So the other day, I was surprised to hear their high school principal announce to an auditorium of parents, “Schools need to put the joy back into the experience of applying to college.”

I felt like standing up and shouting “Hallelujah!” like a gospel singer in call-and-response hymn.

Trust me — there is no joy today in applying to college. It’s a grind of taking tests, retaking tests, doing hours of nightly homework, stressing over grades (and cajoling teachers to raise every grade from a B+ to an A-) and viewing every activity through the lens of how it would read on a college application. And that’s before wondering whether you’ve gotten in, and how you are going to explain to the three trillion people who ask you about college daily that XYZ school rejected you.

Although the process can be intimidating, there absolutely should be joy in applying to college.

Evaluating your strengths and interests at age 17 or 18 is a key component of filling out a college application, and deciding what you want from four of the most important, most expensive years of your life.

The application experience, at its best, can be transformative and exhilarating. We parents and schools would better serve our children by getting them to stop and examine themselves — not their GPAs or impressive achievements. Instead, teenagers today too often feel that their entire life is a Race to Nowhere, with intense pressure on them to secure top grades, participate in an inhumane number of leadership activities outside of school and play multiple sports at a competitive level.

Apparently, the heavyweights at Harvard, MIT and Yale, and more than 85 other admissions personnel and education reform advocates, agree. A large consortium of college admissions deans have banded together in a two-year effort to harness their collective influence to send a persuasive, unified message that ethics, sincerity and humanity more fairly capture the potential of students across race, income levels and cultures than historical yardsticks such as SAT scores and GPAs.

In fact, the Harvard-led group recommends that kindness, concern for others and a commitment to justice play as important or more important a role than grades and test scores in current college admittance standards, according to new research from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

This is a revolutionary message that we parents should heed.

“Too often, today’s culture sends young people messages that emphasize personal success rather than concern for others and the common good,” said Richard Weissbourd, co-director of the Making Caring Common Project at Harvard. “Admissions deans are stepping up collectively to underscore the importance of meaningful engagement in communities and greater equity for economically diverse students.”

How to capture kindness and empathy on the Common App?

As any parent knows, they’re critical to instill in kids, but hard to measure and reward; there’s no standardized test for those qualities, no weekly allowance for goodness, no metric that measures the depth of a child’s heart. So instead, the Making Caring Common Project recommends that colleges add application questions that give students an opportunity to describe their contributions to their families, communities and the public good.

The thinking is that many low-income applicants, or students from families without a tradition of elite educational achievement, or simply nontraditional but qualified candidates, have been unfairly penalized by not having the time, financial resources or parental know-how to focus on getting the highest test scores, grades and extracurricular accolades that have historically helped their more economically secure and educationally elite peers gain entry to college in the past.

Some kids don’t know how to prep for college; others are too busy working to help their families, caring for older relatives, or helping raise younger siblings to participate in the extreme college application process their whiter, wealthier peers are focused on practically from birth.

But colleges want and need these types of resilient, grounded, dedicated kids. Our society does too. And we, as parents, benefit from raising kids who care as much about their families, and the world around them, as they do about winning the robotics competition or being the starting lacrosse goalie.

That’s a race to somewhere that all parents can and should cheer on.

Leslie Morgan Steiner is an author, blogger and public speaker on violence against women, and other issues including motherhood, parenting and infertility. Morgan Steiner is a contributing writer to ˛ÝÝ®´«Ă˝.com. Her weekly radio segment can be heard at 10:40 a.m. (Eastern) each Wednesday on 103.5 FM in the D.C. region and via our .Ěý

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This is the challenge we parents face in making an icon, one who was a living and breathing force to many of us, relevant to our children today.

Here are some ways to do so, no matter how old your kids are, every day of the year.

• Ěýł§łó˛ą°ů±đ that are more relevant and memorable to children than the dates and milestones they memorize in school.Ěý For instance: his name was originally Michael, but when he was two, his father changed it to Martin.Ěý He often got in trouble with his parents as a child, causing him to jump off the roof of his house when he was 12.Ěý He got a C in public speaking, even though today he is remembered as one of America’s finest orators.Ěý He spent his honeymoon in a funeral parlor, because a friend offered it to him to use for free. He had four children with his wife Coretta, and when he died at age 39, his oldest was only 12.

• Make MLK local.Ěý Find out a few facts about a place that is meaningful to your kids, where King made a speech or held an important sit-in, and use that local history to make King relevant to them.Ěý In D.C. where I live, this is easy — but King held marches, rallies and activist meetings around the U.S. and the world. In addition to in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, Martin Luther King went to India, Berlin, Oslo and . An easy trick: find out if your town has one of the 902 streets in the U.S. named for him.

