My parents won't let me catch up. What do I do?
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Anonymous
| Op, go get mental health help |
Anonymous
+1000 |
Anonymous
Do you have anxiety? I am not trying to be mean here, but your line of thinking and obsessing is so similar to my son, who has adhd and anxiety. He has a lot of challenges with obsessive and rigid thinking. So many kids have been redshirted. Your situation is not out of the norm, at all. I mean this kindly. Talking to a therapist and exploring why this makes you feel abnormal would be helpful. |
Anonymous
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If you start too early, all of your friends will be turning 21 well before you, so you will be the odd one out.
Most kids turn 6 in Kindergarten, which means they will turn 19 their Freshman year in college, just like you. |
Anonymous
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OP is likely a troll who is against redshirting.........
If not, FWIW, OP could have taken enough AP classes to qualify as a sophomore when she starts college. My DD was an older (but not redshirted) student. Funny, she had no desire to jump a year ahead. She was an academic sophomore when she started because of AP results. She did not want to graduate early and start grad school, but wanted to enjoy all four years of classes. The AP credits enabled her to take a lot of electives and pursue many interests. |
Anonymous
I'm not saying I should have been started early. I'm saying I should have been started on time. And no, all of my friends would not be turning 21 before me, but rather 3 quarters of my friends. I'd still be older than those born from October to December. And while many students do turn 19 their freshman year of college, it's usually not until after the new year. You're supposed to start college the year you turn 18, regardless of whether or not you have had your 18th birthday yet. |
Anonymous
What about seeing someone regarding your mental health? This is not okay to be obsessing about. |
Anonymous
| All us adults responding to this thread are on your parents side. We know what a slog it can be to be in a 40+ hour a week job. Just enjoy being young now, you’ll never get it back. |
Anonymous
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OP, do you think your parents concerns about your academic load have any merit? What kind of student are you now? When you took the one AP they let you take each year, did you do well in all of your classes or did you struggle?
Do you know what you want to study in college, and what you hope to do when you graduate? If you don't have a direction in mind, going through more quickly is just going to get you nowhere more quickly. If you're still figuring out what you want to study, then your parents have a point with not being so focused on accumulating credits initially. If you do have a direction, have you looked into taking CLEP exams to get credit for courses. https://modernstates.org/ is a good place to start, and you can look at what you think you might be able to do, find out if your intended college accepts examination for credit, and then propose a simple plan to your parents. Not the in-a-hurry ones you've been pushing, but perhaps a suggestion that you believe that in addition to the 15 credits they're supporting you take the first semester of your freshman year, you also think you could self-study for one CLEP exam. Show them that's successful, and then perhaps they'll see you're capable. Keep in mind that you may not want to plan for taking courses over the summer because that's prime time for internships, and depending on what you're hoping to do when you graduate, you're going to want to take advantage of internship opportunities. I don't think you're going to be successful at convincing your parents to support you in this until you understand what their concerns are. You haven't expressed their concerns, except to say they won't let you. Why won't they let you? Does your current academic performance support their concerns, or your optimism? |
Anonymous
| If you are fit, you could join the military and pay for college yourself. That's a quick way to get some freedom from your parents. |
Anonymous
| DH wanted freedom from a controlling father who wanted to dictate where he went to school so he took time off, worked and paid for his own education. He graduated at 25. No one ever asks either of us how old we were when we graduated or how many years we spent in college. It doesn’t matter. |
Anonymous
OP, do you have friends? That’s a serious question, not snark. |
Anonymous
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You are fine. This is not something that matters at all. Lots of kids are 19 when they start college for a whole host of reasons, and not once did it come up at all when I was in college. My first-year dorm had kids age 17-19. And pretty quickly kids will fail a semester or switch majors and so be a year behind graduation anyway. This is VERY common and graduating in 4 years from college is fairly rare, so there is no cohort in college.
And if you go to your in-state school, there will be other red-shirted kids as well as out-of-state kids with different cut-offs. I agree with others that your obsession with this non-issue is something you should talk to a counselor about. You need to get rid of this narrative of a year behind - it simply isn't true. But it doesn't sound like it is something you can let go of without help. This is what therapists and psychologists are there for - so please go. |
Anonymous
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In the vast majority of the US, cut-off dates have long since been moved from December to September. That means that starting the next year, with an October birthday, is right on time. For your age cohort, about 70% of the states with cut-off dates established them as September or earlier.
No one in college will care about your age as long as you're the age of a typical undergrad or had a similar life path (i.e. you're not someone who spent 4 years in the military prior to college etc., in which case your age and experience and relative maturity would set you apart). It's also not unusual for people to redshirt (i.e. a kid with a summer birthday might well start the next year), and it's increasingly common for kids to take a gap year. Note: If you are super self-conscious or anxious about your perfectly normal age, people will notice it and consider you weird, because being self-conscious and/or anxious about something totally normal is a red flag. If it really bothers you, you need to talk to a therapist about it. It sounds like this is a really, really big deal to you, when it ought to be trivial. Were you teased for being bigger than other kids? Teased for being the "dumb kid"? Do you feel like your parents are generally overprotective or over-controlling? Enjoy your college years. If anything, it's a good time to linger, explore your interests, establish life-long friendships, gain experience with independence, and learn about yourself and what you'd really like to do with your life. |
Anonymous
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Come on, guys, this was created by a bored, nosy SAHM with too much time on her hands.
Don’t engage. MYOB , lady! |