreThe college admissions process is a major rite of passage and a formative experience in which students receive powerful messages from adults—including parents, guidance counselors and admissions officers—about what these adults and society value. As a parent, you have a vital role to play in ensuring that this process reinforces important values and motivates your children to undertake meaningful activities that will better enable them to contribute to others and thrive as an adult. The college admissions process can also be a wonderful opportunity to get to know your children in a deeper way—to understand their hopes, worries, values, dreams—and what will help them thrive in college. Below are concrete steps that we as parents can take to make the college admissions process meaningful and constructive for our children.
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