While Marilee Jones, the recently fired Dean of Admissions at MIT, may well be an underhanded illusionist who gilded her resume with make believe degrees, she’s also a spot-on coach when it comes to the Dos and Don’ts of preparing for college for both students and parents.

For adults she suggests that the best way to parent children through the college application process (which she likens to a secular initiation into adulthood) is to act as if it were a baseball game or a tennis match that their kids were about to play.

Your job, she says, is to make sure their uniforms are clean and that they’ve eaten a good meal and got enough sleep. You then drive them to the event; they jump out of the car and join their teammates.

You park the car and join the other parents, seated or standing behind some sort of white line. Your job is to cheer the kids on, applaud their triumphs and manage your disappointment when they do not perform as you had expected.

Now here’s but one of many points that Jones makes in her breezy book Less Stress, More Success – you never run out onto the field or the court and make the point because you can, or because you always wanted to and never had the chance, or because ‘our’ team must win.

In a bid to give kids a sharper edge in the college chase, parents often step over the white line during the college admissions process, and Jones makes a compelling case of how in the long run it’s not in the young adult’s best interest.

What Jones gets after is how best to raise children and the answer, she says, is to set the stage so that they’ll feel comfortable taking risks, venturing out and dealing successfully with their setbacks.

Years ago when Jones was struggling with how to raise her young daughter, a dear friend advised that “parents are the shoreline and children are the little boats.” While the metaphor makes me a little green around the gills, I think it holds water.

Whether the boats capsize, run aground, or get lost in the fog, Jones’ friend said, kids should learn to use the shoreline as a calm, secure, unflappable navigational point.

And while Jones acknowledges it’s often near impossible not to want to jump into the boat to help it skirt the shoals, fix the leaky college essay, or right a soggy college application, she believes that doing so won’t help them to become resilient young adults.

The endgame is not to get them to some highly regarded place that will need to continue to clean up after them, but rather to help them begin to sail for themselves. (That’s it for this Goodnight Moon kind of talk.)

Jones recounted how her daughter advised her in a restaurant (so the elder Jones couldn’t throw a tantrum) that she was quitting soccer in her senior year. Her immediate response was, “What will the colleges think?”

Her daughter held her hand up and told her mom in a firm voice to stop. Nora then explained that she had lost her love for soccer because the emphasis on winning had taken the fun out of it. She said she had been yearning to sing in the chorus and do yoga.

Jones said she had to struggle to stay on the shore but after a lot of masked hyperventilating told her daughter how brave she thought she was to reclaim her life.

“Nothing will create children poised for success in college and in life more than the knowledge that their parents absolutely, unconditionally love them,” Jones writes.

“This love and attention is best demonstrated when parents serve as role models and family members make time to cherish one another. The most valuable and useful character traits that prepare children for success arise not from their extracurricular or academic commitments, but from a firm grounding in parental love and guidance.”

That’s from the woman who spent the last 28 years at MIT, whose graduates, it’s been tabulated, have gone on to found companies with revenues that if combined would make it the 24th largest economy in the world.