General Education Advice

I have taken on a handful of clients in the last few years: young adults – these happen to be young men – who are not meeting with me for “help” through a challenge but rather to affirmatively build their future. They are doing incredibly well. Much like it is with coaches of top athletes, […]

High School Kickoff: Navigating the Launch from Day One The transition into high school marks the official start of a student’s high-stakes developmental runway. For parents along coastal Connecticut and across the state, this moment often brings a mix of excitement and quiet anxiety. The cultural conversation surrounding college admissions, shifting career landscapes, and post-secondary […]

I was working with Tim and Janet, two kind parents from Madison, Connecticut. They had worked hard to provide their children with good lives. Neither of them came from money, and both paid for their own schooling. For that reason, they knew the value of a dollar. They also had a later start on wealth […]

When I wrote Motivate Your Son more than ten years ago, I made a prediction about the future of young people. I divided them into three broad groups: 10% would be on the path of abundance. 40% would be on the path of struggle. 50% would be on the path of disaster. These were not […]

Several summers ago, parents from Old Lyme, Connecticut, came to see me in something of a panic. Their oldest son—I’ll call him Jason—was about to begin his junior year of high school. Jason was athletic, bright, social, and generally a good student. But his parents didn’t like the direction he was heading. He had begun […]

Last year, I worked with a young man from Madison, Connecticut, who was approaching his senior year of high school with virtually no idea what he wanted to do next. He was bright. He had what I would describe as latent ambition. I could see that there was a motivated young adult somewhere inside him. […]

A student from Shoreline, CT recently came to us for SAT preparation with a transcript that would make almost any parent proud. Nearly straight A’s. On paper, she looked like an excellent student. You might reasonably assume that she had mastered most of the material taught in school and simply needed some SAT-specific strategies, practice, […]

Daniel walked into our office with the quiet resistance familiar to many high school students these days. He wasn’t particularly communicative, having arrived largely because his parents dragged him in for a college counseling session. A bright young man from Old Lyme, Connecticut, he simply hadn’t taken the college process seriously. Indeed, he had succumbed […]

Moving away from home is the biggest transition in your child’s life. Even if they are acting nonchalant about it, and even if you do not want to pressure them to care, you should know what I know after providing college counseling through the years: they care… a lot.  Many have back-of-the-mind anxiety that affects […]