title: Almost Grown: Launching Your Child from High School to College
author:  Patricia Pasick 
description: Patricia Pasick, M.Ed., Ph.D., is a family therapist and clinical psychologist in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and teaches at the Fielding Institute. She is married and has two children, ages 18 and 22.
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  ![](../Images/00004.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  For Isabella and Calista Stone
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating
  for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling
  that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you
  have made. In the end, we are our choices.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  —Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Prologue](../Text/The_Everything_Store_split_066.html#filepos804277)
  
  
  
  
  
  In the early 1970s, an industrious advertising executive named Julie Ray
  became fascinated with an unconventional public-school program for gifted
  children in Houston, Texas. Her son was among the first students enrolled in
  what would later be called the Vanguard program, which stoked creativity and
  independence in its students and nurtured expansive, outside-the-box thinking.
  Ray grew so enamored wit