A deferral or waitlist notification is hard on students and, often, even harder on parents watching from the sidelines wanting to fix it. Here's how to actually help, and what tends to make things worse.
What genuinely helps
Help your student identify real, new material for a Letter of Continued Interest, a strong first-semester grade report, a new award, a leadership role that developed since the application was submitted, a meaningful project. This is the actual raw material admissions officers are looking for in a LOCI, and students under stress often underestimate what they've accomplished recently. You can also handle useful logistics: finding the correct regional admissions officer's contact information, tracking each school's specific deadline or submission process for continued-interest letters, and reading a completed draft for clarity without rewriting it. Just as importantly, offer real emotional steadiness, your student is likely more anxious than they're showing, and a calm, non-catastrophizing parent changes the tone of this whole period.
What consistently backfires
Writing the letter yourself. A Letter of Continued Interest must come from the student in the student's own voice. Adult-authored letters are usually easy for an experienced reader to spot, and they undercut the entire point of the letter, which is to show renewed, personal commitment. Contacting the admissions office directly. Parent phone calls or emails advocating for a waitlisted student are almost universally counterproductive. Admissions offices frequently note these contacts in the file, and they tend to read as a signal about the student's independence rather than as a helpful data point. Manufacturing false hope. If a school's waitlist historically admits very few students in a given year, softening that reality doesn't help your student make a clear-eyed decision about where to invest their emotional energy.
The reframe that helps most
A deferral or waitlist is not a rejection and not a failure, it's a genuinely ambiguous outcome that the school hasn't resolved yet. The most useful thing you can do is help your student treat their already-committed school as the real plan, not a fallback, while the waitlist plays out in the background. Students who fully invest in their committed school emotionally tend to handle a subsequent 'no' from the waitlist far better than students who've been quietly told, even implicitly, to keep hoping.
A family I worked with
A mother once asked me directly whether she should call her son's waitlisted school to "put in a good word." I told her what the research and experience consistently show: don't. Instead, she helped her son gather his fall semester grades (which had improved meaningfully) and a new leadership role at his school newspaper, and he wrote his own letter referencing both. He didn't get off that particular waitlist, but he'd already committed emotionally to his safety school by the time the final no arrived, and he described the whole process afterward as far less painful than he expected, largely because his parents hadn't built up false hope in the meantime.
Help your student write a LOCI that actually works
The Waitlist Breakthrough gives your student the exact letter formula and timing strategy that gets real results, without you writing a word of it.
Get the Waitlist Guide