Perhaps the most challenging change for the parents of new college students, beyond the sadness because their son or daughter isn’t at home anymore, is the shift from parent of a child to parent of a young adult. While your student will be your son or daughter for life, and there’s nothing magical about turning eighteen in terms of maturity, our law does say that eighteen year olds are adults in almost every sense of the word. And just as the way we parent our kids changes when they go to school as opposed to when they hadn’t been weaned, or at the transition to licensed driver, the techniques of successful parenting have to evolve when our sons and daughters to go college as well. And this applies even if the school they go to is the community college they can reach by a ten minute walk or car ride.
Make the Shift
What seems to work best is to shift to the kind of relationship we all want to have with our parents when we become adults. We didn’t want Mom calling us everyday to see how we were doing, or Dad insisting that I go outside “right now” and check the oil levels in our cars. No, we wanted our parents to give us space and the chance to make the adult decisions we’d been longing to make since we knew what a decision was. At the same time, we may not have been open to the flood of fatherly or motherly advice when we were eighteen as opposed to when we were turning twenty-eight and wanted advice on fixed rate versus adjustable mortgages. Somewhere in the lives of most of us, our parents moved from being the people who decided everything for us, to the people we knew would always have our best interests at heart, yet wouldn’t dream of trying to impose it on us. And we appreciated them for it. When your student goes to college is an appropriate time for that new relationship to start.
Is it That Hard?
You’ve probably already done that to some extent if your student has started college. You may have listened more to her about this college choice than you ever did about the car she wanted to buy. And you only asked once about your son’s choice to delay taking Calculus I until the second semester, before conceding that “he’s the one taking the classes, not me.” That’s exactly where you want to be. To the extent possible, you want to move from “you have to take this course, or I’m not paying for school,” and move toward “not taking this course now doesn’t add up to me. How did you come to that decision?”
Just as watching your student take off on his or her bicycle and out of your sight the first time, or the first time they go off in the family car once they get their license, this time of transition is going to be difficult for you. But just as you didn’t deny them the chance to ride the long way on two-wheeler, we have to learn how to make this new “adult to younger adult thing” work. And that’s what the parenting a successful college student blog is all about.
Stay tuned.