• Tell them your own memories about King’s legacy. I describe to my kids the day in second grade that my public elementary school was officially “integrated” with a bus of African American children from another neighborhood — and how hard it was for these children, but how much we all benefited from the change. Valerie, the new girl who sat next to me, became one of my closest friends, yet we never visited each other’s houses. I ask my kids to imagine how awkward, controversial and hopeful the “desegregation” or “forced busing” program was for young children and their families.Ěý How would they feel if one day they were required to ride a bus to a different school, completely outside of their choosing, in a potentially hostile neighborhood they may never have been to before?

• Talk about how little our since the 1960s, the busiest years of King’s activism.Ěý “A state trooper pointed the gun, but he did not act alone,” King said at a funeral in 1965. “He was murdered by the brutality of every sheriff who practices lawlessness in the name of law. He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician, from governors on down, who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism.” King could have been speaking at a funeral caused by recent police brutality in Baltimore, Chicago or Ferguson.

• Talk about how much our society has changed since King’s death.Ěý We have 44 black members of Congress and our first black president (although he received when he first became president). Many cities, including Washington and Atlanta, are and every aspect of our society, from sports to education to entertainment, is more integrated than it was during King’s life. Use the movie “Selma,” or other movies that naturally get kids pondering how we’ve overcome or failed to overcome complex issues of race in America, such as “Remember the Titans” or “The Blind Side.”

Before giving in to cynicism, thinking that watching a movie, visiting a statue, or talking about a memory won’t make any difference in ending the racism we all still live with today, here’s what Martin Luther King cautioned: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

It’s up to us and the next generation — our children — to continue King’s courageous work.

 is a contributing writer to ˛ÝÝ®´«Ă˝.com.

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For most parents, December quickly becomes all about pleasing our children and chasing whatever they want, need or beg for. There’s one British mom who bought 300 gifts for her three children — you cannot even see her Christmas tree behind all the presents in the pictureon social media.

When you Google anything relating to “gifts” and “parents,” you find two categories: gifts parents should get their kids and gifts adults should give other parents. Sadly, neither sleep nor extra patience made the list.

But there’s something even more important than getting our kids the perfect gift. Here’s something we all need to do: Teach our kids to get us gifts. I’m not joking.

Presents are huge in the lives of our children, and we may never succeed in extricating the spirit of Christmas from huge, brightly wrapped boxes. But we all know that no gift can create the magic of Christmas on its own. Maybe that “magic” is so elusive as to be unobtainable, even if you buy 300 gifts. But we parents can, and should, give our kids a lesson in how to make the special people in their life feel special, at the holidays and any time of year.

There are several practical challenges. Maybe you are braver than I am, but it feels pretty squirrelly to approach one’s own kids, no matter their age, and casually ask “So, what are you getting me for Christmas?”

If there are two parents at home, each should help the other out. Take the kids shopping for Mom or Dad. Switch the parent and repeat — easy.

If you are a single parent, ask a close friend, relative, or older sibling, to take the kids shopping … for you.

I’ve occasionally used humor to remind my kids that gift-giving is a two-way street and that I happen to live on that particular street. Sometimes it works; sometimes, not so much. But it’s definitely worth a try.

It’s just as important to encourage, or require, children to get gifts for other awesome adults in their lives: Uncle Billy, Aunt Perri, their teachers, baby sitters, and grandparents. Small gifts are fine. You can make this fun and thoughtful.

However, another parenting challenge arises: Do you make your kids earn, and spend, their own money on gifts for you and other important adults? This can be tricky. I say: it depends. It depends on the age of the child and how many adults they are buying presents for. If they don’t have enough money, they can make presents — which are priceless no matter how they turn out.

When our mother died, we found piles of little trinkets we kids had made for her over the years — clay pots, drawings, strangely shaped pottery figurines. She saved them all. And I now have a very similar collection of things my own kids made me over the years. They’re going in my coffin. There’s even devoted to ideas for kid-friendly homemade gifts.

The bottom line: Something under the tree must be from your kids, not just for your kids. Although like much of parenting, this feels more like pulling teeth than making magic, this is the real gift of Christmas.

 is a contributing writer to ˛ÝÝ®´«Ă˝.com.

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In the uncertain world of parenting, few moments are more validating than the discovery of research that confirms the wisdom of one’s own choices. And a new  backs up my long-held theory that pets are good for kids.

Dr. Anne Gadomski and colleagues at the Bassett Medical Center, in New York, surveyed 643 kids between the ages of 6 and 7, and found a significant difference in clinical anxiety levels based on whether kids had pets. Only 12 percent of children with pet dogs tested positive for anxiety, compared with 21 percent of children without a dog. There are caveats: The study was quite small; the only pets included were dogs, and 96 percent of the children were Caucasian. More research is needed.

But Gadomski explains why pets can transform the life of a child in her report in the Centers for Disease Control journal .ĚýSimply put, there’s an ease between children and pets that may not be replicated in any other relationships. “Because dogs follow human communicative cues, they may be particularly effective agents for children’s emotional development … Sometimes [a child’s] first word is the name of their pet. From a mental health standpoint, children often rank pets higher than humans as providers of comfort and self-esteem and as confidants … by reducing anxiety and arousal or enhancing attachment,” she writes.

