Your teenager just got into her dream college. The acceptance letter arrived, and for about 24 hours, everything felt possible. Then the financial aid package showed up: $3,500 per year toward an $80,000-a-year school nearly 2,000 miles from home.

That’s the situation one mom laid out recently on Reddit, and if you’ve got a high schooler at home, it’s going to hit close. Her daughter, a senior who applied to 13 colleges, earned a spot at her top choice. Great news. Except the math works out to nearly $300,000 in debt by graduation, and the family simply doesn’t have the money to cover it. The daughter, by all accounts a good kid with plenty of interests and clubs on her resume, responded by telling her mom, “I’m just sad that my family can’t afford to pay for this.”

Woof.

The mom didn’t come to Reddit looking for sympathy. She came looking for advice, and she was already doing some honest self-reflection. “Maybe I’ve spoiled her a little too much that she has unrealistic expectations,” she wrote, adding that she’s “beyond upset by the unrealistic expectations and lack of motivation or understanding.”

The comments poured in. A lot of them landed in a place that’s worth hearing, especially if you’re raising kids who are still a few years out from this exact conversation. One commenter put it this way: “I think it’s OK for her to be disappointed and express it as long as she’s being respectful and not making demands. It’s hard to process when you first realize that ‘doing your best’ and ‘believing in yourself’ aren’t actually enough to make expensive dreams come true.” Another told the mom to let her daughter sit in the sadness for a minute, give her a hug, and acknowledge that yes, it really does stink that cost puts the school out of reach. You don’t have to fix it immediately. You don’t have to defend the family budget. Sometimes you just sit with the disappointment together.

That advice is worth printing out and taping to your fridge. Truly.

But there’s a practical layer here that suburban families can start building right now, before the acceptance letters ever arrive. According to the Federal Student Aid office, the average debt load for bachelor’s degree graduates who borrowed is over $29,000, and that number climbs fast at private schools with limited aid packages. The gap between what a family can pay and what a dream school costs has a name: it’s called unmet need, and it catches a lot of families completely off guard in the spring of senior year.

The time to talk about it is during sophomore or junior year, not after the early decision deadline passes. Scary Mommy’s coverage of this story makes a fair point that so many things could have gone differently for this family. The daughter might have won a scholarship. The admissions office might have sweetened the aid offer. She might not have gotten in at all, which, painful as it sounds, would have been simpler than getting in and having to say no. But none of those things happened, and now a mom and her daughter are working through a hard conversation that could have started much earlier.

That doesn’t mean you crush your kid’s ambitions. It means you dream with your eyes open. Sit down together and actually look at the College Scorecard before application season gets rolling. It shows average annual costs, graduation rates, and typical earnings after graduation for schools across the country. It’s free, it’s from the Department of Education, and it can turn a dreamy conversation into a grounded one without killing the excitement.

Help your teenager understand that applying to a school isn’t a promise. It’s information. You get the acceptance, you see the real financial aid offer, and then you make a decision together as a family. Applying to 13 schools and skipping the scholarship search isn’t a strategy, and the earlier your kid understands that, the more options they’ll have when it counts.

The daughter in this story will be OK. Plenty of people have built extraordinary lives at schools that weren’t their first choice, schools that cost a fraction of the dream, schools they chose because the numbers made sense. The commenter who told this mom to sit in the sadness with her daughter got it right. Let her grieve the school she can’t attend. That grief is real and it’s valid. Then, when she’s ready, help her get genuinely excited about what she can do, because there’s almost always a good path forward for a kid who’s involved, curious, and willing to work for it.