college essay about having two moms

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What’s It Like To Have Two Moms?

I am the oldest child of two moms in a progressive town once dubbed “Lesbianville, USA,” which boasts a women’s college, a 35,000-participant annual gay pride parade, and a population of two-mom families over five times the national average. My moms, my younger twin sisters, and I are blissfully normal here. But when I tell people outside of my hometown — at Harvard, at my summer internships, near my grandparents’ house, when I travel — that I have two moms, they have a lot of questions. And that’s understandable! In fact, I welcome questions. (Well, some of them ...) It often means that people are trying to educate themselves about family structures they are unfamiliar with.

So, here are my answers to the most common questions I get — the good, the inappropriate, and everything in-between:

What’s it like to have two moms?

What’s it like to have a dad? Our perceptions of what is normal and what is abnormal are shaped by our own experiences — and because I have never known anything different, I have never been able to answer this question.

Who is your real mom?

They both feel pretty real to me when they won’t let me borrow a car or when they’re complaining about how many pairs of shoes I leave lying around the house … Should I keep going?

But really, who is your real mom?

In all seriousness, this is not an appropriate question to ask. It’s 2021. You should know (or be able to learn from Google) that biology isn’t what makes a family and that equating shared genetic material with parenthood erases many different types of families, including adoptive families.

This question assumes that biology makes a parent “real,” and it erases the role of caretaking in parenthood. If you’re asking which mom gave birth to me, that’s information I share with friends or when necessary. It’s not a secret and I personally don’t consider it private information. Anyone who knew my moms 20 years ago knows which one was pregnant. But the answer to this question is rarely relevant to the conversation, and answering it only serves to perpetuate the falsehood that biology is everything.

Who is your dad?

I don’t have a dad, remember? I have two moms … that’s what this whole article is about.

First, a clarification: Many people don’t call the men who provide sperm to lesbian couples “dads” or “biological dads,” preferring the term “donor” to reflect the amazing gift someone has given a couple to enable them to have children but also to reflect the fact that this man, this “donor,” isn’t a parent. That being said, some lesbian couples and their donors have an arrangement in which the donor is also a presence in the child’s life. In such cases, the donor may very well be seen as a dad. Other couples choose to use an anonymous donor, and even then there are myriad options — donors who want to remain anonymous, donors who are willing to be contacted by the child when they turn 18, and so on.

I assume that what you’re really asking is how my moms conceived me. Simply put, this isn’t an appropriate question to ask.

Okay, so if you don’t have a dad, which mom is the dad in the relationship?

They’re both … moms. There are two of them. That’s kind of the point. Plus, the question itself is steeped in antiquated notions of gender roles in heterosexual relationships. There are dads who cook dinner and moms who mow the lawn. Wake up, Rip Van Winkle.

Did your moms use an anonymous or known donor?

I get it. You’re curious! But just don’t ask this question. Ever. If you’re my doctor, or you need to know the answer to this question, or if the answer to this question is relevant to our conversation, or I simply want you to know it, I’ll tell you. But it’s none of your business, and no one is entitled to this information. And, if I’m being honest, you’re exponentially more likely to get the answer you seek if you don’t ask the question.

What do you call your moms?

Real talk: This is actually a really good question to ask — and it’s one that same-sex couples discuss before having children. Most children of two moms use variations of the word “Mom,” but I’ve known some who call both parents by their first names and others who call both of them “Mom.” I personally call my moms “Mommy” and “Mama” because that’s what they chose for themselves before I was born — and I’ve kept calling them those names for no other reason than the fact that it embarrasses my ultra-sophisticated, easily mortified sisters when I scream “Mommy!” down a grocery store aisle.

How is your life different because you have two moms?

Well, I’m not really sure, but I’m guessing that most families don’t see Provincetown as the only acceptable vacation spot and have the local pride parade on the family calendar months in advance, for starters.

I’ll hold the snark to say: Having two moms has given me perspective on feminism, on BGLTQ rights, on parenthood, on this country, and on life that I wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere. The answers to these questions will likely look different for every child of two moms, but one thing is true for most (if not all) of us: We wouldn’t change it for the world.

Orlee G.S. Marini-Rapoport ’23-24, a Crimson Associate Editorial editor, is a History and Literature and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality concentrator in Adams House.

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Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View

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September 4, 2012

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Among the problems Sherkat identified is the paper’s definition of “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers”—an aspect that has been the focus of much of the public criticism. A woman could be identified as a “lesbian mother” in the study if she had had a relationship with another woman at any point after having a child, regardless of the brevity of that relationship and whether or not the two women raised the child as a couple.

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What it’s like growing up with two moms, no, neither of them are my stepmom..

So to start I’ll just iron out any uncertainties. I have two moms, one of them being my birth mother and the other having adopted me as her child. I’ve known them both to be my mom throughout my entire life. They met before I was born and have been together ever since although they were only able to get married a few years ago. Long story short, my parents are lesbians. Now that we have that figured out let’s jump in!

Our society has gone through many changes in the past decade in regards to acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. There have been many incredible steps in the right direction. But those steps did not come before same-sex couples and their children had to endure some major discrimination. As a young child, I never felt that my family was different, it was all I had ever known so it was my “normal”. Many people were completely accepting of my family but then there were those that weren’t. Kids, parents and even teachers always had something to say about it and I quickly became very aware how different my family was. One moment that sticks out in my mind was when I noticed that one of my favorite teachers had a different attitude towards me after both of my moms showed up to parent-teacher conferences. It wasn’t hard for me to put two and two together. She wasn’t accepting of same-sex relationships. I mean, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but it felt unfair to be treated differently because of the lifestyle my parents lived. Even as I progressed through high school, I was nervous to tell anyone. I found as I got older, more and more people were accepting or at least had a neutral standpoint on the subject. Don’t get me wrong there were still haters but it seemed that, if anything, there was more curiosity. One of the questions I get most frequently asked is, “Oh, okay so is one of them considered your step-mom?”. Ummmm no, neither of them is my step-mom, they are both just mom. I even had a mother who has a gay son ask me this once and it blew my mind. I wanted to say, “Ohhhh, so when your son marries the man of his dreams and has a child will he be considered the kids step-dad?”. No, nope, nada, he will just be a dad. They will both just be a dad.

Now, let me interject for a second because, to be honest my parents are going to read this and I can just picture their hearts breaking based on what I’ve written so far. But stop mom don’t cry! There has been so much good that has come from growing up with two moms. My parents gave me an incredible childhood, they supported me no matter what and I am so grateful for that. They are amazing parents and one of the things that bother me the most is that some people have the idea that because a child grows up with two parents of the same sex- they are worse off. I don’t think it gets much more insulting than that. That would mean that a male and a female, which make up a “normal” couple, have better parenting skills and are, therefore, better parents strictly because of their heterosexuality? That’s almost comical in its ignorance… almost. But you know what? I would argue that I, as the child of a same-sex couple, turned out quite alright and because I grew up with two moms I may even be ahead of the curve. This is because I have been taught the importance of acceptance and of living as your most authentic self throughout my entire life. I’ve learned so many important life lessons just from the wisdom that my parents have. Let’s face it, a lot of people who come out of the closet in this day and age are met with quite a bit of acceptance compared to when my parents came out. And I promise you I am not trying to undermine your pain and struggles if you are someone my age who is coming out. But just think, my parents came out when the LGBTQ+ community wasn’t widely accepted and when the idea of being happily married to the person they loved was almost inconceivable. The fact that my parents, and other members of the LGBTQ+ community, were brave enough to be their true selves in a time like that is inspiration enough for a generation. It truly makes me so proud to be their daughter.

Now let’s talks about when things shifted. It was when I started my freshmen year of college at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. I immediately was immersed into a world of unconditional acceptance of me and my family. It was such an amazing feeling to not only be completely comfortable letting people know I had two moms but to have it be something that others found inspiring. A large chunk of the student body at Marymount identifies as being part of the LGBTQ+ community. One of the most eye-opening and touching moments of my life was when a fellow student of mine, after finding out that I had two moms, sat next to me in the lounge. She said, “I’m a lesbian and I have always been told that I won’t be a successful parent because of my lifestyle so I always thought that I would never have kids. Now that I know you I realize that statement has no legitimacy. You and your parents have given me hope for my future”. Okay, so I’ll give you a second to wipe away that tear because holy cow that was so touching. You good? Okay, good. You can’t even imagine how her words made me feel, I was beaming with pride.

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27 hidden joys, appreciation for some of life's most discredited pleasures..

Life is full of many wonderful pleasures that many of us, like myself, often forget about. And it's important to recognize that even on bad days, good things still happen. Focusing on these positive aspects of our day-to-day lives can really change a person's perspective. So in thinking about the little things that make so many of us happy , I've here's a list of some of the best things that often go unrecognized and deserve more appreciation:

1. Sun showers

3. tight hugs, 4. discovering new foods you like., 5. laying in bed after a long day., 6. and being completely relaxed, 7. "this reminded me of you", 8. breakfast foods, 9. over-sized clothes, 10. contagious laughs, 11. car rides with that one person, 12. random (i miss you/ i love you) texts, 13. the city at night, 14. surprises, 15. blanket cocoons, 16. good hair days, 17. really good coffee, 18. days where you're in a good mood naturally and for no particular reason, 19. conquering a fear, 20. when they give you a lot of guac at chipotle, 21. being so comfortable with someone that you can literally talk about anything, 22. home-cooked meals, 23. tattoo stories, 24. leaves changing color in fall, 25. butterflies in your stomach, 26. peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, 27. when you can't stop laughing, cool off with these 8 beers.

Summer is hot and humid, and it's almost like summer was made specifically to drink the refreshing, cold, crisp wonderful, delicious, nutritious nectar of the gods. Which is none other than beer; wonderful cold beer. With summer playing peek-a-boo around the corner while we finish up this semester, it's time to discuss the only important part of summer. And if you haven't already guessed, it's beer. There are few things I take more seriously than my beer, in order are: sports ... and beer. Here are my favorite summer brews:

Coors Light Summer Brew:

This summer shandy begins this list, it's a mix of lemon, lime and orange. While this is by no means a craft beer, it still has it place as a refreshing summer brew to enjoy.

Leinenkugel Summer Shandy

Solid choice for any summer get together, great taste with a hint of citrus.

Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat

Distinctly reminds me of Fruity Pebbles, but nonetheless is a wonderful summer beer.

Want to know more about beer?

Summertime is the perfect time for beer, and that's why International Beer Day is on August 2nd. Our community has you covered with more stories about beer, including:

• The Benefits of Drinking Beer : Let us count the ways. There are more than you might think.
• Delicious Beer Substitutes : Is beer not typically your thing? Try one of these instead.
• Unique Beer Flavors to Try : Whether it's hard apple cider or the tase of wild blueberries, these are great options.
• If College Majors Were Beers : Business, sports medicine, design – there's a beer for every major.

Sam Adams Summer Ale

Sam Adams is known for their traditional Boston Lager, but their Summer Ale is damn good.

Hell or High Watermelon

Made with real watermelon, not much is more summer-esque than juicy watermelon in July.

Blue Moon Summer Honey

I love me some Blue Moon, so the summer brew is a no-brainer on this list.

LandShark Lager

Fun fact: LandShark is owned by Anheuser-Busch, and is more commonly know as the signature drink of Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville.

Obviously Corona had to take the number one spot. To me, there's nothing more refreshing than a cold Corona with lime on a hot summer day.

So whether you're on a sandy beach, a fishing boat, or at a pool, just remember what our dear friend Jack Nicholson said, "Beer, it's the best damn drink in the world."

Drink responsibly and never drink and drive.

7 Reasons SoCal Rocks!

75 degrees and sunny, plus, no humidity. I mean do I really need to say more?

SoCal summers are the best summers by far, and honestly, no argument is needed. But, if you aren't sure why SoCal summers are the best, here are 7 reasons why!

Perfect Weather

You'll get an effortless tan.

Being outside is inevitable when the weather is this nice, so slap on some low SPF and enjoy the perfect weather as you become a bronzed beach babe!

You can exercise with a view

Who said working on your summer bod has to stop when summer starts? In SoCal there are hundreds of gorgeous hiking trails in the mountains or on the cliffs overlooking the beach, so maintaining your summer bod is easy on the eyes and a lot less of a drag!

You don't have to worry about bug bites

The likelihood of you getting bit by a bug is slim, so you don't have to worry about smelling like bug spray whenever you want to go outside.

In n Out all day, every day

No explanation needed.

We have outdoor concerts

At the county fair or on the beach, summertime means outdoor concerts with good music and great friends.

We live where people vacation

We're lucky enough to live in paradise and we don't take that for granted. We take advantage of our sunsets on the beach and backyard staycation without spending a pretty penny on visiting somewhere that isn't nearly as perfect as SoCal. We're pretty spoiled.

25 Lyrics for Selfie Captions

Because let's be honest, we all use lyrics..

Sometimes you can't think of the perfect caption for your Instagram post. I love using lyrics as my captions because there's so many great lines in songs that just seem to fit in the moment . Here are some lyrics that could work for your selfie or pictures of you with your friends!

1. “Don’t get too close, it’s dark inside. It's where my demons hide.”

Imagine Dragons, Demons

2. “Tonight, we are young.”

Fun., We Are Young

3. “Cuz I may be bad, but I’m perfectly good at it.”

Rihanna, S&M

4. “Tell me how they got that pretty little face on that pretty little frame.”

Justin Timberlake, Summer Love

5. “I can’t wait to fall in love with you, you can’t wait to fall in love with me.”

6. “sweatpants, hair tied, chillin with no makeup on.”.

Drake, Best I Ever Had

7. “Why you so obsessed with me?”

Mariah Carey, Obsessed

8. “We ain’t ever getting older.”

The Chainsmokers feat. Halsey, Closer

9. “I didn’t know that I was starving until I tasted you.”

Haille Steinfeld, Starving

10. “Didn’t they tell you I’m a savage?"

Rihanna, Needed Me

11. “I’m gonna make you miss me.”

Sam Hunt, Make You Miss Me

12. "Cheers to the freakin weekend.”

