The Sophomore Slump Nobody Warns You About | Gen X Mom + Gen Z Daughter

Everyone prepares you for freshman year. Nobody prepares you for the second one.

In this XYZ segment of Wonder in the Weeds, Faith and I talk about the sophomore slump from both sides of it. I am the Gen X mom who has now sent two kids off twice, and Faith is the Gen Z daughter who calls sophomore year “the year I made all my mistakes.” We had been circling this conversation for months and finally sat down and did it, cameras and all.

Freshman year comes with scaffolding. Dorm parents, RAs, study hours in the lobby, and a general agreement that you are allowed to make a fool of yourself. Sophomore year, that support quietly disappears and the expectations go up. You are not new anymore, but you are not an upperclassman either. You are the forgotten child of the university, and most people are too embarrassed to say out loud that it is hard.

We get into the honors credit that almost did not happen, the retail job Faith quit a week before Christmas, the bad apartment her dad and I knew was a mistake and let her sign for anyway, and the night she called me from a parking lot with a man following her. Every one of those stories comes back to the same tension: when do you step in, and when do you let the natural consequence do the teaching?

For the parents reading, my honest position is that this one is black and white. You cannot jump in and rescue your kid from a very adult problem at their very adult university. You can acknowledge it. You can offer options instead of instructions. You can ask, “do you want a suggestion, or do you just need to vent?” What you cannot do is fix it without also telling them you did not think they could.

For the students, Faith says it better than I can. Let all of your feelings be felt, and then do not let those feelings make your decisions. Some emotions you can talk yourself out of after 72 hours. Some demand to be felt and will not be negotiated with. Learn the difference, and do not sign a lease or change a major in the middle of the second kind.

This conversation is for you if you are dropping a kid off for round two and nobody told you it would hit harder than the first time. If you are 19 or 20 and privately convinced no one in the history of the world has felt what you are feeling. If you are standing in the middle of the mess like a half cleaned out closet, certain you should never have started. Or if you just need to hear that growing pains are still growing pains at 20, and that most of the time the answer really is to get up and go to class.

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