Article in the College Connection Magazine part of the St Louis Post-Dispatch
Navigating change: a roadmap to independence
Anne T. Makeever
COLLEGE CONNECTION MAGAZINE
Before helicopter parents grew their rotor blades and began to manage the college admissions process when their kids were in utero, there were generations of college-bound students and their parents who grabbed one last hug from one another at the airport, bus stop or train station, then waved either longingly or with a certain amount of relief as the train, bus or plane pulled away. The new freshman returned home for winter break, if a return ticket was affordable, and maybe even spent a summer or two in her old room between freshman year and commencement — or maybe didn’t. Because long-distance phone calls were expensive, and the time it took to write a letter, find a stamp and walk to the mailbox sometimes hard to come by, communication was dear and often infrequent.
Those images seem charming now, even quaint, given our culture’s unlimited talk-and-texting cell-phone plans and the omnipresent nature of e-mail. More “Donna Reed” than “NYC Prep.”
It would be easy to write off the differences between one generation of freshman and their parents and another in a simple, two-word bit of truth: Change happens. Except the tools that underscore the differences have the potential to affect one of the essential elements of the college experience, which is, in a single word, independence. Going off to college, and all that the process entails, is, when given a chance to work as it should, what helps parents and their children move from caregiver and care receiver, to a more equal relationship.
Margaret Pundman, a St. Louis-based author, speaker and life coach, put it this way: “College helps parents and their kids begin to communicate with each other as peers, as adults.”
Do frequent cell phone calls and multiple e-mails per day get in the way of this miraculous transition? “They can,” said Pundman, who has worked with college-bound students and their parents to help prepare them navigate the changes. “But they don’t have to.”
In other words, it’s not an either-or equation. It’s all about context. If your new freshman is calling you hourly, sending e-mail updates so often they begin to pile up in your inbox like spam, assess the situation before assuming the transition isn’t taking. Are the phone calls happening during the walk from the dorm to Freshman Comp and accompanied by the background sounds of new friends? Is your student talking excitedly about new experiences, animatedly about the bad food, in great anticipation of a party next weekend? Then things are fine. You’re being included in your student’s new life and should be pleased you matter so much. But if your student is sending e-mails at all times of day when alone in his dorm, or calling because he’s lonely and bored most minutes of the day, then there’s a problem. He’s not participating in his new life.
“Students can get in their own way by not stepping up to meet the challenges at hand,” Pundman said. That’s true for all of us, but perhaps more so for freshmen, who are negotiating a lot, all at once. The temptation to resist, to pull in and retreat, can at times be irresistible.
So what do you do if you see retreat? Step back; see if your student will then step up. Perhaps you’re not available for every call and some e-mails go unanswered.
And when you do talk, be careful not to feed into your student’s insecurities by revealing some of your own. Your freshman doesn’t need to hear about the recent round of difficulties occurring in the family business, about martial discord, problems with siblings or the family poodle’s decline. Resist the temptation to pull your student back into your life when she should be establishing her own. Keep it light.
And if you’re the student? If you find the solitude of your empty dorm room easier to manage than campus life? Pundman has a quick solution. “Everybody needs a best friend ... so get one.” It might be the guy who arrived at the same time you did for math class – late. Or your dorm mate. Or the girl you recognize from a dorm meeting who’s eating her salad alone in the dining hall. Find somebody. You don’t have to be BFF or soul mates. But you can share the experience of college acclimation and double your social contacts at the same time. And this new person can introduce you to more new people and so it goes.
For lots of families, the first few months go well. “Problems can show up when the student returns home on break,” Pundman warned. Winter break, especially, because it’s lengthy, can create family friction where there wasn’t any. Without thinking, parents may assume the old rules about curfew, noise levels, the number of friends in the basement Man Cave will be the same ones that held through high school. But the returning college freshman may balk, to put it mildly, at such infringements on hard-earned personal freedom. On campus, this freshman has been deciding when to wake, what to eat, where to go, who to see, when to collapse, all on his own.
Pundman proposed this strategy: “Talk about it all before the student comes home.” Negotiate curfew, sleeping arrangements, family privacy, meals, chores – all of it – and you’ll go a long way toward eliminating friction. And students, said Pundman, need to remember they can’t have it both ways. “You can’t be a child and an adult. Don’t ask for curfew to be abolished and then expect your laundry to be done for you.”
The first head cold or onset of flu symptoms can also be roadblocks to independence. “Mom, I’m sick,” filters through the cell phone and the first thought may be: “How soon can I get there?” Again, Pundman’s advice is to step back and assess. Cold or mono? Sprain or compound fracture? Then point the kid in the direction of the campus clinic with a few bits of advice on how to talk to a doctor.
“The best thing any parent can do for a child is to teach that a child how to be her own best advocate,” Pundman said. And that pretty much sums it up. When college arrives, it’s time to let go, judiciously, with a well-timed bit of advice here and there to avert disaster.
Pundman’s last bit of advice for students was this: “Build relationships with your parents, reach out to them.” Get to know who they are as Jack and Jo Anne rather than as Mom and Dad.
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