Rihanna, Cheers

13. “Love’s a game. Wanna play?”

Taylor Swift , Blank Space

14. “You don’t know about me, but I bet you want to.”

Taylor Swift, 22

15. “Let’s set each other’s lonely nights, Be each other’s paradise.”

Justin Bieber, Company

16. “Trippin’ on skies, sippin’ waterfalls."

Troye Sivan, Youth

17. “Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days.”

Twenty One Pilots, Stressed Out

18. “But you will remember me for centuries.”

Fall Out Boy , Centuries

19. “Something about you makes me feel like a dangerous woman."

Ariana Grande, Dangerous Woman

20. “Don’t act like it’s a bad thing to fall in love with me.”

Justin Timberlake, Not A Bad Thing

21. “Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream.”

Taylor Swift, Blank Space

22. “Find me where the wild things are.”

Alessia Cara, Wild Things

23. “I’m high on lovin’ you.”

Florida Georgia Line, H.O.L.Y.

24. “If you’re gonna be somebody’s heartbreak, somebody’s mistake, if you’re gonna be somebody’s first time, somebody’s last time, be mine.”

Hunter Hayes, Somebody's Heartbreak

25. “Don’t be afraid to take the road less traveled on.”

Lauren Alaina, Road Less Traveled

Bruce Springsteen's Top 7 Lyrics

Everything bruce says in his classic rock songs..

Anyone who was born and raised in New Jersey (or anywhere really) knows of Bruce Springsteen, whether or not they like him is a whole other situation. I hope that his hundreds of classic rock songs and famous high energy performances, even in his sixties he can put on better concerts than people half his age, are at least recognizable to people of all ages. Love him or hate him (I identify with the former) you have to admit that some of his songs and interviews have inspirational quotes and lyrics.

Want to know more about Bruce Springsteen?

One of the great American artists of all time, Bruce Springsteen has had a profound impact on the music world. Our community has you covered with more about him:

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• Bruce Springsteen: To Lose Your Audience : He's dabbled into political music, so no surprise that can be divisive.

Here are a few of Bruce Springsteen's most memorable song lyrics because whether you're a die hard fan who named your dog after the man (I totally did that) or you have other opinions, you have to admit that some of his lyrics are on point:

1. "Talk about a dream Try to make it real You wake up in the night With a fear so real Spend your life waiting For a moment that just don't come Well don't waste your time waiting." (Badlands)

This is one of my personal favorites. Maybe it is a little lengthy, but it really hits on some major points.

2. "It's a town full of losers/ I'm pulling out of here to win" (Thunder Road)

Maybe this only resonates with people who hate their hometown (which is most college students I know). However, I once watched an interview where Lady Gaga said that this was the lyric that inspired her to become a musician. Which is pretty cool if you ask me.

3. "You've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above" (Tunnel of Love)

It's the Bruce Springsteen version of "if you can't beat them, join them."

4. "I got something in my heart / I been waitin' to give/ I got a life I wanna start/ One I been waitin' to live" (Leah)

For some reason, I have always loved this less popular song.

5. “God have mercy on the man/ Who doubts what he’s sure of” (Brilliant Disguise)

This had to be included because this is my favorite Bruce Springsteen song, but it is also a solid quote.

6. “Well everybody’s got a hunger, a hunger they can’t resist/ There’s so much that you want, you deserve much more than this/ Well, if dreams came true, aw, wouldn’t that be nice?/ But this ain’t no dream, we’re living all through the night/ You want it? You take it, you pay the price” (Prove it All Night)

Maybe it is not one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs, but this lyric is still powerful.

7. “Is a dream a lie when it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” (The River)

"The River" is another one of my favorite songs, it has so many quotable lyrics. This is just one of them.

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Being raised by two moms made me who I am today

By m.m. gumbin @mmgumbin

“Is your bookstore queer?” Someone asks over the phone. “Is it a queer bookstore?”

“Are we a queer bookstore?” My coworker repeats and glances over at me, as she contemplates the question. We have queer employees, an LGBTQ+ section, and a vibrant rainbow behind our logo on Instagram. In fact, as I shelve children’s books, monotonously running through the alphabet in my head, I can’t help but think how different the kids’ corner looks compared to when I was a child. Heather Has Two Mommies . Daddy’s Roommate. And Tango Makes Three .

And while I’m glad that society has come around to this progressive, accepting place, I can’t help but feel a little resentment burgeoning up as I put titles like this away. I mean, where were these books when I was a kid?

You see, my memories of growing up with two moms in the early 2000s are fraught, confused, kaleidoscopic. No one ever sat us down and explained their relationship. There were no other families like ours in the neighborhood, no same-sex parents portrayed on TV, no brightly colored picture books for us to flip through. Instead, we learned by observing.

Kim took care of the cooking and strict disciplining, while Jill was the breadwinner and nurtured with maternal kindness. I’m not sure who that made the more paternal one. Early on, I didn’t think anything of them both being women; as kids, you accept things as they are. But I was aware that our family was different, maybe even something to hide. My moms slept in separate bedrooms and when friends came over after school, we’d lie and say they were sisters or roommates or anything but life partners. In fact, we hardly even saw them kiss.

I don’t know at what point I understood the truth, but it was intuitive.

Back then, kids used ‘gay’ as a slur. I remember Nate Unger pulling me aside by the buses and laughing, saying he heard my mom liked eating pussy. Gay meant stupid back then.

Conservative commentators and politicians spoke very casually about the dangers of parents like mine, how they might also raise their children queer. My siblings and I both internalized and fought back against this dialogue, how we supposedly needed a man in our life, how there was something wrong with our parents and, by extension, us.

“You know, gay originally meant ‘happy,’” I’d retort back to one of the school bullies with my head down.

“That’s like so gay,” said Mean Girl circa 2006 (although, I’m sure now she’s a pride activist).

I don’t mean to be glib. It’s just been rather astonishing to see how quickly the discourse has changed; in less than a decade—in fact, during Obama’s single presidency—gay and lesbian relationships went from being scoffed at to mainstream. “I Kissed a Girl” to Moonlight .

And while a part of me is relieved that future generations of LGBTQ-raised children (hopefully) don’t have to face the same societal struggles my siblings and I did (depending on their own immediate environments), another part feels like those hardships ended up strengthening me, making me more empathetic, even making me a better person. That pain shaped who I am. In fact, I have no doubt that my experience growing up, its uniqueness and the way it shaped my perspective, is what inspired me to write.

I had to tell this story.

But as any writer knows, not all stories have happy endings.

The other thing that’s made this radical shift in the culture feel uncomfortable is that my moms are no longer together. My parents literally split up the week the Marriage Equality Act passed.

I was 20 years old, traveling around Europe between college semesters. I had needed to get away from things that summer, escape. I remember how spotty the cell reception was at a rest stop in the Swiss Alps and the shock that came over me when I first saw the text message my mom sent. I felt a deep sink in my gut as I looked up at my new friend Kenny, from Thailand, before racing to catch the last bus to town.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“My parents broke up.”

As the windy bus descended down the mountain, I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.

“Are you okay?” Kenny asked, with concerned eyes.

A part of me was relieved. My moms didn’t have the best relationship, and I knew it was better for them, as individual people, to be separated. But they had also been together all my life, and their very union was something that I had to defend and fight against the rest of the world.

To overhear, two mornings later, that gay marriage was finally legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court made the situation more disorienting. Instead of celebrating, I was in mourning. The momentousness of this unpairing. I looked out the chalet window at the fog over the horizon and felt myself similarly drifting through air, re-contextualizing my history. It would change everything. Kim and I now no longer speak.

I want to be clear: the challenges particular to me and my family are not intrinsic to all same-sex families. Some were personal, some cultural, often intermixed. And if I feel a bit of representational guilt, on behalf of my parents, for not lasting “happily ever after” (as if that is the mark of success for a relationship), then I also feel strongly that part of representation for queer relationships/families is showing that not all are perfect or built to last. Just like any heterosexual relationship, queer people are entitled to their abuses, mess-ups, and mistakes.

But where does that leave me: the child, my parents’ product? A man raised by lesbians.

I take a break from shelving and gaze at the cover of our Kids’ Pick: The GayBCs . Staring at it for too long, I feel estranged. What do words even mean?

“Are you okay?” my coworker asks. 

I haven’t told anyone about my family history yet. I don’t know whether to wear it as a badge of honor here or if talking about it is somehow exploiting them, my family, especially since there’s no collective ‘them’ anymore. Sometimes I wonder if it all matters. All in the past, right? Time to close the book.

But the past resides in the present. I fantasize about what it would be like to talk to Kim again, if this essay is a way of reaching out, in fact.

“You dating anyone?” my coworker inquires.

“No,” I mumble.

I have a lot of my own issues to sort out, around gender and sexuality and romantic attachments, but I’m probably not the only one. We are all left with the baggage of our parents. But I think it’s important—now more than ever, now that a generation of children are coming-of-age under such families and growing up into adulthood—that I remember, even honor, my family and their queerness. Kim and Jill were not equal, but they were both my mothers.

Whatever the wreckage, you both shaped me. 

m.m. gumbin is a 27-year-old writer and filmmaker from Tucson, AZ. He is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He works as the Events Host/Marketing Assistant for Book Soup and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

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Thanks for sharing! And that sounds like a great bookstore. And yeah, I know what you mean – times change so fast.

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Growing up with two moms

My moms have been together for 28 years but married for only four. In 2015, we were in Orlando, Florida, on a trip as a family at Walt Disney World Resort. My parents decided that, while we were in Florida, we needed to go to the courthouse since gay marriage was legal in Florida. One morning, we made our way to the courthouse, and they got married in a small room lined with empty, plastic white wedding chairs and an arch at the end. 

It was only me, my sister and my moms in the room with the government official. It was a bit of an uneventful wedding, although some relatives on my birth mom’s side of the family sent us flowers. Really, it did not need to be a huge elaborate wedding, because, much like many other older gay couples, they had already been together for years by then. They had already established a household and brought up a family. They just needed a piece of paper to prove that, in the law’s eyes, we were all a family. They got that piece of paper on June 16, 2015, hilariously only 11 days before the same-sex marriage legislation was passed nationwide.

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As a kid, it’s hard to understand when things so close to you are different and unorthodox to others. My family is all I knew. My parents loved me and loved each other. It seemed normal to me, I did not have society telling me it was weird and, even more so, that it was something to hide from people in fear they won’t accept my family. My family. Me, my little sister, and my two moms. 

I still remember when my moms sat my sister Megan and me down and defined the word “lesbian.” My sister was probably 3 or 4 and I was maybe 7. Looking back, I believe they waited as long as possible to define this word for us. They told us that — that our family was different. They warned we should not go around proudly talking about our moms because some people might not understand and accept our family. It had not occurred to me that my family was different in a way that could be perceived as bad to the world.

My moms turned into “my parents,” or “my mom” singular when I talked about one or both of them. My close friends who knew I had two moms would ask which one I was talking about, and I would clarify my birth mom or “Eema,” which is the Hebrew word for mom. To clarify, we are not Jewish — my moms just wanted to come up with a way to distinguish them that would be easy for even a baby to say.

It took me a while to admit to the people I knew that I had two moms. I usually waited until the information needed to present itself, like if they were going to come over to my house. Otherwise, I kept it hidden. I believe this hesitation came from my moms. 

They often do not tell people around them about having a wife. My mom, my birth mom, has barely told anyone at her work. They are part of a LGBTQ+ generation that pushed the idea that they need to be more secretive in order to fit in and live their lives unbothered without worrying about being judged for loving someone out of the heteronormative mold. I have found it is especially important to tread lightly in the South, and while we live in Nashville, which is decently progressive, there are still a lot of undertones of discrimination in the older generations.

The handful of people I told have accepted my moms and my family. They often found that part of my life to be strange and unique. One of my sister’s friends even went so far as to say that she wished she did not have a dad and that she too had two moms. Now, that does not mean all of these people support the idea of LGBTQ+ marriage. I had a friend tell me, “Of course I support your family — I just don’t support LGBT in general.” But how could someone accept my family but not accept the millions of others just like us? Between 2 to 3.7 million children have an LGBTQ+ parent, 200,000 of which are raised by a same-sex couple, according to a 2015 journal article that appeared in “The Future of Children,” a journal published by Princeton University.

Growing up with two moms puts an interesting twist on the perspective of a young kid. Society emphasizes heteronormativity, especially through the lack of LGBTQ+ representation on platforms like entertainment and media, but having two role models who break the mold from birth counterbalances that in a way. I grew up questioning my sexuality constantly, wondering if I would end up liking men, like the societal norm, or women, like my moms. I did not fear that they would not accept me if I were “different” because they were different. It was freeing, almost, to be able to navigate my sexuality that way, and looking back, it was very rare. I found that I was heterosexual, but that was much more so by choice after contemplation than as a default.

My sister and I essentially look like twins and get called that consistently even though we are three years apart in age. Nevertheless, the second people find out we have two moms, they wonder if we are related, which is hilarious since we look the same. Megan and I are fully related, born of the same mom and the same anonymous donor. She and I have grown up together and grown closer over time.

Megan and I bond over little quirks in our family, such as what I like to call “getting mommed times two.” Moms are known for always asking if you did things like doing chores or your homework to the point of nagging sometimes. Imagine that amount of “momming” but coming from two different people. It is only double the amount of “momming” at most, but sometimes it feels like exponentially more. That being said, I know it’s because they care about me, so I am thankful for it, even if I respond with “Eema already told me that. Four times.”

My parents did not go to Pride until last summer. Honestly, I think they spent so much time trying to normalize that side of themselves that they isolated themselves for the most part from the LGBTQ+ community. It took me and Megan pushing them for them to finally go. I think they liked it pretty well. I believe they were still stuck in the mindset that many people do not support the LGBTQ+ community, but when they went to Pride, their perception shaped into something new and more colorful. So many people were there to support the idea that a family like mine can exist. That is something beautiful. My parents told me they saw that widespread and diverse support, and it made them feel connected the LGBTQ+ community and the overall movement more. I am glad they had that experience, even if it took so long for them to get there.

