Before Your Teen Joins a Group, Ask What It Will Ask Them to Become

Every fall, college freshmen arrive on campus carrying two kinds of questions. The first kind is practical: Where are my classes? Who is my roommate? How do I get through the first round of exams? The second kind is quieter and much harder to answer: Where do I fit? Who will I be here?

That second question comes with real urgency. Trellis Strategies surveyed about 44,000 college students for its February 2026 report, Invisible on Campus: The Student Loneliness Crisis, and found that 57% feel lonely sometimes or always. Among students under 25, it is 60%. Only 35% of lonely students believe their school is even aware of what they are going through. As I wrote recently, students think they're struggling alone, partly because the script says these should be the best years of their lives.

So when a group offers a student instant friends, a ready-made identity and a clear script for being accepted, it can feel like the answer to everything. Sometimes it is. Many campus groups give young people community, purpose and friendships that last a lifetime. But every group asks something in return, and parents and students rarely talk about what that is before it is asked.

Two Kinds of Belonging

There is belonging that welcomes who you already are. And there is belonging that asks you to become the group.

The first kind makes room for your values, your background and your questions. The second kind runs on rituals, unspoken rules and loyalty that outranks everything else, including your own judgment. From the outside, they can look the same. From the inside, the difference shows up the first time you are asked to do something that doesn't sit right with you.

Students who arrive without a clear sense of who they are are the most likely to choose the second kind, because it relieves the discomfort of not knowing. It hands them an identity instead of asking them to build one. For a few months, that can feel like confidence. In reality it is borrowed, and borrowed confidence only lasts as long as you keep following the script.

What I Learned My First Two Years at UCLA

I felt that pressure myself. I grew up in a lower middle class family in Azusa, California. At UCLA, many of the people around me came from much more affluent neighborhoods and upbringings than I did. During my freshman and sophomore years, there was a constant, unspoken sense that to fit in, I needed to adapt to them.

I decided to do the opposite. Instead of conforming, I chose to be honest with people about who I was.

One moment tested that. I was with a group of friends who wanted me to smoke marijuana with them. I told them I wouldn't. They said, "It's okay, Glenn." No one pressured me. If anything, they did the opposite, and made it easy for me to stay true to myself.

That was a game-changing moment for me. I learned that there are good people who will not press you to do something you're uncomfortable with, and that you only find out who they are when you are willing to say what you believe. If I had gone along, I would have fit in that night. But I would never have learned that I could stand by my own values and still belong.

That is what conviction gives a young person. It isn't stubbornness, and it isn't judging anyone else's choices. It is the earned capacity to act on what you believe before you know how others will respond. And every time you do it, it gets easier to do again.

Where the Silence Starts

The danger in the second kind of belonging is not only what it asks students to do. It is what it teaches them to stop saying. When loyalty to the group matters more than what each person sees and believes, people learn to stay quiet when something feels wrong. That habit doesn't stay on campus. I see it years later in organizations, in talented professionals who know the truth in the room and have learned that saying it costs too much.

Most of us learned to edit ourselves long before our first job. As I wrote in Room to Roam Is Not Enough, young people need freedom, but they also need room to be themselves.

Conversations to Have Before Move-In

Ask your teen to name what they won't trade to fit in. Saying it out loud before college makes it far easier to hold on to in the moment.

Talk about the difference between joining a group and disappearing into one. A healthy group makes you more of who you are. An unhealthy one needs you to be less.

After the first month, ask a different question. Instead of "Have you made friends?" try "Who are you becoming there?" and listen closely to the answer.

And remember that parents carry their own scripts. Many of us push our kids toward the groups and paths we believe will protect them, the same way we were handed a script ourselves.

The friends worth keeping are the ones who say "It's okay" when you tell them who you are.

Belonging that requires you to edit yourself is conformity wearing a friendlier name.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.