Gadomski’s team dug into why dogs, in particular, might benefit kids. Maybe some dogs are especially empathetic with children. I’ve seen that any pet — turtles, fish, a snake, a hamster — can help children develop self-confidence, responsibility and patience. Children are, by definition, far less powerful, far less in control, than the adults in their lives; a friendship with an animal that cannot speak, leave the house or a cage, or assert much power, probably provides great solace.

We already had one cat, but my youngest loved dogs with such passion that I feared she’d try to steal the neighbor’s. So when she was about 3, we adopted a black Lab-shepherd mix from our local animal shelter. My daughter slept with Chief, built exercise courses in the house for him and spent one summer teaching him how to take the waves at the beach without getting rolled.

I then started a new family tradition: When each of my kids became a teenager, they could get their own cat. My son inspired me, because as a competitive basketball, soccer, and tennis player, he was on his way to developing a 24/7 tough exterior that troubled me. Caring for the tiny orange kitten he picked out softened my son just enough to assuage my fears.

Toughness wasn’t his younger sister’s problem at 13, but she simply didn’t like or trust animals the way the other kids did. That changed when she picked out a tortoiseshell kitten and raised her to be the sweetest, calmest pet in the house.

The dog lover, when she turned 13, refused to get a kitten. Instead, she picked out an adult male tuxedo cat at the shelter that she thought no one else would take. These days, sometimes I find all the cats and the dog sleeping in her bed.

Pets are a great deal of work, and their food and medical care can be costly. They also make a family take a painful risk: Pets may die while your child is still too young to understand death. So there are downsides to combining pets and kids. But in terms of developing character and deep compassion in children, I’ve found no better or simpler substitute.

 is a contributing writer to ˛ÝÝ®´«Ă˝.com.

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Take Halloween.

Many historians believe Halloween originated not with razor blades being inserted into apples, but with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people lit outdoor bonfires and put on costumes to scare off ghosts that lingered in between fall and winter. It was a tricky time of year between the abundance of the fall harvest and oncoming winter frugality, a moment of both celebration and superstition, and we needed a timeout to process all the contradiction and anxiety. (Much like parenting itself.)

Today, Halloween means — mostly — costumes and candy. Oct. 31 is many kids’ favorite holiday, , along with Thanksgiving and Christmas. How could we screw this one up?

Well, for parents, Halloween is not all treats — it’s yet another time to play the serious heavy. We focus on kidnappings, what too much chocolate can do to one’s stomach lining and the threat of poison in candy corn. Other big worries that we shouldn’t worry about: getting or making exactly the best costume ever for your kid; trying to influence or improve your kid’s dress-up choices, and preventing kids who are “too old” (whatever that imaginary cutoff is) from absconding with your candy supply.

All this regulation is a sign of parenting taken too far. Because the biggest risk to kids on Halloween is far more mundane: crossing the street. Children are more than , according to Safe Kids USA and the Centers for Disease Control.

The reasons are simple: Darkness limits drivers’ visibility; more kids run across the streets in the middle of the block, and many kids are wearing dark Halloween costumes. This year, Halloween falls on a Saturday — by itself a risk factor for pedestrian-auto accidents. So nag the kids (“cross at the green, not in-between!”) and invest in some reflective lights for their costumes.Ěý And while doing so, forget about the infinitesimal risks of stranger abductions and unmitigated sugar consumption.

Here’s how we parents can enjoy Halloween:

• Don’t buy or make any kids’ costumes until the week before Halloween. Kids change their minds. Experimenting with temporary identities is part of the zany fun of Halloween.

• Let your kids eat as much candy as they want for a night or two. They’ll remember and resent your control-freakish killjoy restrictions far longer than any stomachache could possibly last. And they will probably just sneak Reese’s into bed, which never ends well for the sheets or for parents.

• Give candy to all kids who grace your doorstep — even if they are . In costume or not. Even 6-foot, 2-inch teenagers are drawn to free Hershey’s (or a wistful visit back to the innocence of childhood). Smile like you would at a cute toddler dressed as a princess — because teenagers are really just very large 2-year-olds.

• Never psychoanalyze your children’s (or your own) costumes. My macho-athlete son went as a cheerleader one year (he made a very cute blonde). His sister was Princess Barbie Vampire (with blood dripping from her lips) another year. I regularly dress up as a witch. There is true joy to be found in exploring a new facet of your personality on Halloween, as long as no one wonders out loud about what you’re really trying to say with your costume.

Lastly, let’s have some fun. Why ruin Halloween by taking anything too seriously? At least for one night of the year.

 a contributing writer to ˛ÝÝ®´«Ă˝.com.

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