My parents’ story is pretty normal. Yet it is, at the same time, inspiring. I hope young LGBTQ+ people read this story and realize it is possible to be successful, develop a household and start a family no matter your sexuality. My parents are strong, powerful women who decided to live truthfully to themselves, even if it was out of the ordinary and scary. Do not think that you don’t have the same rights. There are obstacles in every journey — my moms have dealt with plenty. But they did not let those roadblocks stop them. They showed the people around them that a gay household can be normal and everlasting. And that, I think, is amazing.

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Doing it All? Mothers’ College Enrollment, Time Use, and Affective Well-being

Jennifer march augustine.

1 Jennifer March Augustine, University of South Carolina, Department of Sociology, Columbia, SC 29208

Kate C. Prickett

2 Kate C. Prickett, University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Chicago, IL 60637

Daniela Negraia

3 Daniela Veronica Negraia, University of South Carolina, Department of Sociology, Columbia, SC 29208

The rising share of women in college with dependent children and growing emphasis on two-generation policies for reducing socioeconomic inequality have galvanized research aimed at determining whether mothers’ increased education can improve their and their children’s well-being. Yet as part of this effort, scholars have overlooked signs that mothers’ college enrollment may not be unequivocally good for families. This research brief aims to bring greater attention to this “side of the story.” To do so, we analyze time diary (2003–2015) and well-being data (2010, 2011, 2013) from the American Time Use Survey. We find that mothers in college experience a time squeeze that limits their time in caregiving, self-care, and work, on one hand, and school-related activities on the other. This time squeeze may explain why mothers enrolled in college (compared to mothers who were not in school) also reported less happiness and more fatigue during activities with their children.

Among U.S. college students today, one in four is a parent, with the vast majority (76%) of student-parents being women ( Gault et al., 2014 ). These facts suggest a remarkable change in the characteristics of today’s college students from previous decades, when women who pursued higher education did so before having children, and those who had children were unlikely to return to school ( Marini, 1984 ). This trend in mothers’ college enrollment has also been viewed by scholars as a potential policy lever for reducing historically high levels of socioeconomic inequality in the U.S. for the next generation. In short, scholars argue that policies that promote lower educated mothers’ continued pursuit of higher education will not only benefit a generally less advantaged population of women; they will also improve the mobility prospects of their children (Attewell & Lavin, 2007; Kaushal, 2014 ). The promise of this “two-generation” policy approach has been well-supported empirically. A vast literature finds that children of higher educated parents are more likely to achieve higher levels of education and economic prosperity than are children with parents with less education ( Black & Deveraux, 2010 ; Hout, 2012 ). A small but growing body of studies also finds that increases in lower educated mothers’ education are associated with improvements in mothers’ parenting ( Crosnoe & Kalil, 2010 ; Domina & Roska, 2012) and the academic outcomes of their children ( Gennettian, Magnuson, & Morris, 2008 ; Harding, 2015 ; Magnuson, 2007 ; Magnuson, Sexton, Davis-Kean, & Huston, 2009 ).

Despite strong evidence in favor of policies that aim to increase the education of women without college degrees, however, we believe there remains an issue that has been overlooked by researchers: the possibility that mothers’ pursuit of a college degree may not have unequivocally positive effects on families. Mothers in college may also experience a greater time squeeze—in other words, greater struggles to put in enough work hours to support their families, to care for their children, and create time for leisure ( Jacobs & Gerson, 2004 )—in ways that undercut the financial, psychosocial, and health benefits that higher education is supposed to promote in mothers, and the social and cognitive development of their children. To our knowledge, researchers have not yet directly examined this possibility, although there are certainly signs that point to it. For example, researchers have found that children whose mothers returned to school experienced an increase in behavioral problems ( Harding, 2015 ); the cognitive gains made by children whose mothers increased their education quickly faded-out ( Gennettian et al., 2008 ); and that more than half of mothers that recently enrolled in college failed to complete their degree ( Miller et al., 2011 )—a figure that exceeds estimates for college students without children by 40%. Qualitative research has also revealed how many mothers who dropped out of college actually found themselves in worse financial positions than when they first enrolled ( Seefeldt, 2016 ). Thus, the goal of this brief is to draw attention to the need for research that elucidates the various challenges experienced by families with mothers enrolled in college and to galvanize this effort by pursuing two study aims.

The first aim is to examine whether student mothers experience an exacerbated “time squeeze” in which, on one hand, mothers in college have less time to devote to paid labor, self-care, and caring for their children; activities that promote mothers mental and physical health, their children’s social and cognitive development, and the overall economic security and wellbeing of their family ( Fiorini & Keane, 2012 ; Harding, Morris, & Hughes, 2015 ; Jopp & Herzog, 2016; McLeod & Owens, 2004 ; Osterbacka, Merz, & Zick, 2010 ; Ross & Mirowsky, 2010). On the other hand, given the time demands of caretaking and paid work (which the majority student mothers do; Miller, Gault, & Thorman, 2011 ), student mothers may have less time to invest in their schooling. We investigate these possibilities by describing the amount of time that mothers enrolled in college devote to different forms of caregiving (e.g., basic care, developmental care), two principle categories of self-care (e.g., sleep, leisure), and human capital accumulation (e.g., work, school) compared to similarly educated mothers who are not in school, and to other adult women college students without children. The second aim is to explore the possible consequences of this time squeeze and associated role strain for student mothers’ affective well-being (i.e., intensity of positive and negative feelings) during their daily activities by examining whether they experience more negative feelings (e.g., fatigue) and less positive ones (e.g., happiness) compared to similar mothers who were not in school.

Taken together, these study results would reveal that mothers in school not only spend less time in the activities linked to their and their children’s well-being; but that the quality of the time in these activities is lower as well. These findings, in turn, provide insights into why many student mothers may not complete their degrees or their children experience increased behavioral problems, indicated by prior research; provide the basis for future investigations that incorporate measures of mothers’ and children’s outcomes; and highlight the importance of greater inquiry into the experiences of mothers in college, which, given the failings of two-generation programs of the past ( Chase-Lansdale & Brooks-Gunn, 2014 ; Kaushal, 2014 ), is an essential step in crafting effective-two generation programs for the future.

Data and samples

To pursue these aims, this project makes novel use of data from the American Time Use Survey (2003–2015). The ATUS is a large-scale, population-based survey sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that records respondents’ time use over a 24-hour period. The ATUS captures an unparalleled range of activities, as well as information on various demographic factors (e.g., marital status, ages of children, income). Although the ATUS has been used extensively to study how mothers balance the competing demands of work and caregiving, this project, to our knowledge, is the first to use the ATUS to consider the time demands of schooling for mothers enrolled in college.

We also make use of an innovative module that ATUS added to the 2010, 2012, and 2013 surveys: the Subjective Well-Being Module ( ATUS, 2014 ), in which respondents were asked at the end of the interview to assess the extent to which they felt different feelings (e.g., happy, sad) during three activities randomly selected from their time diary. Activities shorter than 5 minutes, grooming, personal activities, and sleeping were not eligible. In contrast to global assessments used in most other studies, these measures reflected both positive and negative feelings and were measured in reference to a specific activity ( Kahneman et al., 2004 ).

This study draws on three different subsamples. The first two samples were formed by pooling data across all 13 surveys (2003–2015). The first of these samples, which we call the mothers sample, was formed by restricting the sample to only include women aged 18–45 who had less than a college level of education (including Bachelor’s and Associate’s degrees) and an adoptive or biological child living in the household under age 13. Given our approach to dealing with missing data (explained below), approximately 8% of these mothers were dropped due to item missingness on family income (986 excluded) and metropolitan residence (106 excluded). This final analytical sample included 13,121 mothers, among whom 1,278 (8.8%) were enrolled in college at the time of the survey. We focus on mothers with children under age 13 to capture the stage in mother’s lives when their children have more caregiving needs ( Nomaguchi, 2009 ). The second, which we call the student sample, was restricted to only include mothers aged 25-45 who had less than a college level of education and a coresidential child under age 13, and other women enrolled in college with less than a college level of education who were aged 25-45 who did not have children. We made this latter age restriction using conventional cut-offs (see National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.) to limit our sample to non-traditional adult students who are likely to be more similar to student mothers than traditional college students. Dropping respondents in this sample with missing data on family income (8.1%; n = 66) and metropolitan area (0.9%; n = 7) resulted in a final student sample of n = 746, out of which 417 were mothers. Mothers who reported being enrolled in high school were dropped from both samples ( n = 90). The third sample, the well-being mothers sample, consisted of mothers who participated in the Well-Being Module (surveyed 2010 2012, or 2013). This sample included 2,536 mothers, out of which 247 were enrolled in college. These mothers reported on how they felt in a total of 7,553 activities; 738 of these reports came from mothers enrolled in college.

Independent variables

Two survey questions were used to determine whether women were enrolled in college . Respondents were first asked if they were enrolled in “high school, college, or university.” Respondents responded either “yes” or “no.” Those who responded “yes” were then asked: “Would that be high school, college, or university?” Women who responded that they were enrolled, and that the institution was a college or university, were categorized as students (coded as “1”). Non-students (coded as “0”) were those who reported not being enrolled in any education. To capture parental status , female respondents were classified as mothers (coded as “1”) if they reported having at least one biological or adoptive child aged 12 or younger who was living in the household. Nonparents (coded as “0”) had no dependent children.

We examined seven categories of time—measured in minutes over the 24-hour time diary period—which broadly reflected three domains. The first was time with children , which was captured three different ways: First, any time with child captured any time during the day—regardless of the activity—in which the mother was with her child. Second, child-focused time included only time when the child was present and was the explicit focus of the activity; for example, bathing children or doing homework. Third, developmentally-rich time narrowed in on a set of activities shown to be most strongly tied to children’s positive development, including reading to children, conducting arts and crafts with them, and talking with and listening to children ( Bus, Van Ijzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995 ; Roberts, Jurgens, & Burchinal, 2005 ).

The second domain of time was in self-care activities , which we captured using two variables: 1) time spent sleeping, and 2) time in leisure activities (e.g., socializing, relaxing, watching television, and arts and entertainment). We also combined time in sleep and leisure to create an overall measure of time in self-care. The third domain was captured by two measures of time in work-related activities and time in education-related activities, which more broadly reflected time in human capital accumulation . Again, we created a combined time measure in work and education to better reflect the total time in this domain. More information about the specific activities reflected in each of these measures is available upon request, although they generally followed the major tier codes created by BLS staff.

Affective Well-being

For each of the three randomly selected activities, respondents were asked to assess how happy, sad, stressed, and tired they felt in that activity on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 6 (very much). The order of questions was randomized for each respondent. These dimensions of well-being were derived from the Princeton Affect and Time Use Study (Krueger et al., 2009) and designed to map onto Russell’s (2003) circumplex model of core affect. Although we only include one measure of positive affect (i.e., happiness) compared to several measure of negative affect (e.g., fatigue), it is worth noting that measures of positive emotions have been shown to be highly correlated, while negative ones have not ( Kapteyn et al., 2015 ). For this study, we captured mothers’ affective well-being in two activities: activities with children and other activities . Activities with children refers to all activities in which the mother reported that her child age 12 or younger was in her care during the activity. Other activities refers to all other activities in which the mother was not with her children. Reports of other activities commonly reflected activities like paid work, schooling, and leisure. Although it would have been preferable to differentiate time in other activities, we do not have a sufficient number of reports for student mothers to do so. We do, however, have a sufficient number of reports to look more closely at activities with children, which we do.

Individual-level covariates

All models included covariates that captured: respondents’ employment status (dummy coded full-time employed , part-time employed , unemployed , or not working ), highest level of educational attainment (dummy coded less than a high school degree, high school degree , or some college ), union status (dummy coded married , single , or cohabiting ), family income (continuous, based on 16 levels created by BLS), race/ethnicity (dummy coded European American , African American , Hispanic , Asian , or Other ), nativity ( foreign-born or not), chronological age (measured continuously), whether they lived in a metropolitan area (1 = yes ), and geographic region (dummy coded Northeast, Midwest, South , or West ), as well as time diary information, including whether the diary was recorded on a holiday (1 = yes ), summer month (1 = yes ), weekend (1 = yes ), and the year of the interview (dummy coded). In the analyses using the mother sample, we also accounted for the number (dummy coded as one child, two children , and three or more children ) and ages of mothers’ coresidential children (captured by three distinct binary variables indicating whether the mother had a child aged between 0-2 years, 3-5 years, and 6-18 years, where a value of “1” indicated that the mother had a child in that age group). In the analyses using the student sample, we also included a covariate to indicate whether students were enrolled part or full-time. We also used this measure in preliminary analyses based on the mother sample to check whether patterns of results were similar for mothers enrolled part time versus full time, which they were.

Activity-level covariates

For the analyses based on the well-being mothers sample, in addition to the factors above, we accounted for activity-level characteristics that may affect feelings about the activity, including: the duration of the activity (measured in minutes per day, because, for example, reading for ten minutes to a child may feel different than reading for 50 minutes) and where the activity took place (0 = somewhere else , 1 = at the respondent’s home ; e.g., because eating at home feels different from eating at a restaurant).

Analysis Plan

The analysis for Aim 1 included two sets of multivariate models. Both models used ordinary least squares regression (OLS) to predict time, net of the individual-level covariates and time diary factors, but drew on different samples. The first set of models drew on the mother sample. For these models, we compared the time that student mothers spent in caregiving, sleeping, leisure, work, and education-related activities (using a different model to predict time in each activity) compared to mothers who were not enrolled in college. The second set of models drew on the student sample. For these models, our focus was on comparing mothers’ time in the human capital-related activities of work and schooling and self-care to that of women college students, who were also non-traditional students, but did not have dependent children.

