Holly Connor sang her big solo in her middle school’s production of “Newsies” this month. She played a big-voiced saloon singer, Medda Larkin, and when she bellowed the chorus to “That’s Rich,” the audience at Wydown Middle School in Clayton, Missouri noticed.

Her 14-year-old voice sounds like that of someone much older. She’s got range. There’s a polished timbre and control to it.

“Everyone was blown away by my voice,” Holly said to me, matter-of-factly. She isn’t being cocky. “I can hear everything because I can’t see everything,” she explains. Holly was born blind because her optic nerve never fully developed. Although she can make out some movement and contrast several feet ahead of her, she relies on Braille to read and write.

She’s also autistic, which can make performing onstage a lot trickier. It has taken time for her to adjust to the chaos and sensory overload that can be part of a stage production. But these challenges haven’t stopped her from participating in 12 shows last year. She’s performed in 21 different productions with various theater companies around St. Louis over the past three years. That’s on top of a full school day, playing piano in the school’s jazz band, and taking private acting, dancing and singing lessons. Her days start early and are jam-packed with rehearsals, auditions and lessons until evening.

It’s quite a departure from a baby who cried constantly and a toddler who couldn’t leave her house until she was 3 years old. Her parents didn't take her to public places until she was 7 because she would get overwhelmed.

Holly has a rare triad of blindness, autism and musical genius. The phenomenon has been written about in medical and anecdotal accounts. Her parents and voice coach describe her as a savant, who can play and sing songs by ear that she’s heard once and has an instant memory for music. She picks up new instruments and languages easily. She has also started composing her own music.

Her mother, Katie Sears, gave up her career running clinical trials for cancer research two years ago to manage her daughter’s activities and needs. She has spent hours converting scripts into Braille for her daughter, which sit in fat, bound copies on her bedroom bookshelf. She keeps an airtight schedule and packed calendar.

“Her goal is to be on Broadway,” Katie said. Just as important, music and performance have opened up a world of friendships to Holly that she had never experienced before. Her mother started an Instagram account a year ago and posted daily videos in which she documented Holly’s days. It gave students at school a way to get to know her and feel comfortable talking to her.

Her stepfather, Titus Sears, relocated their family from Seattle for a job with Enterprise. The St. Louis region has embraced Holly with her special needs and gifts in a way the family never experienced before, her parents said.

“We are making as many open doors as possible for her,” he said.

When Holly was 4 years old, her parents took her to China for a seven-week experimental stem cell treatment that cost $75,000. Since then, Holly has gone to Panama for a similar stem cell therapy and will be returning again next year for a week. Her mother says she has seen a significant reduction in her daughter’s autism symptoms and improvement in her sight, although the treatment has not been scientifically proven to work.

Her mother stays backstage with her for every production. There have been times when she has had to calm Holly down 30 seconds before she has to go on stage. Once she even fell off the stage because she didn't have a buddy to guide her. To watch from the audience, though, it’s hard to tell that this young performer is any different from her peers.

That is, until you hear that exceptional voice.

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Remember when rich parents had the integrity to donate buckets of cash to fancy universities so their mediocre kids could get a coveted spot?

Say what you want about Jared Kushner’s convicted felon father, Charles. At least he had enough scruples to write his $2.5 million check directly to Harvard University. He didn’t try to pass off Jared as a water polo champ.

Everyone knew what was up in that exchange. Daddy Kushner knew he was putting a down-payment on a diploma. Harvard knew, and as evidenced by more recent emails, they like how this game has long been played. And Jared knew.

Which brings us to what may be the most surprising thing in this college cheating scandal. Most of the beneficiaries of the busted rich parents allegedly had no idea they got a hefty assist getting into Yale or Stanford. Some of them actually believed their SAT scores magically rose 400 points or they jumped from a 17 ACT to a 35. There’s a telling exchange in the 200-plus-page affidavit detailing the investigation’s findings. “Cooperating Witness 1” is explaining how the cheating scheme works to a parent and says the student won’t have any idea they didn’t earn the inflated score.

“Which is great, that’s the way you want it. They feel good about themselves,” he said.

Well, there’s a millennial twist to a cheating scandal. You can protect your kid’s self-esteem as you bribe and cheat their way into college. Some of these students might have had a clue that they weren’t among the brightest and best in their exclusive high schools. But being surrounded by wealth has a way of making you feel like you’ve “earned” whatever you get.

