What Parents Need to Know About College Kids and Mental Health (Part 2)

This is part 2 of a two-part series on the mental wellbeing of college students. Last week my Executive Assistant, Amy Masaschi, wrote about her son’s anxiety and depression at the start of his college career. This week, I’ll offer several steps to help parents navigate the college years in a supportive way.

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College students need support for their mental health—and a growing body of research bears this out.

The Annual Healthy Minds survey, which received responses from more than 76,000 U.S. college students during the 2022-23 academic year, revealed these alarming statistics:

• 61% said they sometimes or often felt lonely
• 41% reported symptoms of depression
• 36% experienced anxiety
• 14% had seriously thought about suicide (6% had made a plan, 2% had attempted it)

Another national survey of students found that more than half (56%) have experienced chronic stress in college, while three in four say stress is negatively affecting their academics. Only 4 percent say stress had no impact on their academics!

First-year and female students are at highest risk, according to a recent smartphone-enabled tracking study conducted by Dartmouth researchers.

Armed with this data, parents of new college students cannot afford to assume, “That’s not my child.” Our college kids might in fact be in that mix of statistics. So, picking up where Amy’s guest blog left off last week, I’ll offer four more tips for supporting our college students’ emotional health.

Tip 1: Assume your college kid needs your support – just on their terms

When we surveyed teens and young adults age 15-21 for For Parents Only and several other books, we discovered that high school graduation marked a stark dividing line.

Adolescents who aren’t yet adults are starving for freedom, and there’s all this tension around wanting it. But that goes away when they go away to college. In college, they no longer stress about freedom—because they have it!

At the same time, our college-age kids have a different type of stress: they know they’re in uncharted territory and they often do want our support. So, as parents, we go from being stiff-armed to being welcomed with open arms. (Well, kind of. With limits.)

We polled young adults (ages 19-24, some in college, some post-college) last year for a blog on what young adults need from their parents. While the poll was informal, many responses had a similar thread: Young adults want our support, but on their terms.

One 23-year-old described it this way: “Think of us like the toddler/kindergartners of adults. We need to start being independent and make mistakes on our own, but at the end of the day we just don’t know a lot (even if we think we do). So asking if we’d like advice on any topic would really help.”

Here’s the key: the same respondent said unsolicited advice is not welcome! So, parents, maybe we should trade barging in with advice on the roommate situation in favor of asking questions like these:

• Are you feeling better about your roommate (or finances or calculus professor)?
• Is anything worrying you right now?
• How can we support you?
• How can we pray for you?

Tip #2: Establish a check-in system

If your college kid is a talker, phone check-ins may work great. But what if, like Amy’s son, your student deals in one-word answers? Or what if their best times to talk (think 2 a.m.) aren’t yours? (Or what if your best times aren’t theirs? I still laugh with my mom about how she and my dad used to call my freshman hall phone at 8 a.m. on Saturday mornings!)

One of my friends devised a brilliant check-in system with her college kids, all of whom wrestle with the usual anxiety at times. My friend asked each of them to text her a sequence of six numbers every day.

On a range of 1 to 3 (1 for struggling, 2 for doing okay, and 3 for thriving), her kids rated how they were feeling about each of these that day:

• Sleep
• Eating/nutrition
• Exercise
• Academics
• Social life
• Emotional / spiritual life

The numbers gave my friend direction on how to pray. Plus, if the student answered “1” in any area, they agreed they were giving my friend permission to ask about it if it seemed necessary (for example, if it was a trend).

Another woman with several college kids made sure her son (who experienced depression) knew he could say anything to her. Anything. “This is a tough one because you might hear things that are hard to hear,” she said. But it kept the lines of communication open.

To that end, another friend’s college son confessed a weed addiction to her during his junior year. Rather than grill him about why he tried it or where he got the money or how he could be so stupid (all of which flashed through her mind!) she asked, “Would you like to move home while we figure this out?”

He said, “Yeah Mom, I really would.”

With support, he realized he was overloaded with stress. He identified steps to de-stress in healthier ways—including lightening his course load to graduate a semester later, plugging into church community, and exercising more.

There are plenty of ways you can touch base in a way that works for both of you. The key, as Amy mentioned last week, is to be sure to check in regularly, especially in the first semester.

Tip 3: Limit how we ‘vent’ our views in their earshot

Some of the big stressors for students have been around since, well, college: Coursework, relationships, or adjusting to campus life.

But some of the main stressors for young adults today are big, global concerns—such as politics, gun violence, or climate change—that are outside of any one person’s control.

Remember at the opening of this blog, how many college students had significant anxiety? Well, we might need to personally reckon with one reason for that. According to the American Psychiatric Association, a recent survey found that more than half of Gen Zers (born between 1997 and 2012) experience mental health impacts around these big issues. And one reason is what they hear about politics from us—whether before they left for college, or what they read yesterday on our social media platforms.

Parents, this means we should choose our words with care.

When we vent the-sky-is-falling opinions, we might think we’re just letting loose our frustrations. But we’re actually contributing to our kids’ fears.

Of course there are many policy concerns that matter. But our kids’ mental health matters, too. (Not to mention that catastrophizing tends to make anxiety more acute in us, as well.)

Tip 4: Urge your child to seek community, counseling and care

While 50% of college students with a mental health condition do not seek care (similar to the ratio in the overall adult population), one encouraging trend is that more students are seeking care.

Of course, this means many campus health centers, pastors, and counselors are struggling to keep up with demand. (This is the main reason we’re in the middle of a major initiative called The Church Cares. The project is designed to build up and train an army of lay helpers in the church who can help fill in this gap. Please read more about that here, as well as how Jeff and I are pursuing research-based solutions here.)

One of the best solutions for our kids is to encourage them to not “go it alone.” Let’s normalize talking with a pastor, lay counselor, or a Christian licensed mental health practitioner who will support their faith. And since having healthy, supportive friendships is one of the most protective factors for health, let’s strongly encourage our kids to seek healthy community.

At the end of the day, especially as people of faith, we must pray that our college kids will be connected to exactly the right people and that, in the process, their health and faith will be strengthened now and for years to come.

If you are interested in having Shaunti bring research-based strategies, practical wisdom and biblical principles to your next event, please contact Nicole Owens at [email protected].

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