For the second aim, we drew on the well-being mothers sample and OLS regression to predict mothers’ reports of how happy, sad, tired, and stressed they felt in two activities: time with children and time in other activities. For these models, we pooled across all reports of each measure of affective well-being (e.g. all three reports of happiness, all three reports of fatigue) to predict an average estimate of how respondents felt in either of these two activities. In doing so, we incorporated random effects, which accommodated the hierarchical structure of the Well-Being survey (i.e., the fact that women had multiple reports of their well-being in either activities with children or other activities) while adjusting for autocorrelation, non-independence, and unobserved heterogeneity in mothers’ reports of their well-being, as well as the activity-level (e.g., duration, location) confounds ( Allison, 2009 ; Laird & Ware, 1982 ). When predicting well-being in activities that involved children, we drew on 3,813 activity records (339 records for mothers enrolled in college), which were drawn from 1,928 mothers (of whom 178 were enrolled in college). When predicting well-being in other activities, we drew on 2,179 activity records (241 records for student mothers), from 1,244 mothers (127 student mothers).

All models were estimated in Stata v.14. Models based on the time use data used the survey weight, reflecting the 2006 population. Models based on the well-being mothers sample used the activity weight to adjust for the unequal probability that different activities were selected for the Well-Being Module ( ATUS, 2014 ). Because of the limited amount of missing data (e.g., 7% on income, 1% on metro in the mother sample; 1% on income in the mother well-being sample), consistent with other studies using ATUS and evidence missingness on income violates the missing at random (MAR) assumption of multiple imputation ( Abraham, Maitland, & Bianchi, 2006 ), we used list-wise deletion to account for missing data. Estimates of the mother and student samples using multiple imputation, however, produced nearly identical results.

Description of Mothers Enrolled in College

Overall, 9% of mothers in the mother sample were enrolled in college. 1 Not surprisingly, the majority of student mothers reported they had completed some college (63.6%), compared to just over one quarter of mothers not enrolled in college. Only a handful of student mothers reported they did not complete a high school level of education (4.2%). This increased to 23.9% among mothers who were not enrolled in college. Conversely, student mothers had lower rates of full-time employment compared to mothers not in college (27.3 vs. 37.7%), but higher rates of part-time employment (23.5 vs. 18.8%). Rates of labor force participation of student mothers overall appears to be lower in the ATUS sample than in other samples (see Miller et al., 2011 ).

Among other sociodemographic factors, compared to mothers not in college, student mothers were younger (29 vs. 32 years), had fewer children (43% had only one child vs. 32%), were more likely to have an infant (43.9 vs. 37.6%), less likely to be married (47.9 vs. 62.8%), were more likely to be single (43.8 vs. 29.6%), and had lower family incomes (8.7 vs. 8.9). Finally, nearly a quarter of student mothers were African American, compared to only 14.1% of mothers who were not in college. Hispanic-White mothers, on the other hand, made up only 18.9% of mothers enrolled in college compared to 30.4% of mothers who were not enrolled.

Multivariate Results Predicting Mothers’ Time-Use and Well-being

To address the first aim, we used OLS regression to reestimate differences in mothers’ time use by college enrollment status within the mother sample, controlling for measures of mothers’ background characteristics and time diary factors. We then examined time use among the student sample, comparing the amount of time in self-care and human capital activities among student mothers to other adult learners (i.e., age 25 or older) who did not have children. The results of these two sets of analyses appear in Table 2 .

Predicted Minutes in Activities For Women in Mother Sample ( n = 13,121) and Women in College Student Sample ( n = 746)

Notes: Standard errors in parentheses. Coefficients for controls not shown. All models controlled for employment status, highest level of education, union status, family income, race/ethnic background, nativity, age, metro, region, holiday, summer, weekend, and year. Models based on the mother sample also controlled for the number of coresident children, whether the mother had a child age 0–2 living in the household, whether she had a child age 3–5 living in the household, and whether she had a child aged 6–18 living in the household. Models based on the student sample controlled for part-time versus full-time enrollment.

The multivariate results of the mother sample appear in the first panel of Table 2 . Student mothers spent an hour less with their children than mothers who were not in college, as well as less time in child-focused activities (23 minutes less per day). This latter difference, however, did not extend to developmentally-rich time, which did not significantly vary by mothers’ college enrollment status. Among self-care activities, student mothers experienced significantly less sleep (23 minutes) and leisure time (53 minutes), totaling 76 less minutes of self-care time than mothers who were not in college. At the same time, student mothers devoted significantly more time to work- and education-related activities (229 vs. 161 minutes). This difference was driven by student mothers’ time in education-related activities, which averaged 119 minutes per day for student mothers. Time spent in education-related activities likely explains why student mothers spent 52 fewer minutes in paid labor each day than mothers who were not in school. This overall pattern was also observed when we distinguished between full- and part-time students, although the size of the differences in time spent in caregiving, self-care, and human capital activities compared to mothers not in college were smaller for mothers enrolled part-time.

The second panel on Table 2 presents the results of the analyses exploring student mothers’ time compared to adult women college students without dependent children. Student mothers devoted statistically similar amounts of time to work-related activities, but they spent significantly less time in educational (102 vs. 147 minutes) and leisure activities (178 vs. 233 minutes). There were no statistically significant differences in time in sleep.

Mothers’ Well-being

Addressing the second study aim, random effect models estimated four dimensions of well-being among the well-being mothers sample (results in Table 3 ). Student mothers reported significantly less happiness ( B = −.29, SE = .13) and more fatigue ( B = .36, SE = .14) in activities with their children compared to nonstudent mothers, translating to 19% and 18% of a standard deviation difference, respectively. Examining child-focused time specifically, however, student mothers did not differ significantly from nonstudent mothers in their reports of well-being. At the same time, meals with children present were associated with significantly more stress for student mothers than nonstudent mothers. During activities when children were not present, student mothers also reported significantly more fatigue than nonstudent mothers ( B = −.38, SE = .18; 19% standard deviation difference). Reports of feeling sad or stressed were not significantly different by student status, regardless of whether a child was present.

Affective Well-being of Student Mothers Compared to Non-Student Mothers during Activities with Children and Other Activities

Notes: Coefficients for selected controls shown. All models controlled for employment status, highest level of education, union status, family income, race/ethnic background, nativity, age, metro, region, holiday, summer, weekend, year, the number of coresident children, whether the mother had a child age 0-2 living in the household, whether she had a child age 3-5 living in the household, whether she had a child aged 6-18 living in the household, duration of the activity, and where the activity took place. Statistically significant at

Robustness Analyses

Although we included statistical controls to account for observable differences between student mothers and mothers who are not in school, as well as female students without dependent children, student mothers differ from these groups in significant ways. For example, 63% of mothers who were not in school are married, compared to 48% of student mothers. Given these differences, we pursued a series of models based on propensity score matching techniques to create comparison groups that more closely resembled the student mothers to test the robustness of the patterns we observed. The first approach involved nearest neighbor matching with replacement ( teffects psmatch2 in Stata), estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) based on the full set of covariates used in the models. The second approach involved nearest neighbor matching without replacement ( psmatch2 in Stata) , which provides an estimate of the treatment effect on the treated (ATT). Both approaches improved the balance of observable covariates between groups. The latter approach is generally considered less optimal than the first ( Drukker, 2016 ), but it allowed us to generate a matched sample. Reestimating models based on this matched sample was the third approach and the only strategy that allowed us to adjust for the hierarchical structure of the wellbeing data or specify random effects. Overall, the results of each of these approaches proved to be consistent with the results presented in Tables 2 and ​ and3. 3 . The results from these models and more detail on our modeling strategy are available upon request.

In addition to testing the robustness of our results to various propensity score techniques, we reestimated our models using boostrapping: a resampling method that allowed us to calculate more accurate p-values and provide stronger controls against Type I error ( Westfall & Young, 1993 ). Doing so helped address the potential issue of ‘multiple comparisons’ (i.e., the estimation of multiple dependent variables, which may be correlated) in this study. Results based on these models were also similar to those presented in the tables (results also available upon request).

Over the past few decades, there has been a dramatic change in the life course trajectories of contemporary women, in which many women are now returning to the educational system to pursue post-secondary degrees after having children ( Gault et al., 2014 ). This trend has inspired substantial scholarly interest in determining whether and how increases in the education of less educated mothers improves the well-being of their families ( Crosnoe & Kalil, 2010 ; Harding, 2015 ; Magnuson, 2007 ), and enthusiasm for the potential for policies that aim to promote the continuation of the trend as a means of reducing inequality in the U.S. for both the parent and child generation (Kausal, 2015). At the same time, scholars have not given much consideration to the results of studies which suggest that mothers’ pursuit of higher education may not be unequivocally positive for families, or to basic theories on time use and role strain which highlight such possibilities. As such, the aim of this brief was to draw attention to the need for research that helps policy makers to better understand the challenges experienced by mothers in college—a vital step in crafting social policies that consider not only their potential, but the factors that stand to lessen their efficacy—and to begin this effort. In doing so, we also make novel use of two contemporary source of data, the ATUS time diary data and Well-Being Modules, which to our knowledge, have not been used to study the lives of student mothers.

The results of our study highlighted two challenges faced by mothers pursuing a college degree. First, mothers enrolled in college experienced an exacerbated time squeeze, in which they experienced less time on all fronts compared to mothers not in school. They had less time with their children, including time focused on them, in sleep and leisure, and in paid labor, yet they also spent less time in education-related activities (and leisure) than other adult women in college who did not have children. Given that mothers worked, on average, the same number of hours in paid labor as women in college without children, this time deficit appears to be linked to the need to devote more time to care for their children. These results point to the possibilities that mothers may not benefit as much from schooling as their peers without children because they have less time to invest in it, which means that some of the well-documented advantages of higher levels of parental education are likely not passed on to their children as well; that children of mothers enrolled in college may receive fewer time investments and less monitoring; and that families may suffer greater strains as a result of mothers’ time squeeze. These ideas received support from our second set of findings, in which we found that student mothers were more tired in both activities in which their children were present and those activities without their children (e.g., paid work, schooling) and that they were less happy during activities spent with their children than mothers who were not in school. These results point to the possibility that student mothers’ lower levels of well-being may also interfere with their schooling and parenting.

Taken more broadly, contrary to conventional thinking, the results of our study suggest that mothers in school may have fewer of the resources—greater parental investment, more financial resources (at least in the short-term, as student mothers work fewer hours), and better mental health—that higher education is argued to promote ( Hout, 2012 ). Of course, we do not actually know what the true implications of these two factors —less time, and time that is lower in subjective well-being—are for these outcomes (e.g., mother’s mental health, parenting), or for other aspects of mothers’ lives, such as their success in school, productivity in paid labor, or the outcomes of their children. To this latter point, we find that despite spending less time with their children, student mothers still spent the same amount of time in developmentally rich activities, like reading with children, as mothers not in college. It is possible that mothers’ schooling may have negative implications for children’s behavioral outcomes, as found by Harding (2015) , but not their academic ones. These findings provide an empirical and theoretical foundation for these types of investigations, while also having descriptive significance of their own.

Nevertheless, this research was also limited in other ways. First, we were limited to the use of cross-sectional data, which meant we could not actually observe changes in mothers’ time or well-being upon enrolling in school, rule out the possibility that selection was driving the patterns we observed, or make causal claims about the impact of college enrollment on mothers. Given how prior research suggests that mothers who enroll in college are positively selected—for example, they have higher test scores, their parents have higher levels of education, and they have better financial and social support than mothers who do not return to school ( Augustine, 2016 ; Brooks-Gunn, Guang, & Furstenberg, 1993 )—we do not believe that the results of this study were purely driven by unmeasured variation. At the same time, in order to support any causal claim, future research must also attend more carefully to questions around what is the most appropriate counterfactual (e.g., mothers not in school; mothers in school with greater support) and how school enrollment may affect the lives of different mothers in different ways.

Next, lack of longitudinal data also meant we cannot say whether these challenges have enduring effects, or whether they are short-term strains. Thus, we cannot say whether these short-term strains ultimately helped mothers achieve their longer-term goals of improving their families’ well-being, although there is new evidence to suggest it may not—at least assessed in terms of improvements in the quality of the home environment or children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills (Augustine & Negraia, 2018). Thus, we believe the time squeeze associated with mothers’ school enrollment may have more profound implications than are currently understood.

Next, the small number of student mothers selected for the Well-being Module was sufficient for our purposes, but a larger sample would be preferable for various reasons, among them: allowing us to look more carefully at how student mothers’ well-being varied across different contexts, such as in paid labor. We also did not examine the factors that may buffer student mothers against an increased time squeeze or role strain, which are important to identify so as to craft policies and programs that support student mothers. Nor did we examine how these processes varied across contexts; for example, in married versus single-parent families or for mothers who were not in the labor market compared to those who are. Our goal was more modest: to provide a baseline picture of student mothers’ time use and affective well-being. In auxiliary analyses in which we predicted mothers’ time use separately for working mothers and mothers who were not working, we did find similar patterns as those reported for the full mother sample. Future research and new data collections are needed to tackle many of these issues.

In sum, in an era in which an increasing number of mothers are returning to college, and the benefits of a college education have never been higher, it is important that researchers study the experiences of mothers in school so that we can design programs and policies that ensure that mothers can ascertain these benefits, and pass them on to their children. The goal of this research brief was to highlight this issue by focusing on mothers’ time use and the implications of her use of time for her well-being. In doing so, we also aimed to spur on a new research effort that works to better understand the implications of this increasingly salient life course context—mothers’ enrollment in college—for the well-being of U.S. families.

Description of Sample Characteristics and Dependent Variables by Mothers’ College Enrollment Status based on the Mother Sample

Notes : Means and percentages are based on weighted estimates.

1 This figure is lower than many estimates of the percentage of mothers without college degrees who increased their education (e.g., Harding, 2015 ; Magnuson, 2007 ; Pressler, Raver, & Masucci, 2017 ) because such estimates included mothers who earned a high school degree or GED. There are far fewer mothers who return to school after having children, however, who purse a college degree than who purse a high school level of education ( Augustine, 2016 ).

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College Essay Examples | What Works and What Doesn't

Published on November 8, 2021 by Kirsten Courault . Revised on August 14, 2023.

One effective method for improving your college essay is to read example essays . Here are three sample essays, each with a bad and good version to help you improve your own essay.

