The College Counseling Mom Podcast: It’s Fine, I’m Fine, My Kid’s in High School.
Real talk and real guidance for parents raising college-ready teens — without the stress.
Host Lindsay Phillips, a school counselor turned college consultant (and mom who’s been there), helps families navigate high school and college prep with clarity, calm, and humor. Grab your coffee (or wine) and join Lindsay each week to make this season feel a little lighter and a lot more doable.
Episodes
52 episodes
Episode 51 | The List Is the Loan Strategy: How Your College List Decides How Much You Borrow
"How are we actually going to pay for this?" If that question shows up in your house late at night, or right after you open the FAFSA and close it again real fast, this episode is for you.Most families treat the college list and the mone...
Episode 50 | The Conversations We Assume Already Happened
Content warning: this episode discusses sexual assault, drug use, and the deaths of two college students. Please take care of yourself. Support resources are listed at the bottom of these notes.Recorded September 29, 2026. ...
Episode 49 | What Your Kid's School Counselor Is Actually Doing All Day
You have a question about the college process. The answer is probably four minutes away in your kid's school counselor's inbox. And you don't send the email, because you're not sure it's a reasonable thing to ask.Lindsay is a former scho...
Episode 48 | Four Doors: What Your Kid Is Actually Applying To
Every spring Lindsay gets the same phone call. A kid got in, the family is celebrating, and somebody says "they put him in a different major, but he can just switch, right?" Sometimes that answer is yes and it is no big deal. Sometimes the scho...
Episode 47 | Will He Find His People? The Question Under "My Kid Won't Join Anything"
If your kid won't join anything and you have been quietly spiraling about it since school started, this one is for you. Lindsay takes apart the question underneath the question, the one that is never actually about the activities list, and give...
Six Ways to Apply to College. Most Families Only Know Two.
There's a mom in your group chat right now who just said "we're not doing early, we're just doing regular decision," and everybody agreed with her because it sounded like the calm, sensible choice. It isn't a choice at all. It's a default. And ...
Episode 45 | Good Enough: How to Know the College Essay Is Actually Done
If your senior has been revising the same personal statement for three weeks, this one is for you.There is a mountain of advice out there about how to start a college essay and almost none about how to finish one. So families keep going....
Episode 44 | Three Out of Three: Picture Day and How I Actually Build a College List
Somebody asked me recently what my system is for building a college list, and my first instinct was to say I don't really have one. That was nonsense. I do. I'd just never said it out loud.So this week I'm saying it out loud, and I'm fin...
Episode 43 | Colleges Are Keeping Score: How Your Kid Shows a College They Mean It (Demonstrated Interest, Explained)
Episode DescriptionThere is a quiet thing a lot of colleges track, and almost no parent has heard the plain-English version of it. It is called demonstrated interest, and at the right schools it can tip a close admissions decision...
Episode 42 | Supplements Are the Game Now: How to Help Your Senior Without Writing It For Them
The Common App opened August 1, and right behind the main essay comes the part that quietly makes or breaks a senior fall: the supplemental essays. The why us, the why this major, the community essay, the quirky one. There can be a lot of them,...
Episode 41 | The Schedule Talk: Why Course Choice Matters Every Year of High School
Your kid's course schedule is one of the very first things a college looks at, and it is the single biggest piece of the application you actually get to shape on purpose. Not the test score. Not the essay. The classes.And it is not just ...
Episode 40 | SAT or ACT? How to Actually Pick the Right Test for Your Kid
Six moms hit reply on my last email asking the exact same question: which test should my kid even take, the SAT or the ACT? It is the right question, and almost nobody asks it early enough.In this episode I give you the honest truth abou...
Episode 39 | The July Draft That Saves Your September (Your Teen's Messy First Essay)
Picture two versions of you. July you, iced coffee on the porch, essay not written but honestly not worried about it. September you, up at eleven at night while a blank personal statement blinks back and the supplements pile up out of nowhere.<...
Episode 38 | Welcome to Your New Grade: The One Thing Each Class Should Focus On This Summer
Here is a little secret from my school counselor years: the new school year does not really start in August. It starts now. The first couple weeks of July are when the system quietly rolls every kid up to their next grade, no ceremony, no annou...
Episode 37 | How to Help With the College Essay Without Starting World War III
Picture it: dinner table, and your well-meaning person lobs another "what about writing about your Eagle Scout project?" across the table while your kid slides so far down in their chair they're basically eating horizontal. Friend, I have lived...
Episode 36 | The 7 Things You Can Stop Stressing About This Summer
Okay, real talk. It's 10 PM, you swore you'd put your phone down, and instead you're deep in a college admissions thread reading about somebody's kid who's apparently curing diseases between AP exams. And there it is. That pit in your stomach. ...
Episode 35 | Should Your Kid Write About the Hard Stuff?
If your teenager has been through something hard, a loss, a stretch of anxiety or depression, a family rupture, a health scare, a year that left a mark on the whole house, you have probably had a quiet thought you would never say out loud. ...
Episode 34 | The Room I Wish I Had With Jake (And Am So Thankful I Have With Josh)
I came home from the IECA conference in Baltimore this month with one observation I cannot stop thinking about: almost nobody in our industry is naming the MENTAL LOAD moms are carrying through their kid's college process — and nobody is buildi...
Episode 33 | Why Liberal Arts Colleges Deserve a Closer Look (And the Myths Keeping Them Off Your List)
Fresh off the IECA conference and a campus tour day at Dickinson and Gettysburg, Lindsay walks through the four myths that keep most moms from putting liberal arts colleges on the list. The "my kid wants STEM" myth, the cost myth, the "no grad ...
Episode 32 | Three Things to Do Before Senior Year (So Your Kid Walks In Confident and You Walk In Relieved)
By the time senior year starts in August, what do you actually want for your kid? Lindsay says: a confident kid and a relieved parent. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because of three quiet things you do between now and August that ...
Episode 31 | The Sneaky Grief of Every High School Year
A mom-to-mom honest talk about the quiet grief that hits at every grade of high school, not just senior year. Lindsay walks through the unique grief of 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, plus what actually helps when the milestones (or the lack o...
Episode 30 | What Your Burned-Out Junior Actually Needs From You During AP Week
This week I am talking about the thing most parents do not realize about AP exam season. Your job is almost never the thing that feels productive.If you have a junior at home and they are absolutely cooked right now, you are not alone. M...
Episode 29 | The Story Is Always in the Details
This week I am taking you behind the curtain. The curtain of what the personal statement brainstorm actually looks like from the inside. Including the part nobody talks about. The messy middle.The going-nowhere conversations. The short a...
Episode 28 | The Essays Nobody Talks About Until It's Too Late
Every year I watch the same thing happen.Families spend months focused on the personal statement. They feel ready. And then August 1 arrives, the Common App opens, and the supplemental essays appear. Multiple prompts per school. Multipli...
Episode 27 | When the Process Doesn't Look Like You Pictured It
Last week I got an email from a senior mom that stopped me in my tracks.I had sent a check-in note to senior families. She wrote back and said something I have not stopped thinking about: this process is just not what I envisioned it to ...