You know it's move-in weekend in Springfield before you check a calendar. Every parking spot downtown vanishes like it owed someone money, and you're stuck behind a car with a lofted bed frame strapped to the roof. It's chaos, and — if I'm honest — a little funny to watch. Some of that traffic is me, too; I'm over 50 and still can't parallel park to save my life.
But in 2018, I was the one loading our SUV for real. What I didn't know then is that underneath all that noisy energy, some of those kids are quietly falling apart.
Ours did.
The year 'far away' got really, really far
When our oldest daughter left for college in Chicago — over 500 miles away by car — we knew the basics: new city, new roommates, new academic pressure. What we didn't know was how much a dorm's built-in social pace
would drain her. She's neurodivergent and needs real quiet and control over her space to function. Roommates who kept stranger hours weren't just an inconvenience, they were a daily withdrawal from a bank account that never got to refill.
She wasn't hiding it, exactly. The problem was that dorm life runs on constant group activity — floor events, late-night hangouts, roommates who wanted company — and none of it left her room to be alone, which is what she actually needed to recover. She was calling us every day, struggling. There's a particular helplessness in sitting on a FaceTime call, watching your kid cry, hundreds of miles away. You're parenting from a distance, listening to someone you love sound stretched thin, unable to do a thing about it in the moment.
So what do you actually do from 400 miles away?
You grasp for whatever you can control. We sent GrubHub money so she didn't have to face the cafeteria, and mailed surprise care packages. She didn't drive; without a car, walking was the only option, and that's how she ended up walking across campus in bad weather and getting pneumonia — a wake-up call about how much was outside our reach.
We found her a counselor outside the school system and coordinated with the health office nurse. I was doing everything I could think of, and it still felt like failing half the time.
Letting go of the college I thought we were paying for
Then COVID hit, and quarantine turned out to be a strange gift. It gave her a forced pause: real space to step back and think through what would actually help her succeed. She took the year off, then transferred to a school closer to home. Here's the part I'm not proud of admitting: my first instinct wasn't relief. It was grief — for the college experience I'd pictured, the tuition already paid, the version of "success" I'd quietly been holding her to.
We had to let that go. Actual success looked like a smaller apartment down the road from us instead of a dorm, where she could manage her own schedule but still lock her door and shut the world out when she needed to. That apartment, more than the tuition, might be the biggest gift we gave her.
Struggle isn't a competition (even if it feels like one)
I think back to my own freshman year — working, taking the bus to get to school, trying to log enough hours to cover my part of the rent. It was a lot, but I wasn't managing a full-time mental health struggle too. It's tempting to reach for your own experience as the yardstick — "I got through it, so can they." But struggle isn't a competition. Our kids live their hardship in their own bodies, in their own real time. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can say isn't comparative, just "I hear you, and I believe you."
A few things I’d tell any parent going through this now:
- Take their stress seriously the first time, not after the third phone call where they’re crying.
- Let the GPA slide for a semester if it has to. A B-minus earned while your kid is barely hanging on is a bigger win than an A earned while they’re falling apart. Grades recover. Kids who feel like they failed you the whole time they were struggling take a lot longer to.
- If they end up changing plans — a new school, a gap year, moving back home — that is not the same thing as giving up. It felt like failure to me for about a week. It wasn’t. It was her figuring out what she actually needed instead of what I’d already pictured.
- Watch for the quiet stuff, not just the crying-on-the-phone stuff. Skipping meals, sleeping all day, going dark on texts for 48 hours — those are the ones that sneak past you because they don’t come with a phone call.
- Find them a counselor who isn’t tied to the school before you need one, not after. It’s a lot easier to make that call before 2 a.m. than during it.
- And, only half joking: Don’t rush to turn their bedroom into a home gym the second the moving truck pulls away. Nothing says “we’ve moved on without you” like a treadmill where the bed used to be — save that move for after they’re steady, not while they’re still finding their footing.
Back to that minivan
So now, stuck behind that car every August, I try to remember: I don't know what's inside it. Maybe it's just excitement and a mini-fridge. Maybe it's a kid who's terrified, or a parent already quietly worried.
Springfield is a college town. We get the traffic every fall, and it's easy to grumble. But those students are navigating something harder than parallel parking. Half the patience we'd want offered our own kids is a fair trade for a few weeks of gridlock.
Amber Weigand-Buckley is a Springfield native, award-winning author, founding editor of Leading Hearts Magazine and podcast host. Find her at ShortyellowpencilRX.com.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Back-to-school and what to do when your child is struggling | Opinion