Table of contents

Essay 1: sharing an identity or background through a montage, essay 2: overcoming a challenge, a sports injury narrative, essay 3: showing the influence of an important person or thing, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about college application essays.

This essay uses a montage structure to show snapshots of a student’s identity and background. The writer builds her essay around the theme of the five senses, sharing memories she associates with sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.

In the weak rough draft, there is little connection between the individual anecdotes, and they do not robustly demonstrate the student’s qualities.

In the final version, the student uses an extended metaphor of a museum to create a strong connection among her stories, each showcasing a different part of her identity. She draws a specific personal insight from each memory and uses the stories to demonstrate her qualities and values.

How My Five Senses Record My Life

Throughout my life, I have kept a record of my life’s journey with my five senses. This collection of memories matters a great deal because I experience life every day through the lens of my identity.

“Chinese! Japanese!”

My classmate pulls one eye up and the other down.

“Look what my parents did to me!”

No matter how many times he repeats it, the other kids keep laughing. I focus my almond-shaped eyes on the ground, careful not to attract attention to my discomfort, anger, and shame. How could he say such a mean thing about me? What did I do to him? Joseph’s words would engrave themselves into my memory, making me question my appearance every time I saw my eyes in the mirror.

Soaking in overflowing bubble baths with Andrew Lloyd Webber belting from the boombox.

Listening to “Cell Block Tango” with my grandparents while eating filet mignon at a dine-in show in Ashland.

Singing “The Worst Pies in London” at a Korean karaoke club while laughing hysterically with my brother, who can do an eerily spot-on rendition of Sweeney Todd.

Taking car rides with Mom in the Toyota Sequoia as we compete to hit the high note in “Think of Me” from The Phantom of the Opera . Neither of us stands a chance!

The sweet scent of vegetables, Chinese noodles, and sushi wafts through the room as we sit around the table. My grandma presents a good-smelling mixture of international cuisine for our Thanksgiving feast. My favorite is the Chinese food that she cooks. Only the family prayer stands between me and the chance to indulge in these delicious morsels, comforting me with their familiar savory scents.

I rinse a faded plastic plate decorated by my younger sister at the Waterworks Art Center. I wear yellow rubber gloves to protect my hands at Mom’s insistence, but I can still feel the warm water that offers a bit of comfort as I finish the task at hand. The crusted casserole dish with stubborn remnants from my dad’s five-layer lasagna requires extra effort, so I fill it with Dawn and scalding water, setting it aside to soak. I actually don’t mind this daily chore.

I taste sweat on my upper lip as I fight to continue pedaling on a stationary bike. Ava’s next to me and tells me to go up a level. We’re biking buddies, dieting buddies, and Saturday morning carbo-load buddies. After the bike display hits 30 minutes, we do a five-minute cool down, drink Gatorade, and put our legs up to rest.

My five senses are always gathering new memories of my identity. I’m excited to expand my collection.

Word count: 455

College essay checklist

Topic and structure

• I’ve selected a topic that’s meaningful to me.
• My essay reveals something different from the rest of my application.
• I have a clear and well-structured narrative.
• I’ve concluded with an insight or a creative ending.

Writing style and tone

• I’ve crafted an introduction containing vivid imagery or an intriguing hook that grabs the reader’s attention.
• I’ve written my essay in a way that shows instead of tells.
• I’ve used appropriate style and tone for a college essay.
• I’ve used specific, vivid personal stories that would be hard to replicate.
• I’ve demonstrated my positive traits and values in my essay.
• My essay is focused on me, not another person or thing.
• I’ve included self-reflection and insight in my essay.
• I’ve respected the word count , remaining within 10% of the upper word limit.

Making Sense of My Identity

Welcome to The Rose Arimoto Museum. You are about to enter the “Making Sense of My Identity” collection. Allow me to guide you through select exhibits, carefully curated memories from Rose’s sensory experiences.

First, the Sight Exhibit.

“Chinese! Japanese!”

“Look what my parents did to me!”

No matter how many times he repeats it, the other kids keep laughing. I focus my almond-shaped eyes on the ground, careful not to attract attention as my lip trembles and palms sweat. Joseph couldn’t have known how his words would engrave themselves into my memory, making me question my appearance every time I saw my eyes in the mirror.

Ten years later, these same eyes now fixate on an InDesign layout sheet, searching for grammar errors while my friend Selena proofreads our feature piece on racial discrimination in our hometown. As we’re the school newspaper editors, our journalism teacher Ms. Riley allows us to stay until midnight to meet tomorrow’s deadline. She commends our work ethic, which for me is fueled by writing一my new weapon of choice.

Next, you’ll encounter the Sound Exhibit.

Still, the world is my Broadway as I find my voice on stage.

Just below, enter the Smell Exhibit.

While I help my Pau Pau prepare dinner, she divulges her recipe for cha siu bau, with its soft, pillowy white exterior hiding the fragrant filling of braised barbecue pork inside. The sweet scent of candied yams, fun see , and Spam musubi wafts through the room as we gather around our Thankgsiving feast. After our family prayer, we indulge in these delicious morsels until our bellies say stop. These savory scents of my family’s cultural heritage linger long after I’ve finished the last bite.

Next up, the Touch Exhibit.

I rinse a handmade mug that I had painstakingly molded and painted in ceramics class. I wear yellow rubber gloves to protect my hands at Mom’s insistence, but I can still feel the warm water that offers a bit of comfort as I finish the task at hand. The crusted casserole dish with stubborn remnants from my dad’s five-layer lasagna requires extra effort, so I fill it with Dawn and scalding water, setting it aside to soak. For a few fleeting moments, as I continue my nightly chore, the pressure of my weekend job, tomorrow’s calculus exam, and next week’s track meet are washed away.

Finally, we end with the Taste Exhibit.

My legs fight to keep pace with the stationary bike as the salty taste of sweat seeps into corners of my mouth. Ava challenges me to take it up a level. We always train together一even keeping each other accountable on our strict protein diet of chicken breasts, broccoli, and Muscle Milk. We occasionally splurge on Saturday mornings after interval training, relishing the decadence of everything bagels smeared with raspberry walnut cream cheese. But this is Wednesday, so I push myself. I know that once the digital display hits 30:00, we’ll allow our legs to relax into a five-minute cool down, followed by the fiery tang of Fruit Punch Gatorade to rehydrate.

Thank you for your attention. This completes our tour. I invite you to rejoin us for next fall’s College Experience collection, which will exhibit Rose’s continual search for identity and learning.

Word count: 649

• I’ve crafted an essay introduction containing vivid imagery or an intriguing hook that grabs the reader’s attention.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

This essay uses a narrative structure to recount how a student overcame a challenge, specifically a sports injury. Since this topic is often overused, the essay requires vivid description, a memorable introduction and conclusion , and interesting insight.

The weak rough draft contains an interesting narrative, insight, and vivid imagery, but it has an overly formal tone that distracts the reader from the story. The student’s use of elaborate vocabulary in every sentence makes the essay sound inauthentic and stilted.

The final essay uses a more natural, conversational tone and chooses words that are vivid and specific without being pretentious. This allows the reader to focus on the narrative and appreciate the student’s unique insight.

One fateful evening some months ago, a defensive linebacker mauled me, his 212 pounds indisputably alighting upon my ankle. Ergo, an abhorrent cracking of calcified tissue. At first light the next day, I awoke cognizant of a new paradigm—one sans football—promulgated by a stabbing sensation that would continue to haunt me every morning of this semester.

It’s been an exceedingly taxing semester not being able to engage in football, but I am nonetheless excelling in school. That twist of fate never would have come to pass if I hadn’t broken my ankle. I still limp down the halls at school, but I’m feeling less maudlin these days. My friends don’t steer clear anymore, and I have a lot more of them. My teachers, emboldened by my newfound interest in learning, continually invite me to learn more and do my best. Football is still on hold, but I feel like I’m finally playing a game that matters.

Five months ago, right after my ill-fated injury, my friends’ demeanor became icy and remote, although I couldn’t fathom why. My teachers, in contrast, beckoned me close and invited me on a new learning journey. But despite their indubitably kind advances, even they recoiled when I drew near.

A few weeks later, I started to change my attitude vis-à-vis my newfound situation and determined to put my energy toward productive ends (i.e., homework). I wasn’t enamored with school. I never had been. Nevertheless, I didn’t abhor it either. I just preferred football.

My true turn of fate came when I started studying more and participating in class. I started to enjoy history class, and I grew interested in reading more. I discovered a volume of poems written by a fellow adventurer on the road of life, and I loved it. I ravenously devoured everything in the writer’s oeuvre .

As the weeks flitted past, I found myself spending my time with a group of people who were quite different from me. They participated in theater and played instruments in marching band. They raised their hands in class when the teacher posed a question. Because of their auspicious influence, I started raising my hand too. I am no longer vapid, and I now have something to say.

I am certain that your school would benefit from my miraculous academic transformation, and I entreat you to consider my application to your fine institution. Accepting me to your university would be an unequivocally righteous decision.

Word count: 408

• I’ve chosen a college essay topic that’s meaningful to me.
• I’ve respected the essay word count , remaining within 10% of the upper word limit.

As I step out of bed, the pain shoots through my foot and up my leg like it has every morning since “the game.” That night, a defensive linebacker tackled me, his 212 pounds landing decidedly on my ankle. I heard the sound before I felt it. The next morning, I awoke to a new reality—one without football—announced by a stabbing sensation that would continue to haunt me every morning of this semester.

My broken ankle broke my spirit.

My friends steered clear of me as I hobbled down the halls at school. My teachers tried to find the delicate balance between giving me space and offering me help. I was as unsure how to deal with myself as they were.

In time, I figured out how to redirect some of my frustration, anger, and pent-up energy toward my studies. I had never not liked school, but I had never really liked it either. In my mind, football practice was my real-life classroom, where I could learn all I ever needed to know.

Then there was that day in Mrs. Brady’s history class. We sang a ridiculous-sounding mnemonic song to memorize all the Chinese dynasties from Shang to Qing. I mumbled the words at first, but I got caught up in the middle of the laughter and began singing along. Starting that day, I began browsing YouTube videos about history, curious to learn more. I had started learning something new, and, to my surprise, I liked it.

With my afternoons free from burpees and scrimmages, I dared to crack open a few more of my books to see what was in them. That’s when my English poetry book, Paint Me Like I Am , caught my attention. It was full of poems written by students my age from WritersCorps. I couldn’t get enough.

I wasn’t the only one who was taken with the poems. Previously, I’d only been vaguely aware of Christina as one of the weird kids I avoided. Crammed in the margins of her high-top Chuck Taylors were scribbled lines of her own poetry and infinite doodles. Beyond her punk rock persona was a sensitive artist, puppy-lover, and environmental activist that a wide receiver like me would have never noticed before.

With Christina, I started making friends with people who once would have been invisible to me: drama geeks, teachers’ pets, band nerds. Most were college bound but not to play a sport. They were smart and talented, and they cared about people and politics and all sorts of issues that I hadn’t considered before. Strangely, they also seemed to care about me.

I still limp down the halls at school, but I don’t seem to mind as much these days. My friends don’t steer clear anymore, and I have a lot more of them. My teachers, excited by my newfound interest in learning, continually invite me to learn more and do my best. Football is still on hold, but I feel like I’m finally playing a game that matters.

My broken ankle broke my spirit. Then, it broke my ignorance.

Word count: 512

This essay uses a narrative structure to show how a pet positively influenced the student’s values and character.

In the weak draft, the student doesn’t focus on himself, instead delving into too much detail about his dog’s positive traits and his grandma’s illness. The essay’s structure is meandering, with tangents and details that don’t communicate any specific insight.

In the improved version, the student keeps the focus on himself, not his pet. He chooses the most relevant stories to demonstrate specific qualities, and the structure more clearly builds up to an insightful conclusion.

Man’s Best Friend

I desperately wanted a cat. I begged my parents for one, but once again, my sisters overruled me, so we drove up the Thompson Valley Canyon from Loveland to Estes Park to meet our newest family member. My sisters had already hatched their master plan, complete with a Finding Nemo blanket to entice the pups. The blanket was a hit with all of them, except for one—the one who walked over and sat in my lap. That was the day that Francisco became a Villanova.

Maybe I should say he was mine because I got stuck with all the chores. As expected, my dog-loving sisters were nowhere to be found! My mom was “extra” with all the doggy gear. Cisco even had to wear these silly little puppy shoes outside so that when he came back in, he wouldn’t get the carpets dirty. If it was raining, my mother insisted I dress Cisco in a ridiculous yellow raincoat, but, in my opinion, it was an unnecessary source of humiliation for poor Cisco. It didn’t take long for Cisco to decide that his outerwear could be used as toys in a game of Keep Away. As soon as I took off one of his shoes, he would run away with it, hiding under the bed where I couldn’t reach him. But, he seemed to appreciate his ensemble more when we had to walk through snowdrifts to get his job done.

When my abuela was dying from cancer, we went in the middle of the night to see her before she passed. I was sad and scared. But, my dad let me take Cisco in the car, so Cisco cuddled with me and made me feel much better. It’s like he could read my mind. Once we arrived at the hospital, the fluorescent lighting made the entire scene seem unreal, as if I was watching the scene unfold through someone else’s eyes. My grandma lay calmly on her bed, smiling at us even through her last moments of pain. I disliked seeing the tubes and machines hooked up to her. It was unnatural to see her like this一it was so unlike the way I usually saw her beautiful in her flowery dress, whistling a Billie Holiday tune and baking snickerdoodle cookies in the kitchen. The hospital didn’t usually allow dogs, but they made a special exception to respect my grandma’s last wishes that the whole family be together. Cisco remained at the foot of the bed, intently watching abuela with a silence that seemed more effective at communicating comfort and compassion than the rest of us who attempted to offer up words of comfort that just seemed hollow and insincere. It was then that I truly appreciated Cisco’s empathy for others.

As I accompanied my dad to pick up our dry cleaner’s from Ms. Chapman, a family friend asked, “How’s Cisco?” before even asking about my sisters or me. Cisco is the Villanova family mascot, a Goldendoodle better recognized by strangers throughout Loveland than the individual members of my family.

