Sports and prom and graduation day, oh my! Even with our spring overstuffed to-do lists, we managed to pull together a booklist for you of our favorite reads for getting yourself and your kid ready for college. Even if it will be a little while before your baby crosses that stage and moves that tassel, even if you are just overcome planning all the things you want to say to your graduate, even if college is still very much a SOMEDAY rather than a couple of months from now, try to find some time to open up one of these great books. Time moves super fast in the teen years, so you might want to get started today.

1. The Admissions by Meg Mitchell Moore

Any parent who has been through it will tell you: college admissions is an emotional pressure cooker. Nothing quite captures the high highs and the low lows quite like this utterly delectable piece of fiction. The Hawthornes are a family so familiar you feel from the first page like you might be reading about your next door neighbors. As their oldest gets put through the wringer applying to Harvard, dad’s alma mater, so do the rest of them. As the pressure is on, things start to unravel and secrets are revealed. Bottom line: an immensely enjoyable read for you that will make you grateful for your own process in comparison.

2. Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania by Frank Bruni

We get the anxiety around getting into college.  It’s not just about getting into college, but the right one that makes a difference, right? Bruni has made it his life’s work to smack that idea right out of your head. With frank, honest talk and persuasive arguments for why you are looking at this whole college admissions thing all wrong, Bruni turns everything you think you know about it on its head. His passion is palpable and his research thorough. In the end, his argument that motivated kids can get a good education almost anywhere feels like just the balm you needed just when you needed it.

3. Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges by Loren Pope

Snuggle this one up beside that big honking behemoth, Princeton Review’s The Complete Book of Colleges . Honestly, this book gave us a different way to talk about college and all the different reasons you matriculate to institutes of higher learning besides just the great job opportunities. We love, love, LOVE the acknowledgement that kids, like colleges, are not a “one size fits all” commodity. So many great ideas here for kids who might not fit the mold of the high achiever but who would thrive in college. A great resource that opened up lots of great discussions with our kids!

4. Masterminds and Wingmen: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World by Rosalind Wiseman

Before you launch your young man out into the world at large, read this book. Frankly, anyone who spends any time at all around any boys age 11 through 18 needs to read it too. With over 200 interviews with boys and strong research guiding her conclusions, Wiseman draws the adolescent boy in sharp relief and gives us not only a true picture of the more complex lives of boys, but some ways we can help them through the next few years.

Our favorite insight is that we as a society do boys a disservice by dismissing their emotional lives as simple when they most assuredly are not. There is even a free e-book for boys themselves to read about what to do in difficult situations.

We know what you’re thinking: Wiseman is kind of a superhero. Or a superstar. In any case, she has written a book that can save you and any special boys in your life and help get them ready for that eventual big step up and away from you.

5. Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World by Rosalind Wiseman

And Wiseman works a similar magic for girls. Erin read this book when she first started teaching middle school and it fundamentally changed the way she looked at girls, their friendships, and their struggles with each other and themselves.

Wiseman offers sage, sound advice for how to guide girls towards treating themselves with dignity and grace and treating each other fairly, but there is so much more than that in this book. Understanding girl power plays, how boys fit into the big picture of girl relationships, and the different roles girls play really helps anyone who knows or loves an adolescent girl guide her to her best, most authentic self. Thanks again to the wonderful and very wise Wiseman for helping us prepare our daughters (and yours) for the big wide world.

6. Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood by Lisa Damour

When it comes to advice about college, we listen to our friends Lisa and Mary Dell who write over at Grown and Flown, a great online resource for parenting through this next phase of life. They told us to buy this book, and we are ever so grateful they did. Chock full of great research, stellar examples, and good advice, this book is a gem, but what we felt was most helpful was the overall tone. Damour’s message time and time again is that we, as parents, can do this very hard thing of parenting our girls through this tough phase of development.  With the cool confident tone of a priest or a hostage negotiator, Damour emphasizes  that there is more than one way to “get this right.”  Our harried teen mom hearts wish we could clone her and carry her around in our pockets to talk us down off our ledges when the time comes. In the end, this is one book that will deliver all of you to the other side and get you ready for the big, beautiful things that lie ahead.

7. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by John Krakauer  

This one might make you want to lock up ALL of your college aged kiddos, but you HAVE to read it. You know how we love to talk to kids about everything from sex to drugs to alcohol. Well, Krakauer lays out why we need to talk to our kids about alcohol and campus rape too. YIKES! But why, you ask? WHY?! We get that this is a tough read in many places, but Krakauer’s firm steady journalistic hand makes this one of the best, most important (but still immensely readable) things you can read, especially if you have kids filling out college applications or already cozied up in dorm rooms. It is a book that launched a thousand conversations for us. We are sharing it with you in the hopes that it will do the same in your family. A MUST read!

8. How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims

This, from Julie Lythcott-Haims’ Amazon author page, is one of the reasons we love her and her book:

I am deeply interested in humans – all of us – living lives of meaning and purpose, which requires figuring out what we’re good at and what we love, and being the best version of that self we can be. So I’m interested in what gets in the way of that.

Um, yeah, all of what she said. This is not a book about helicopter parenting, per se, so much as a path through the fears that can interfere with our parenting and foil our relationships with our kids. Lythcott-Haims tells us how we as a society evolved to this style of parenting and how to break the bad habits that threaten the job we are trying to do. Such insight in such a readable form! A book we keep coming back to again and again!

9. The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults by Frances Jensen

You know our science-loving hearts love us some fine research. This one is top notch while also keeping it real. Jensen is a mom to two boys as well as a neurologist. She gets that we don’t want to just know why our crazy teens act the way they do, but what we can do about it. Brimming with good science and better ideas of how to use that research to improve our parenting, this book won over our hearts and minds.

10. The Naked Roommate: For Parents Only: A Parent’s Guide to the New College Experience: Calling, Not Calling, Packing, Preparing, Problems, Roommates, … Matters when Your Child Goes to College by Harlan Cohen

When Erin sent her oldest to college this fall, she desperately needed a place to answer her five million questions. Her friends were all, “we haven’t done this before, make a new friend.” Harlan Cohen was that buddy. Erin loved his straight-shooting, non-preachy tone and oodles of relevant advice. If at times it felt like he had peered into her soul and presciently written chapters just for her, well, that was just gravy. Though the 600 pages look daunting, this book is one you pick up and put down. Think of it as the Bible of Letting Go. There is a companion book for kids headed to college which we did not purchase. Erin knows her kid and the sheer volume of it meant that it would be a doorstop, not a resource. But THIS book was perfect for her and, hopefully you too, as you and your family take this next big step.

So whether you have a kid heading off to college in the fall or a few years from now, these are all books that will help you not just survive but enjoy this brave new world you are entering.

-Erin and Ellen

Sending a kid to #college? We have a #booklist for you!

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