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Editor’s Note:  is a nonprofit that protects emotional health and prevents suicide for our nation’s teens and young adults. They partner with high schools, colleges, school districts, and youth-serving community-based organizations to strengthen their mental health, substance misuse, and suicide prevention programs and systems. We are grateful for their contributions to the work of this piece.

Alisha, a mother of three, returned to college to pursue an undergraduate certificate. But her experience was met with challenges while she balanced school, work, and parenting. She told us in an interview that she “didn’t know how to ask for help or whether [she] could ask for help” during her first experience entering college at 19.

Like Alisha, many parenting students are unsure how—or whether—to access the support they need. They are far from alone. undergraduate students and graduate students are raising children while pursuing a college credential. There is often minimal support on campus to help them meet their basic needs, making it hard for parenting students to manage their mental health.

To better understand these challenges, �鶹������ý’s Student Parent Initiative partnered with to interview parenting students and learn how their college experiences impacted their mental health. What we heard was clear: student parents are navigating school, work, and child care in systems that were not built with them in mind. These pressures contribute to and heightened stress compared to their nonparenting peers. 

During Mental Health Awareness Month, we’re sharing insights from three student parent interviews to highlight common challenges and actions that policymakers and institutions can take to support them.

Build Belonging, Not Barriers

A sense of belonging is , and it’s something many parenting students struggle to find on campus. It is critical for colleges to promote a sense of belonging for their parenting students so that they feel seen and valued on campus. 

Parenting students often feel out of place, in part because they are older than the average student. Notably, of student parents are in their 30s, compared to six percent of nonparenting students. Colleges can help parenting students through curated family-friendly spaces and activities.

These efforts matter: in a prior study, considered dropping out, compared to 25 percent of nonparenting students, partly due to inflexibility and a lack of accommodations from faculty and staff.

Alisha experienced this firsthand. She attended three community colleges. The second college she attended did not allow children on campus, so “going to [that] school didn’t make sense because they didn’t have those resources,” she said. Ultimately, she completed her program at an institution that offered a more robust ecosystem of support for parenting students. 

A culture that promotes belonging among parenting students welcomes children on campus, trains faculty and staff to accommodate their demanding schedules, and offers welcoming spaces like family-study and lactation rooms. Campuses can also reduce isolation by creating opportunities for parenting students to meet and connect with each other through networking events, mentoring programs, and parenting students affinity groups. The presence of these resources sends a powerful message: parenting students are valued, supported, and they belong.

Address the Hidden Emotional Toll

Beyond logistical challenges, parenting students often carry a significant emotional burden of guilt, which impacts mental health. 

“Why am I here? I should be with my baby,” shared Rachel, capturing a feeling of guilt that many parenting students experience. The constant tension between academic responsibilities and caregiving can create deep feelings of guilt, self-doubt, and stress. Even when they are making long-term investments in their families’ future, parenting students may feel as though they are falling short in the present. 

This emotional strain is often compounded by a lack of visible support or acknowledgement from institutions. Without resources that recognize their dual roles, parenting students may feel guilty about their studies taking time away from being with their children. Colleges can help ease the hidden emotional toll by normalizing help-seeking, offering mental health services tailored to parenting students, and creating messaging that affirms their identities as both students and caregivers. Recognizing and addressing this emotional toll is critical to supporting overall well-being. 

Strengthen the Support Systems that Matter Most

Balancing coursework and caregiving can be unsustainable without the right support. Access to institutional resources plays a critical role in reducing stress for parenting students. One key support that all three parenting students spoke to is the need for access to child care. As Quianna shared,“What am I going to do with my child?…. that’s why I didn’t go to school [initially]. Between work and everything else, who’s going to watch my child? It helps a lot to have child care resources in the places you’re already going to be.”

Parenting students are parents first, and child care is critical to help them reach academic goals. However, they often face barriers in accessing child care because of cost, limited hours, or long waitlists. Without reliable and affordable child care, parenting students often stop out of school. One parenting student shared how her son was in “so many hands” as she relied on family and friends for care since daycare was unaffordable, a common experience for parenting students. Finding care that met her son’s learning disability needs added another layer of challenges.

Another area of support our interviewees highlighted was access to employment opportunities and campus activities tailored to their schedules. They shared how campus activities supported their well-being because they provided space to foster connections with other students. These spaces can also open doors professionally. For example, Quianna wrote a book, Level Up Single Mom, using her on-campus job as a platform to promote her book and secure speaking engagements.

Turn Insight Into Action

Both policymakers and institutional leaders play pivotal roles in supporting parenting students’ mental health, below are specific ways leaders can take steps to do so.

What Institutions Can Do

Student mental health is already a top concern for campus leaders: , and more than one in four identify it as a top institutional priority, reflecting the continued urgency to respond to this issue. JED recommends solutions that take into account the underlying mental health conditions that shape parenting students’ emotional well-being and helps to minimize stressors. 

Colleges can take meaningful steps by expanding access to child care and basic needs, creating family-friendly spaces and child-friendly programming, offering flexible policies, ensuring mental health services are responsive to parenting students’ needs, and adopting classroom guidelines that accommodate the diverse schedules and learning needs of students. These steps help build a culture where parenting students feel seen, valued, and supported. 

In order to shift campus culture, campuses must also focus on its people by training faculty and staff in both understanding and being sensitive to the unique stressors faced by parenting students. This awareness, coupled with resources and policy changes, allows for a culture shift whereby parenting students are considered in professorial and staff decisions and policies. 

What Policymakers Can Do

Better data is essential for support. Most colleges don’t systematically collect data on which students are parents, limiting how effective institutional leaders can be in supporting these students.

Federal policymakers can address this gap by supporting bipartisan legislation like the Understanding Student Parents Outcomes Act, which would require colleges to collect comprehensive data on parenting students. Data collection is critical in ensuring both policymakers and institutional leaders have the information necessary to know how many parenting students are enrolled in postsecondary education, their demographic information, and what needs they have to help them succeed. Improved data collection can also help campus health centers tailor mental health services and programming to parenting students’ needs. Mental health support is necessary for parenting student persistence and completion, and comprehensive data can inform those investments and tailor services for parenting students.

Several states are already taking this approach. Through measures such as and the , some states are requiring public colleges to identify and collect data on parenting students, with California further linking that data to financial aid and support services. Other states, including Illinois, Texas, Minnesota, Maryland, and Virginia, have advanced similar policies, signaling a shift toward making student parents visible in higher education data systems.

Sustained and strategic federal investment in student parent support remains essential. program provides competitive grants to colleges to help low-income student parents afford child care, enabling them to complete their degrees. Expanding CCAMPIS funding would allow more institutions to meet the need for child care assistance and reduce one of the most persistent barriers to degree completion. 

At the same time, federal initiatives such as , administered by the , alongside newer cross-agency efforts to expand campus mental health infrastructure, crisis response, and trauma-informed care, are helping institutions build more comprehensive systems of support. While not specific to parenting students, these investments are critical in addressing the mental health needs that often intersect with caregiving responsibilities, financial strain, and academic pressure.

Parenting students are navigating extraordinary demands in pursuit of higher education. With alignment across data, funding, and mental health initiatives, institutions and policymakers can reduce structural barriers, strengthen well-being, and ensure these students have a real opportunity to persist and succeed.