On our summer trip to Boyd Lake State Park, we stayed at the Cottonwood campground for a breathtaking view of the lake. Cisco was allowed to come, but we had to keep him on a leash at all times. After a satisfying meal of fish, our entire family walked along the beach. Cisco and I led the way while my mom and sisters shuffled behind. Cisco always stopped and refused to move, looking back to make sure the others were still following. Once satisfied that everyone was together, he would turn back around and continue prancing with his golden boy curly locks waving in the chilly wind.

On the beach, Cisco “accidentally” got let off his leash and went running maniacally around the sand, unfettered and free. His pure joy as he raced through the sand made me forget about my AP Chem exam or my student council responsibilities. He brings a smile not only to my family members but everyone around him.

Cisco won’t live forever, but without words, he has impressed upon me life lessons of responsibility, compassion, loyalty, and joy. I can’t imagine life without him.

Word count: 701

I quickly figured out that as “the chosen one,” I had been enlisted by Cisco to oversee all aspects of his “business.” I learned to put on Cisco’s doggie shoes to keep the carpet clean before taking him out一no matter the weather. Soon after, Cisco decided that his shoes could be used as toys in a game of Keep Away. As soon as I removed one of his shoes, he would run away with it, hiding under the bed where I couldn’t reach him. But, he seemed to appreciate his footwear more after I’d gear him up and we’d tread through the snow for his daily walks.

One morning, it was 7:15 a.m., and Alejandro was late again to pick me up. “Cisco, you don’t think he overslept again, do you?” Cisco barked, as if saying, “Of course he did!” A text message would never do, so I called his dad, even if it was going to get him in trouble. There was no use in both of us getting another tardy during our first-period class, especially since I was ready on time after taking Cisco for his morning outing. Alejandro was mad at me but not too much. He knew I had helped him out, even if he had to endure his dad’s lecture on punctuality.

Another early morning, I heard my sister yell, “Mom! Where are my good ballet flats? I can’t find them anywhere!” I hesitated and then confessed, “I moved them.” She shrieked at me in disbelief, but I continued, “I put them in your closet, so Cisco wouldn’t chew them up.” More disbelief. However, this time, there was silence instead of shrieking.

Last spring, Cisco and I were fast asleep when the phone rang at midnight. Abuela would not make it through the night after a long year of chemo, but she was in Pueblo, almost three hours away. Sitting next to me for that long car ride on I-25 in pitch-black darkness, Cisco knew exactly what I needed and snuggled right next to me as I petted his coat in a rhythm while tears streamed down my face. The hospital didn’t usually allow dogs, but they made a special exception to respect my grandma’s last wishes that the whole family be together. Cisco remained sitting at the foot of the hospital bed, intently watching abuela with a silence that communicated more comfort than our hollow words. Since then, whenever I sense someone is upset, I sit in silence with them or listen to their words, just like Cisco did.

The other day, one of my friends told me, “You’re a strange one, Josue. You’re not like everybody else but in a good way.” I didn’t know what he meant at first. “You know, you’re super responsible and grown-up. You look out for us instead of yourself. Nobody else does that.” I was a bit surprised because I wasn’t trying to do anything different. I was just being me. But then I realized who had taught me: a fluffy little puppy who I had wished was a cat! I didn’t choose Cisco, but he certainly chose me and, unexpectedly, became my teacher, mentor, and friend.

Word count: 617

If you want to know more about academic writing , effective communication , or parts of speech , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

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A standout college essay has several key ingredients:

• A unique, personally meaningful topic
• A memorable introduction with vivid imagery or an intriguing hook
• Specific stories and language that show instead of telling
• Vulnerability that’s authentic but not aimed at soliciting sympathy
• Clear writing in an appropriate style and tone
• A conclusion that offers deep insight or a creative ending

There are no set rules for how to structure a college application essay , but these are two common structures that work:

• A montage structure, a series of vignettes with a common theme.
• A narrative structure, a single story that shows your personal growth or how you overcame a challenge.

Avoid the five-paragraph essay structure that you learned in high school.

Though admissions officers are interested in hearing your story, they’re also interested in how you tell it. An exceptionally written essay will differentiate you from other applicants, meaning that admissions officers will spend more time reading it.

You can use literary devices to catch your reader’s attention and enrich your storytelling; however, focus on using just a few devices well, rather than trying to use as many as possible.

Most importantly, your essay should be about you , not another person or thing. An insightful college admissions essay requires deep self-reflection, authenticity, and a balance between confidence and vulnerability.

Your essay shouldn’t be a résumé of your experiences but instead should tell a story that demonstrates your most important values and qualities.

When revising your college essay , first check for big-picture issues regarding message, flow, tone, style , and clarity. Then, focus on eliminating grammar and punctuation errors.

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My wife isn't 'just' a stepmom to my son. He sees her as his other mom.

• My wife has been in my son's life since he was 6 years old.
• She has taken on a parental role, stepping in whenever I need extra help.
• Even though she's his stepmom, my son considers her his other mom.

After Vice President Kamala Harris announced she was running for president, one criticism lobbed against her was that she is not a parent because she has never given birth to children. But she is the stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff's two children.

Like Harris, my wife is a stepmother to my son.

I am no longer in a relationship with his father and have been in a new relationship for four years. My wife came into my son's life when he was 6 years old and quickly stepped into a parental role. It was a role she enthusiastically took on.

Although she didn't give birth to my son, my wife is absolutely his second mother.

My son and wife's relationship started friendly

My wife didn't immediately take an authoritative role or force him to treat her like a parent. At first, she was more like a grown-up friend — someone he knew he needed to respect, but someone who would take him on drives to get ice cream or let him pretend to drive her car while I was inside the grocery store.

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I was worried about parenting with another person all the time. As the primary parent, I wasn't used to dividing parenting duties . My wife was aware of that and always deferred to me as the primary parent.

But the bond between my son and my wife was instant. He had never met someone I was dating before, but he liked her immediately.

My wife has taken on more responsibility as a stepmom

Over the last four years, she's taken on more parental responsibility but never tried to act like she was more of a parent than myself or my son's father. She is a bonus mom, someone there to kiss him goodnight , help him with his homework, and love him unconditionally.

During the pandemic, my wife volunteered to take the lead in helping my son with virtual school so I could focus on work. She created a schedule for him, made him lunch, and ensured he kept up with assignments. When the playgrounds opened, she would take him to play, armed with a backpack full of whatever was needed.

I have gone on several overnight trips , leaving the two of them alone together. My son doesn't even call or text me when I'm gone because he's having so much fun hanging out with my wife. I never have to worry about him; I know my wife will make sure he takes a bath and goes to bed on time.

There are days when I will ask her to tag in and do the bedtime routine because I'm working or want a break, and she does it without question. My son knows that if he needs something, he doesn't have to come to me all the time.

Seeing my wife willingly step into a parental role with my son has strengthened our relationship. I knew I loved her almost immediately after we met, but seeing how my son responded to her made me more secure in my decision.

Sometimes, she still refers to him as mine, and I always remind her that she's his mom, too. We do everything as a team: school meetings, performances, birthday parties . Everyone knows us as his two moms, and there's no one else I could imagine doing this with.

My son now sees my wife as the missing piece to our family puzzle. He proudly claims her as his other mom.

"You're my mom too," my son will say when my wife calls herself his stepmom. He made that decision. My wife never wanted to force a close relationship on him, but he pushed for it.

Media has warped the perception of stepmoms

Popular media depictions of stepmoms are largely negative. The common trope is that they're evil.

For example, you have characters like Meredith Blake in the Lindsay Lohan version of "The Parent Trap," the Baroness von Schraeder in " The Sound of Music ," and, of course, the prototype: Cinderella's Evil Stepmother.

These women are always seen as temptresses who come in and seduce the father into marrying them before revealing they intend to get rid of his daughter so that she will be the only woman in his life.

Maybe there are stepmoms out there who fit this description, but by and large, stepmoms are there to be whoever their step kids want them to be.

I know that's exactly the role my wife plays, and my son and I are all the more lucky for it.

Watch: Why one mother fled Texas to keep her child safe

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Bella Hadid Wears the Naked Dress to End All Naked Dresses

Anthony Vaccarello finally figured out how to reproduce his collection of ultra-sheer pantyhose dresses. Bella Hadid hit Cannes in look seven from the Saint Laurent fall 2024 show: a halter dress featuring 10 denier hosiery cups, a knotted pantyhose bodice, and a below-the-knee skirt with a control top hemline.

Hadid, styled by Molly Dickson, leaned into the Old Hollywood glamour that has become synonymous with the Cannes Film Festival, adding a pair of mahogany peep-toe ankle strap heels and an enormous pair of drop earrings from Chopard.

This look fits into Hadid’s latest sartorial M.O. of sheer earthy tones that can only be described as “sexy nymph.” While promoting her fragrance, Orebella, in New York, the model wore a diaphanous nude Dior slip dress by John Galliano, as well as a cream-colored Rokh dress with a lace bodice. And yesterday in Cannes, she further explored brown tones in a simple tank dress . But this look—with only some extremely well-placed seams preserving her modesty—is by far her boldest to date.

When asked about how he would manufacture these ephemeral pieces from the collection, Vaccarello told Vogue, “Don’t even ask me about production—I can’t tell you.” This being the first instance the delicate outfits have been spotted on the red carpet speaks to Hadid’s risk-taking style. Even if she is the only person who ever wears one of these sheer Saint Laurent looks out in the world (let’s see if she can make it to the end of the night without any snags) the fact that Vaccarello was readily willing to make one for her speaks to Hadid’s immense power in the fashion industry.

And if this is Hadid’s wardrobe for her first official day of events in Cannes? We can only imagine what’s to come.

More Great Fashion Stories from Vogue

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Angelina Jolie Will Wear This Pair of Shoes Anywhere—Even a Shopping Run

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Bridgewater student’s Harvard admissions essay about finding passion for life after losing her mother to cancer goes viral on TikTok

Yes, abigail mack got in. she begins classes in the fall..

When Abigail Mack sat down to write her college application essay in October, she had a sudden realization: She strongly disliked the letter “s.”

The consonant had stung since she was 12, when her mother, Julie, died of cancer. Each time she heard the word “parents,” or said it herself, she realized she only had one. In time, she found herself wanting to escape the heavy grief that seemed to cling to its snake-like curve.

Staring at a blank screen, Mack, a Bridgewater resident who attends Cardinal Spellman High School in Brockton, started to type.

“I hate the letter ‘S’,” she wrote. From there, the words poured out.

The result was a heartfelt narrative about how running from the letter “S,” a symbol for the pain of losing her mother at a young age, led her to trying to distract herself with a range of extracurricular activities and hobbies — some of which eventually became passions that motivated her to keep going.

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The powerful essay ended up helping her — along with her many academic achievements — land a coveted spot in Harvard College’s class of 2025, at a time when the school saw a record number of applicants.

After learning she had been accepted, Mack shared her story and essay on the popular video app TikTok this month, where 60-second clips of her describing her essay and why she wrote it have now been viewed close to 20 million times. Her essay has sparked an outpouring of support from all over the world, with many posting that they, too, had lost a parent to cancer growing up.

@a_vmack ♬ original sound - Abigail Mack

“I’ve gotten so many bittersweet comments from people who have had similar experiences, saying I had put into words what they had been feeling,” she said. “It’s been so nice to feel like I’ve connected with so many people about that topic.”

Mack, 18, decided to share her essay about her mother on social media after initially posting her reaction to getting into Harvard in March — a tradition for many high schoolers overjoyed to be heading to college.

From there, Mack began posting other school-related content for her followers, and answering questions from people curious about her academic journey. In late April, she posted the first in a series of videos about her essay, including one that has now been viewed some 16 million times.

“I had been really hesitant to share it just because it’s so personal,” she said. “But I thought about it some more ... so I decided to share it.”

Mack said she had long known she would write about her mother, recalling her as a kind, empathetic, and brilliant woman who was adored in her community. She ran a dance company, Julie’s Studio of Dance, with Mack’s father, Jonathan.

“My mom set the greatest example for me,” Mack said. “She had a way of making everybody feel so special and unique. She was so upbeat, and positive, and brave.”

But when it came time to write about her, Mack ended up with a completely different essay than she hoped for, one that focused more on her own loss and less on how the experience shaped her life.

So Mack, a devout theater enthusiast, went back to the drawing board in October with a new perspective.

“I remember sitting down at my computer in English class — it was an assignment to write our college essays — and I thought about the difference between ‘parent’ and ‘parents’ and how much ‘parents’ is so much more common in our vernacular,” she said. “Once I came up with that hook, the rest of the essay wrote itself.”

It started like this: “I hate the letter ‘S.’ Of the 164,777 words with ‘S,’ I only grapple with one. To condemn an entire letter because of its use 0.0006 percent of the time sounds statistically absurd, but that one case changed 100 percent of my life. I used to have two parents, but now I have one.”

“’S’ follows me,” she wrote. “As I write this essay, there is a blue line under the word ‘parent’ telling me to check my grammar ... but cancer doesn’t listen to edit suggestions.”

She recalled how she unintentionally became the “busy kid,” filling the void left by her mother with theater, sports, and afterschool programs. Eventually, she realized there were a few activities in particular that made her happiest.

“I stopped running away from a single ‘S,’ and began chasing a double ‘S’ — passion,” she wrote of narrowing her focus to politics, theater, and academics. “I’ve finally learned to move forward instead of away, and it’s liberating.”

Mack, who also got into Notre Dame, Georgetown University, Dartmouth College, and Northwestern University, said she didn’t entirely expect the video series to take off like it has but is glad her story has resonated so widely.

“It still doesn’t feel real,” said Mack, who is interested in studying foreign policy and international relations. “I’ve been a little bit nervous about my [future] classmates at Harvard seeing the video.”

Mack’s father, who met Julie at Holy Cross in the late 1990s and still runs the family’s dance studio, said he has been touched by the reactions to his daughter’s essay and is glad she found light in the darkness.

“Writing the essay gave her a chance to reflect on this last period of her life,” he said. “I think it’s good for her to be able to recognize the good things that have come from that.”