The Privileged Action group tends to get really worked up about the Affirmative Action group. They don’t seem to get as upset about legacy kids, for whom simply being related to another person gets them bonus points. They also don’t get as upset about the spots reserved for athletes in sports dominated by white participants that require big money to play. It doesn’t even rankle the middle class that Early Decision students, whose families typically don’t have to worry about financial aid packages, have a far greater chance of acceptance than those who apply later in order to have competing financial aid offers. During the recent trial of Harvard’s admission system, one witness noted that early decision legacies get a 40-percentage-point boost in the chance of admission, compared with a 9-point boost for low-income students, according to the school’s own analysis.

Where’s the clamoring to get rid of legacy bonus points? For whatever reason, giving an unearned advantage to the children of rich families doesn’t provoke the same angst in America that Affirmative Action has.

The children who grow up in bubbles of privilege often don’t have anyone of authority in their lives to give them a reality check about how much of their “success” is a reflection of things they never earned in the first place. The schools they attend from preschool and the selective universities they end up in reinforce this message: You are special. Your hard work got you here. You are destined to do great things.

Imagine if during orientation, selective colleges and universities shared some perspective-setting data about how their school is overrepresented by those from the wealthiest families. Imagine if they showed how that wealth made the path to this college all that much easier for them. It’s hard to deliver that message to kids whose families also may be writing hefty tuition checks. But if higher education institutions were more honest and transparent about who gets in and why, perhaps these students would graduate with more realistic ideas about what their degrees mean. Colleges and universities should expose the limits of the supposed meritocracy their students believe they rode in on. Maybe they will become parents less inclined to game the system for their own kids.

It’s hard to teach integrity by the time students get to college. But you can still impart some humility.

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A few weeks ago, a woman posted a question in a large Facebook group of writers who are also mothers. She asked us to share our greatest fear related to our children. The responses might have shocked the generation of parents before us.

The top-cited concern was about a child getting shot, either in a school or otherwise. While the odds of being killed in a school shooting are extremely low, the images and stories of dead children massacred in their schools are seared in our minds. That’s traumatic for survivors, and anxiety-provoking for witnesses and children who live with that reality.

The second most common fear was that a child might commit suicide. The rate of teen suicide has been rising. The number of children hospitalized for thinking about or attempting suicide has doubled in less than a decade, according to a 2018 study published in the journal of Pediatrics.

Depression and anxiety among young people have skyrocketed. A new Pew Research Center study found that the vast majority of teens see these illnesses as major problems among their peers. Experts continue to debate the factors fueling the mental health crisis many young people are facing today.

Parents realize how serious these issues have become, as reflected in the suicide response and others that followed it, such as bullying. We don’t know for sure if smartphones and social media are direct causes of these problems, but we cast a suspicious eye on the technology in which our kids are immersed. The number of hours spent with screens daily can’t be healthy, and research suggests the same.

We didn’t grow up this way. Our parents likely worried most about risky behavior, like drug use, or car accidents. But parenting fears are tied to generations like the tide to the moon. Our fears are pulled by what we can’t control, the unfamiliar and omnipresent.

By now, it seems every parent on the planet has been warned about the “Momo Challenge.” Even Kim Kardashian warned her 129 million followers on Instagram about it. An image of a sculpture called “Mother Bird,” created by Japanese artist Keisuke Aisawa, was hijacked into creepy internet lore. The bulging-eyed, birdlike female face allegedly appeared in YouTube videos targeting children or WhatsApp messages and encouraged kids to hurt themselves and others, culminating in -- what else? -- suicide.

Numerous media organizations, schools and law enforcement agencies warned the public about it, although scant evidence showed that children were actually falling for the so-called challenge. It was later described as a “hoax,” although that’s not quite accurate, either. Some people likely did see this unsettling image, perhaps delivering a frightening message.

Momo tapped into something primal for parents. Momo is knowing you can’t control everything your children will ever see or experience on the internet. Momo is the plethora of terrible content, shady corporate practices and dangerous people as close as the phone in your child’s hand. Momo is knowing that the current levels of screen time are affecting our kids in ways we don’t entirely understand or even know. Momo is the outsized consequences and ruined futures for stupid mistakes on social media. Momo is the cyberbully we can’t see, and schools can’t control. Momo is feeling outmatched and outnumbered by technology’s pull and unable to protect our kids the way we want to. Momo is the report about a 9-year-old boy in Colorado dying by suicide after being bullied by classmates.

I talked to a father about what he had heard about the Momo challenge. He said he knew it wasn’t a real threat. “All these kids use all these different apps now,” he said. He named a popular messaging one that can be used to chat anonymously in large groups. “That’s the one that’s scary,” he said.

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