"My teen has nothing to write about"

I work with students and families worldwide on college essays, supplemental essays, and scholarship essays, and every September I hear some version of the same sentence from parents: my teen has nothing to write about. It is rarely true, and it is rarely the real problem.

What your teen usually means is that nothing in their life feels college-essay worthy. That is a completely different problem, and it's the one you can actually help with.

A strong college essay does not have to begin with the biggest accomplishment, the hardest class, or the most unusual thing your teen has ever done. It has to help a reader understand something about your child that no transcript, test score, or activity list could ever tell them. Those are two very different assignments, and most teenagers are quietly working on the wrong one.

Something happened over the summer that most families have not heard about yet. A supplemental essay is the extra school-specific question a college adds after the main Common Application essay, usually some version of why do you want to come here. The University of Georgia announced in May 2026 that students applying for fall 2027 will write one essay and no second one, and Georgia Tech announced on July 29 that it will no longer require its short-answer question either. UVA, Tulane, UNC-Chapel Hill, and the University of Miami have all cut theirs as well.

Fewer essays sound like relief, and it is genuinely less work, but it does not make the application easier. When those extra questions disappear, your teen loses every backup chance to explain who they are, so that one Common Application essay becomes the only writing an admissions reader will ever see.

Instead of asking your teen to come up with something impressive, which is a request no seventeen-year-old can fill on demand, start with one question and then give them room to answer it without you filling the silence.

"What is a moment from the last year or two that you still think about?"

It does not have to sound important to anyone else. It only has to be true.

If asking face to face feels like too much pressure, send it as a text first and let your teen sit with it before you talk. You can copy this one exactly as it is written:

"Random question, no wrong answer. What is a moment from the last year or two that you still think about? I am curious, that is all."

Then help them talk it through, in the car or at the kitchen table, one question at a time:

☐ What actually happened, start to finish?

☐ What were you thinking or feeling while it was happening?

☐ Why do you think you still remember this one?

☐ Did anything about you change afterward?

☐ What does this story show me about you that I would never learn from your application?

And then listen. When your teen stops giving you one-word answers and starts adding the small details without being prompted, stay right there and keep listening, because that is usually the moment the essay is hiding inside.

It is rarely the thing you would have picked. It might be a shift at work where something went wrong, and your teen had to handle it alone, or a conversation in the car they have not stopped thinking about, or a frustrating practice where they wanted to quit and stayed anyway. Those everyday moments tell a reader far more about your child than another list of accomplishments, and they are the ones no other applicant can write.

Scholarship season does not fail on talent. It fails on supply, and I watch it happen the same way every spring. A family gets the college essay done in the fall, closes the laptop, and then in February a scholarship application asks for four hundred words about a challenge your teen has overcome. Nobody has anything written, the deadline is in nine days, and the family applies to two scholarships instead of twenty and decides scholarships are not worth the trouble.

A teenager with three or four banked stories does not have that week. They open a document that already exists, pull the moment that fits the prompt, and finish the application in an hour. Applying to more scholarships is how the money actually arrives, and having the stories written is what makes applying to more possible.

So you are not just helping your teen write one college essay. You are teaching them to recognize and tell the stories of their own life, and that is material they will come back to through applications, through scholarship season, and through every interview they ever sit in.

I put the whole method into a free eight-page guide you can print and work through at home this weekend. It has the one question, the five follow-ups that turn a one-word answer into a story, and a page to bank four stories before your teen forgets them.

This month's session covers the essays that pay: three ways your teen can approach a scholarship essay, how to use the Moment Method to uncover a story worth writing about, and other practical ways your family can lower what you actually pay for college.

The College Money Series is where I take parents through the money side of admissions, one topic a month.

📅 Third Sunday of every month
🕝 2:30 p.m. Eastern
🏠 Attend in person, or join the live stream from home
💬 Bring your questions and ask me live
💵 Always free for families

Bring the essay question your teen is stuck on, bring your college money questions, or bring both.

Angela Robles