Steve Annear can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him @steveannear .

The Challenges of Parenting While in College

New research links support and health for undergraduate student parents..

Posted June 30, 2018

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College is challenging. Parenting is challenging. Those who succeed at doing both at the same time tend to have help from strong family and friend support networks. Research now available highlights the role of social support and stress in the physical health of college students who are also parents.

Nearly 5 million undergraduate students are also parents in the United States. Of those student parents, only 26 percent earn their degree within six years. Many of the others leave university for lower paying jobs. Some reasons for leaving college early include not having a strong enough support system including friends and family that can pitch in and help when the student parent needs to stay late on campus or when a child is sick. Others cannot overcome the financial burden of paying for college while raising a child. Many student parents work extra jobs when they are not in class to make ends meet. Many suffer from significant stress that is compounded by juggling two major life transitions at once: becoming a college student and becoming a new parent.

Drs. Eve Gerrard and Ron Roberts found that some student parents question why they are putting themselves and their families through this stress and whether a college degree is really worth it. Since being a student parent often means not doing either role to the best of their abilities, some student parents wonder whether the sacrifices they are making to their education and their children will pay off in the end.

As communication scientists, we recognize the importance of a strong social support network in handling and overcoming challenges in any life stage, but especially when attending college while raising young children. Social network members like family, friends, and others who care can offer instrumental support like parenting advice or study tips. They can also offer tangible support like tuition money or a place to stay. When people receive enough good support, they are better off physically, mentally, and socially.

In a recent study from the Family Communication and Relationships Lab published in Health Communication , my colleague, Dr. Kristina Scharp, and I set out to discover how the costs of seeking support influence the health of undergraduate student parents . Costs of seeking support can be both intrapersonal and interpersonal and occur when people feel stigmatized or distressed about asking for help. It is easy to imagine a new parent who wants to appear confident and like they have they have everything under control may not want to ask for help. Having to ask for help may be intrapersonally costly if it lowers the person’s self-esteem or makes them worry about their ability to solve problems. Interpersonal support costs happen when the person thinks they will looks weak or incompetent to others, or they worry about how others will react to their request for help. For example, if new parents believe they should be able to handle the stress of a new baby and should naturally know how to be “good parents,” they may fear that others will look down on them for needing help. We found that the higher the costs student parents reported they felt, the worse their physical health. Student parents who perceived high costs to seeking support had more headaches, slept less, and exercised less than parents who reported lower costs.

Second, we wanted to understand how the amount of support a student parent desired influenced his/her physical health. People differ in how much support they want from their networks. Here we examined a type of support that relies on communication: social presence support. Social presence support captures the amount of support a person believes they have available to them. When a sibling tells a new parent “I am here for you if you need anything,” they are providing social presence support. Social presence support is about knowing support is available if needed, not about how much is actually given. Social presence was not directly associated with poor physical health in our study, but it was linked to parenting stress suggesting that desiring more social presence support than a student parent is getting contributes to higher parenting stress.

Finally, we tested whether college-based stress and parenting-based stress negatively influenced the physical health of student parents. Like we expected, the student parents in our study who experienced high levels of parenting and academic stress had worse health outcomes. For example, these parents were sleeping and exercising less than their peers who did not experience such high stress.

The major takeaway from our study is that friends and family can make a significant difference in the lives of college students who are also parents . Student parents who feel supported and are not afraid to ask for help are less stressed and in better physical health. Friends and family can remind student parents often that they are there for them and that it is normal to not have everything under control and figured out all the time. Friends and family can explicitly say that the student parent is not expected to be a perfect parent or raise his/her children on her/his own. As the saying goes, it takes a village . This is especially true when raising a child and earning a college degree.

Scharp, K. M. & Dorrance Hall, E. (online first). Examining the relationship between undergraduate student parent social support seeking factors, stress, and somatic symptoms: A two-model comparison of direct and indirect effects. Health Communication. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2017.1384427

Gault, B., Reichlin, L., Reynolds, E., & Froehner, M. (2014). 4.8 million college students are raising children. Institute for Women’s Policy Research Fact Sheet, #C424, 1–2.

Gerrard, E., & Roberts, R. (2006). Student parents, hardship and debt: A qualitative study. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 30, 393–403. doi:10.1080/03098770600965409

Sarason, I. G., & Sarason, B. R. (2009). Social support: Mapping the construct. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 26, 113–120. doi:10.1177/0265407509105526

Uchino, B. N. (2009). Understanding the links between social support and physical health: A life-span perspective with emphasis on the separability of perceived and received support. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4, 236–255. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.011

Elizabeth Dorrance Hall, Ph.D. , is an Assistant Professor of Communication, Michigan State University and Director, Family Communication and Relationships Lab.

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Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

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Guest Essay

What the Polls Tell Us About Harris vs. Trump

By Kristen Soltis Anderson

Ms. Anderson, a contributing Opinion writer, is a Republican pollster and a moderator of Opinion’s series of focus groups.

Whatever your feelings are about Donald Trump as a candidate, the pollster Tony Fabrizio, a top adviser for all of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaigns, knows his business. He saw a path to a Trump victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 that others didn’t. Campaigns often leak polling memos to drive a preferred narrative, so it’s sensible to take such memos with a grain of salt, but when Mr. Fabrizio puts one out , I take it seriously.

So when he warned last week of a “ Harris Honeymoon ” as Democrats were rallying around the vice president, I knew it was only a matter of time before the public polls would show what the Trump campaign was likely seeing privately. Two days later, there it was: the New York Times/Siena College poll showed the race narrowing to just a one-point Trump advantage nationally over Vice President Kamala Harris among likely voters, a major shift from a prior Times/Siena poll which showed Mr. Trump ahead of President Biden by six points.

This is, to use the parlance of our time, a vibe shift. It’s hard for me to overstate the euphoria Republican activists were feeling about the election coming out of their convention in Milwaukee. And, indeed, before the shake-up atop the Democratic ticket, most voters said that they thought Mr. Trump would win in November, according to a July poll by Echelon Insights, where I am a founding partner. Now, with around $200 million raised for Ms. Harris in a week, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a somewhat different result if you asked voters that question again.

There are two things giving Ms. Harris a lift in the short term: unity and energy.

The first is the party unity she enjoys by virtue of being the presumptive nominee without having had to endure a bruising Democratic primary battle. I’ve described this as the equivalent of a video game cheat code that lets you skip past some difficult but tedious early levels on the way to directly fighting the big bad boss at the end of the game. Harris didn’t have to spend the last year getting pummeled by, or trying to pummel, Democratic presidential rivals, almost certainly including some of the very Democrats who are now under consideration to be her vice-presidential nominee. While some of the out-of-the-mainstream views she espoused during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential run will no doubt follow her in this election, Ms. Harris benefits greatly from not yet having had to renavigate several issues that divide the Democratic Party these days, including border security, crime and policing and the war in Gaza.

The second thing Ms. Harris gets is a Democratic voter coalition reset to Obama-era factory settings. Democrats haven’t always done better with younger voters, but starting with the 2008 cycle, Democrats really began running up the numbers in that group. Advantages among voters of color grew substantially as well, triggering Republican panic . The Trump-Biden rematch, however, saw a reduction in polarization along generational and racial lines, with Mr. Trump narrowing Mr. Biden’s margins among groups like Black men and Generation Z. With Mr. Biden out and Ms. Harris in, early evidence suggests some reversion to the before times; according to last week’s accounts of the Times/Siena poll, Ms. Harris is “faring better among groups that Mr. Biden had been the weakest in, especially younger voters and nonwhite voters.”

America is a pretty evenly divided country. We are fairly split down the middle in terms of partisan identification. We’re also deeply polarized, with few people breaking from their own side to express support for a candidate of another party. I believe Mr. Biden’s age and apparent decline functioned like a black hole that bends light around it, warping our view of the evenly divided electorate. Now, with that distorting force removed, we’re back to the very close race we could have and should have expected all along.

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College Essay: How My Mother Inspires Me

I remember my childhood fondly: looking out the window at a beautiful lake, watching the latest Nickelodeon cartoons on a big flat screen TV, driving an ATV through a muddy forest, and eating snacks from a huge  stainless steel  fridge.  

That’s all true – but none of those things were mine. All of them belonged to kids of rich white people whose homes my mother had to clean.  

My mother came to the United States from Mexico in her early twenties, looking for a superior way of life than what she had living on the outskirts of Morelos, Mexico. In the U.S., she took the only jobs she could get – cleaning other people’s houses. She did that day after day, week after week, year after year, to support me and my three younger siblings.  

The lake view was from a house that my mom had to clean to pay our rent. The flat screen TV belonged to the child of the woman whose windows my mom had to clean to pay our electric bill. The ATV I loved to drive in the woods and the fridge where I got snacks belonged to a kid I met when I helped my mom clean his mother’s house every Saturday to buy a week’s groceries.  

When I started to feel sorry for myself because I didn’t own these amenities, I would think of my beautiful mother. As I saw her do backbreaking work, day in day out, sacrificing herself for me and my siblings – giving up any life of her own – I would think, “My mom doesn’t deserve to suffer like this. I need to do more. I need to sacrifice too.”    

So  I gradually gave up sports and friends to help around the house and care for my younger brothers and sister. And our frequent moves to cheaper housing meant adapting to new  schools  multiple times, saying goodbye to old friends and trying to make new ones.  

It wasn’t always easy, but whenever I thought, “Why me? Why does my life have to be difficult?” I thought about my mom. Even with my learning disability (ADD) and  d epression, I pushed forward, just like I saw my mother do with her suffering.   

I pushed forward dealing with frustration, asking for extra help from my teachers and holding in my thoughts and feelings. I knew the only way I could do more and be successful was by working harder on my academics. I remember my body enduring long nights of trying to complete and understand my school material.  

Through all of these difficulties, my mom has been my greatest inspiration. She’s been my biggest fan and supporter. She’s taught me by her example that I need to sacrifice for others and for myself to persevere in the face of adversity. The things I learned from her example will make me a more determined student in college and a contributor to my college community. My goals for the future are to get a college degree, establish a career and to become a greater contributor to society by giving back to my community, the Mexican-American community.  

With my determination to succeed in college, the pinnacle of my success will be when I will walk upon the stage, smiling cheek to cheek, receiving my degree that I worked hard for, and then gazing out into the crowd to find my mother applauding with tears running down her face.  

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Managing my time in college as a mom

• March 5, 2021

This blog post was written by College Forward student, Claudia Gloria in July 2020.

Hi, my name is Claudia Gloria and like most college students I’ve had my share of not having too much time to do anything. Like, getting a paper done, studying for a test, making it to class, eating, sleeping, social life,  etc. You get the picture. No one really informs you on how to manage everything while going to college for the next four years or more. I know in my first year of college it was hard trying to balance everything and at times felt like there was not a lot of time to do everything I wanted to do. But, as time went on I soon started realizing that it was possible to manage my time and be able to do everything I needed and wanted to do.

How I manage my time

While in college, I had to manage working two jobs, taking two classes online, and being pregnant. Sometimes, life doesn’t really give you a moment to just breathe. I got through by maintaining a schedule; what I usually do to make a schedule is have my planner out and write everything down. When writing everything down in my planner, I prioritize what is needing my attention first and what can be put to finish last. I work pretty much from 8 am to 5 pm, and after work, I do my class stuff for at least 3 hours. After that, I watch tv or have “me time” until at least 11 pm. Then I head to bed, wake up, and do the schedule all over again the next day.

Since finding out I was pregnant, making a schedule became something that I wanted to do, to have to do. Becoming a first-time parent has changed my perspective on everything, ensuring that I get everything done on time, from getting school work done correctly and on time to making sure that I schedule my doctor appointments and requesting days off of work for them. No one prepares you for your plans changing when a baby becomes part of those plans that already existed, but that does not mean they go away; they just get to be shared with another person you love that can see you grow and accomplish your dreams.

Most students also have to work and go to school. On the Mental Health America site, “About half of full-time students have jobs outside of school. This number jumps to 80% when it comes to part-time students.” Some may get burned out, and some may continue doing it. Even when managing your time to perfection, you still feel the pressure and stress of never having enough time to get everything done. Even with making a schedule and getting every little thing done on a list that I make, I still feel overly stressed. Some ways that I have found to be effective to get rid of the stress with school and outside of school can benefit almost every student going through the same issues.

Mitigating “not doing enough” stress

Anna Heinrich wrote that there are seven effective ways to manage your time in college and still remain sane.

Write down everything

This does work well. I noticed having my planner with me and writing down important times and events has really been helping me make sure that I do not schedule something on top of anything else.

Use your phone for good

Some professors encourage technology. Others do not. The way you can use your technical devices would be to have your recorder on during lectures. Or even to write down notes in them as well and to use as a calendar when you do not have a planner with you.

Stick to a routine

Having a routine everyday is effective when you know what you’re going to do every day, especially when you are going to school and have a million things to do. But, you should also go outside of that routine and make time for yourself to do something that is not in your normal routine. Go to the park, ride your bike, see the friends you have made while going to college, and have a little me time like relax or read a book that has nothing to do with school whatsoever or been assigned to you.

A healthy diet and working out has been shown to relieve stress and made going to school a little more calming for me. Working out and exercising can make you keep your levels of energy up, making you want to accomplish more in that one day.

Stay organized

In college, organization is really the key to succeeding, with having an organized schedule a list then you’re able to do more by checking each thing off. Avoiding, procrastination, and having a messy area can really make a person go nuts plus it will also make assignments harder to accomplish and get done.

Checklists are your friend

This goes back to being organized and sticking to a routine. With a checklist, you are able to see what needs to be done, what has been completed, and what has not. It helps make certain tasks either a higher priority or something that can be done after the most important task is completed.

Find a balance

Having a balance in college keeps you afloat and it helps keep your sanity intact. With a balance of being able to learn and do school work, you can get all the important stuff done You can take time off from just going to work day in and day out because school is considered work as well there has to be a balance between the two to make sure that you’re not losing it during your first year.

With this list, I can say personally that they are effective since I have used some of these steps to get through my own journey in college and in my personal life.

You may be thinking, “Okay, I have this list that you got from someone else. What am I supposed to do to follow each point made?” Different people are organized in different ways. It is important to try out different time management tools. What works for your friends or classmates may not work for you. Whether you want to do each step that is listed or just do a few even, doing a few of them will make it easier to transition into college. This list also helps with everyday life situations like having a job or family, I know some parents use a planner to organize their everyday life like work-wise and manage their family.

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17 Amazing Scholarships for Moms and Single Mothers

Financial Aid

Mothers and single mothers have it harder than others when trying to get a college education.

In addition to balancing a full academic course load, they are also responsible for feeding, clothing, and financially supporting their children.

Plus, data shows that between 30% and 40% of families headed by single mothers are living in poverty—which makes the idea of spending money on education even more difficult to fathom.

Fortunately, there are multiple companies who want to help moms and single moms improve their situations through education. Read on to see a list of scholarships directly aimed at mothers who are pursuing higher education.

Who Are These Scholarships For?

Many organizations want to help mothers get back into the classroom. They believe that if moms are getting college degrees, then they will be able to get better jobs and eventually be able to provide more for their families.

There is a lot of help out there for mothers and single mothers who are ready to put in some hard work.

Use this article as a starting point to explore some of the opportunities out there for moms to return to school.

We have split the scholarships into two categories:

• Scholarships for moms returning to college after a break
• Scholarships for single mothers

However, if you're serious about funding your education, don't stop there.

There are many other scholarships available that are not aimed specifically at moms, but that mothers who are pursuing degrees can and should still apply for. They're discussed in more detail at the end of this article.

Scholarships for Women Returning to School

These scholarships are for students who are returning to school after taking a break. If you're fresh out of high school, these are not for you!

Asherah Foundation Scholarship Program

• Deadline: Mid-June

This scholarship provides a second chance at education for women who are pursuing higher education later in life and have overcome great obstacles in order to do so. Applicants must be over the age of 24, have a high school diploma or equivalent, and intend to pursue continuing education with the goal of advancing her status in the workplace. Scholarship winners receive $2,500 annually to be applied toward expenses pertaining to a four-year college degree, associate degree, accredited vocational program, or other postsecondary career training program.

AAUW Virginia Beach Branch Scholarship

• Deadline: April 15

Students who are residents of Virginia Beach and at least 23 years old may apply for this scholarship. You should currently be enrolled in an undergraduate program at an accredited institution and have returned to school after being away. You should have a GPA of 3.0 or higher. Applicants must write a short essay about their career goals and special circumstances. At least one award of $500 will be given.

Arizona BPW Foundation Annual Scholarship

• Deadline: Likely June 18

The Arizona Business and Professional Women's Foundation gives out several scholarships aimed at women 19 years old or older who are returning to school to better their career prospects. Applicants must attend a community college or trade school in Arizona and will need to write an essay about their career goals and financial situation. The application deadline usually around June 18th. Award amount varies.

BK Krenzer Reentry Scholarship

• Deadline: May 1

This scholarship is awarded by the Society of Women Engineers to a non-traditional student who has re-entered education after a break. Students should be studying any kind of engineering and may be college freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or seniors. The award is for $3,250.

Dr. Wynetta A Frazier Sister to Sister Scholarship

• Deadline: Early February

This scholarship is aimed at African American women who are either returning to school after a break or who are starting college for the first time following a break after high school because of family responsibilities or other personal demands. Applicants must be able to confirm acceptance into a college or university to pursue a BA degree, must be at least 21 years of age, and need to write an essay on a given topic. Submission of college or high school transcripts and two letters of recommendation are also required.Two awards of $500 to $1,000 will be given.

Emerge Scholarship

• Deadline: Mid-February

Emerge Scholarships are aimed at non-traditional women students who are going back to school after a break. Applicants must be residents of Georgia who are planning to study in Georgia, be at least 25 years of age, and must express their career and life goals in the application. The number of awards given varies every year; last year 14 were given. The award amount ranges between $2,000 and $5,000.

Executive Women International Adult Students in Scholastic Transition Scholarship

• Deadline: Early spring

EWI offers the Adult Students in Scholastic Transition Scholarship (ASIST) for adults who are facing economic, social, or physical challenges and are looking to improve their lives through education. Students must first apply through local chapters, and then chapter winners will be entered to win at the corporate level. Corporate level scholarships are for amounts ranging from $2,000 to $10,000.

Jeannette Rankin Women's Scholarship

• Deadline: Mid- to Late February

This scholarship is aimed at women who are 35 years of age or older, low-income, U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and are pursuing their first bachelor's degree, associate's degree, or technical degree. Selection will be based on applicants' stated goals and plans for reaching them, and how they plan to use their education to give back to the community. The award amount is around $2,000.

Non-Traditional Student Scholarship

• Deadline: March 1

Applicants must be members of The American Legion, American Legion Auxiliary, or Sons of the American Legion. Applicants should be non-traditional students returning to the classroom after a period of interruption, or be starting education at a later point in life. Winners will be selected based on need, academic achievement, character and leadership, and personal goals. A $2,000 scholarship is awarded in every Auxiliary geographic division. 

P.E.O. Program for Continuing Education

• Deadline: Varies by chapter

This grant is intended for women whose education was interrupted and who want to return to school to complete a degree or certification. Applicants should be citizens of the USA or Canada and be studying in one of those countries. They should have had at least 24 consecutive months as a non-student in their adult lives and be within two years of completing their desired educational program. Awards are up to $3,000.

Society of Women Engineers Olive Lynn Salembier Scholarship and Mary V. Munger Memorial Scholarship

Applicants must be members of the Society of Women Engineers and must have been out of the engineering workforce and school for at least two years prior to re-entry. The Olive Lynn Salembier scholarship awards $2,000 and the Mary V. Munger Scholarship awards $3,000.

Scholarships for Single Mothers

These scholarships are specifically aimed at single mothers who want a postsecondary degree.

Helping Hands for Single Moms

• Deadline: Rolling

This scholarship is designed for low-income single mothers who are earning a college degree. Applicants should have U.S. citizenship and live in Maricopa County or the Phoenix metropolitan area. They must also be legally single and not living with a partner, be registered in college with a GPA of at least 2.8, carry at least a 9-credit-per-semester course load, and have at least one child under the age of 11. The award amount varies.

The Patsy Takemoto Mink Education Foundation

• Deadline: August 1

This Foundation offers five scholarships every year to women who are at least 17 years old and are mothers with minor children. Applicants should be pursuing an associate's degree, bachelor's degree, or a vocational degree or certificate, and have an annual family income of $28,000 or less (depending on number of family members). Awards are up to $5,000.

WISP: Change Your World Scholarship

• Deadline: Rolling (2 months prior to starting educational program preferred)

Applicants must be women who are direct survivors of an abusive partner. You must have been separated from the abusive partner for at least one year, and have sought other services from a non-profit for abuse survivors for at least 6 consecutive months. Special consideration will be given to women who plan to use their education to further the rights of other women and girls.

Rosenfeld Injury Lawyers Single Mother Scholarship

• Deadline: Likely December 5

Rosenfeld Injury Lawyers offers two $1,000 scholarships to single mothers who are looking to go back to school to improve their living circumstances. Applicants must write a 500+ word essay on the advantages of going back to school while caring for their children. They should explain how motherhood has prepared them for the challenges of being a student.

Live Your Dream Awards Program

• Deadline: November 15

These scholarships are for women who provide primary financial support for themselves and their dependents and have overcome obstacles such as poverty, domestic violence, or drug and alcohol abuse. Applicants should have financial need and live within a Soroptimist International member territory. Territories include the U.S., Canada, Mexico and several countries in South and Central America, as well as east Asia. Local-level award amounts vary; local award winners become eligible for regional awards of $3,000 or $5,000, and regional award winners are eligible to win international-level awards of $10,000. The application opens on August 1st each year.

Ford Opportunity Scholarship

The Ford Family Foundation offers scholarships to assist single parents in pursuing a bachelor's degree. They recognize that as the head of household and without the support of a partner, single parents face many challenges that most students do not face. Applicants must be single parents of dependent children and live in the state of Oregon or Siskiyou County, California. Up to 50 students receive scholarships every year. The scholarships cover 90% of the student's costs that are not covered by other resources, generally ranging between $1,000 and $25,000.

If you're looking for more ways to fund your education, there are many other scholarships available. Read on to learn about some of your other options and how to apply to them.

How to Find Other Scholarships

No matter what you are studying or where you plan on attending school, you will likely be eligible for scholarships beyond those that are solely for women and mothers. Finding and applying to these other scholarships is a great way to increase the amount of money you have for school.

A good place to start is by looking into scholarships for the majors or programs you want to focus your studies on. Almost all disciplines have a number of scholarships available. Furthermore, if you have chosen to pursue a field in which women are traditionally underrepresented , such as the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), you will find that there are scholarships specifically set aside for women in these areas.

Next, try searching for scholarships that relate to your interests, hobbies, or special circumstances. For example, there are a number of weird, random scholarships out there for people who happen to have certain last names or characteristics (like being left-handed ), and there are even more scholarships for people who have more conventional qualities, such as an interest in art or music. Keep searching until you come up with a long list of scholarships that you can apply to.

Now that you know about your different options, read on to learn how to win these scholarships!

How to Win Scholarships

Rule 1: Apply to Multiple Scholarships

Keep in mind that many scholarships are competitive, meaning there are hundreds—or thousands—of people applying for them. You can greatly increase your chances of winning a scholarship or two by applying for a large number of scholarships. We recommend applying to anywhere between five and 30 scholarships.

Rule 2: Be Meticulous

Follow the required instructions for every essay and question. Pay particular attention to supporting documents that you will need to send with your applications, and keep on top of deadlines. As mothers, you're short enough on free time as it is—don't make it worse by spending time on incomplete or incorrect applications that will get you nowhere!

Rule 3: Keep Applying

Don't stop applying for scholarships just because you're in your second, third, or fourth year of college. In fact, there are many scholarships out there that are aimed specifically at students in the final years of their education. If you're able to continue bringing in new money sources throughout your academic career, you will end up with much less debt when you graduate.

Rule 4: Find Other Support

Keep an eye out for any other support that will help you. For example, some parents are eligible for government grants while they're studying.

You will likely find that you are not the only parent at your school—see if you can coordinate childcare with others so that you can get the most for your money. Also, see if your school offers any special aid or discounts for parents to provide their children with safe housing and hot meals. You may be surprised by how much your university or college will want to lend a helping hand!

What's Next?

Now that you know about scholarships for moms, take a chance to learn about other scholarships and how to apply for college.

If you want to apply to some great scholarships not listed above, check out our guides to the National Merit Scholarship , McDonald's Scholarship , and Tylenol Scholarship .

Did you know that sometimes getting a scholarship is as easy as applying to your school of choice? Check out this list of schools that automatically offer scholarships based on grades and test scores .

Need a letter of recommendation for a scholarship? Here's how to get one .

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Mary Ann holds a BA in Classics and Russian from the University of Notre Dame, and an MA from University College London. She has years of tutoring experience and is also passionate about travel and learning languages.

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What You Don't Know Until You're a Single Mom

No one's around to pat you on the back — or tell you what to do.

But my little family with my 8-year-old and 10-year-old daughters is my greatest source of joy. Sure, there's no partner on hand to tell me after a difficult day that I'm doing a good job — but there's no one around to tell me I should be doing it any different, either. Along the way, I've learned a few things.

1. You alone are responsible.

Every time you pass that stray sock on the stairs that fell out of the laundry basket, you inexplicably hope that someone will pick it up for you. It will live there until you do it.

2. You can't threaten your kids with "wait until your father gets home!"

You're judge, jury, executioner. And then you become comforter of the very child you just scolded. It's complicated.

3. Nobody's eating the leftovers.

Those Tupperware containers in the fridge are one of many reminders that the man of the house is gone. Your notion of how much food to make is all out of whack. Soon you will stop making meals that have leftovers . Because without a husband to please, chicken nuggets for the kids and wine and a salad for you is a damn fine meal.

4. You get to use all of the closets.

Spread your clothes out . Let them breathe. The shower, too. All of those hair products you wanted to try, then couldn't throw out even though you didn't like them? There's room for all of them in the shower, because it's all yours now.

5. You can bring the catalogs inside.

When the catalogs arrive, chock full of tech gadgets or sports gear that you can't afford, you no longer have to hide them from your spouse. You can even let the kids cut them up to make a collage, then give that to daddy for Father's Day. Easy peasy.

6. Some broken stuff will stay broken.

The leaky faucet can be fixed by placing a bucket in the sink, then using the caught water for plants. The broken garage door that is holding your car hostage requires a repairman . Choose your battles.

7. There won't be any unexpected charges on the credit card statement.

You know exactly what you bought , and owe, because you're the only one shopping. Unless you aren't, and there's fraud protection for that. But mostly, your budget is yours.

8. The dog poop out back is all yours, too.

Talk about fun!

9. Sick days are brutal.

Sick kids mean not getting anything done as you comfort and care of them, trying to create remedies from the stuff on hand so that you don't have to take a sick child to the store, all while trying not to come in direct contact with them, because then you will become the sick one, and there is no backup to cover for you when you are ill . You get up with a fever and get the kids off to school. Because that's what single moms do. This will feel like hell at the time, but will in fact be all the proof you ever needed that you are an epic badass.

10. Resign yourself to smaller celebrations.

Kids can't buy extravagant birthday or mother's day gifts for you. Because you're the one who does all the shopping. And how do you take them shopping and pay for a gift without seeing what it is? So gifts aren't bought. They're made. Which means more anyway.

11. Vacations can be a challenge.

Navigating airports, lengthy flights , car rentals , and long car rides as a solo parent will seem too daunting to even consider. Do it anyway, just to prove to yourself that you can. And to show your kids how amazing you really are. Years later they won't remember that you forgot to take the liquids bag out at security and held up the whole line of cranky travelers, but they will remember swimming with you in the hotel pool and being the center of your universe for that moment.

Cassandra Dunn is the author of novel The Art of Adapting (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster).

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