Okay this is for my fellow parents of college students. Can we talk about mixed messages for a minute? From the moment our children sprang forth into the world we have been told in every way imaginable to be attentive to and engaged in their education and development.
Read to them. Get the right mobile to hang over the crib. Read to them. Get toys and games that help them to learn. Read to them. Get to know their teachers. Be a classroom volunteer (read to them and other people’s kids). Coach youth sports. Chaperone field trips. Follow what they are learning and partner with their teachers. Encourage them to read. Be involved with their school community.
And then there are all the ways we are supposed to protect our kids and keep them safe and healthy. From safety gates at the top of the stairs to those annoying plastic things you stick in light sockets to helmets and mouth-guards for pretty much every activity that involves locomotion in any form – and even some that don’t. We need to monitor their social media profiles, the electronic games they play, and all of their online activities (all for good reasons). We watch their diets and eating habits, teach them about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, and help them develop good personal safety skills and habits. To say nothing of the omnipresent handwashing and sanitizing.
And let’s be clear, if you don’t do some, if not most of these things, then the not-so-subtle message is you’re not really a very good parent. (It’s best I don’t head down that rabbit hole right now. We’ll just pencil in ill-informed-snarky-judging-of-parents as a topic for another time.)
So most of us – because we love our kids and we want to be good parents – work hard to be caring, attentive, and involved in our children’s lives. As our students finish out their time in high school we help them through the college search process, buy the extra-long sheets and mini-fridges for the dorm rooms, and pay tuition bills and take loans to send them off to college. And what do we get for our efforts? After being greeted warmly with bad institutional coffee and kind-of-stale miniature muffins and Danish on the day we drop them off, we are told to go home and never have direct contact with our children ever again.
Okay, I may have overstated the last part a little. But you know what I’m talking about, right? One day you are a concerned partner in your child’s personal development and the next you are (cue the ominous movie trailer voice) a helicopter parent. Overnight you go from an orange-slicing, carpool driving candidate for Parent of the Year, to an overprotective dilettante, singularly responsible for the sluggish economy, the rise of reality television, and climate change.
So, as if it weren’t hard enough getting used to the daily absence of this person who has been so central in your life, you also have to worry about making sure you are striking the right balance between supporting your child through his college transition while not smothering her with a daily onslaught of ill-advised texts and phone calls.
Well, I probably can’t give you all the answers, but here are my thoughts on a few college parent FAQs that might help.
How often should I communicate with my college student? There is no hard and fast rule about how frequently you should be talking, texting, or emailing with your college student child. The transition impacts different people in different ways. You know yourself and you know your child and you need to figure out together what the right balance is. I covered this in more detail in a previous MCW post which you may find interesting. Understand that this is an organic process that shifts and changes over time. Try to remember that the objective is to help your student settle into her new life at college and let that guide you.
When should I call the professor if my student is struggling in a class? Never. Really. You should not directly insert yourself in your student’s relationships with his professors. Ever. Even if the professor indicates that it is okay. Do not do it. If she is struggling in a class, then she should contact the professor or TA as per the course syllabus. If he has tried that and it hasn’t helped, then he should contact his advisor or someone in the dean’s office to identify academic support services or explore other avenues of recourse. Your role is to support your student. Reassure her that she can manage the situation and things will work out. Remind him that you love him and you are there for him. But do not ever contact a professor on your student’s behalf. Even if pigs fly, Hell freezes over, and the cows come home all on the same day, you should not call your child’s college professor.
Is it ever okay for me to contact college staff members directly? Absolutely. There are lots of people on campus who are there to help students negotiate any number of different issues. It is completely appropriate for you to partner with them to support your student. First and foremost, if you are concerned about your student’s emotional health you should not hesitate to reach out to someone on campus for help. It goes without saying that you should contact someone if you think your child is in danger or at imminent risk. But beyond emergency situations, whether you are seeking guidance for how to help your student manage feeling homesick, or you just want to know if there are people he can talk to about a roommate conflict, seeking information that your student can use to address issues of concern is not a problem. But your objective should be to get information that you can pass along to your student to act on.
The three rules of thumb I encourage parents to remember with respect to contacting college officials are:
- When you do things for your student that she should be doing for herself you are depriving her of an opportunity to learn and grow.
- Never (ever, ever, ever) contact a campus official, ask them to reach out to your child to address a problem and say, “But you can’t tell him that I called you.” It is not fair to the campus official or to your student. If you’re concerned about your child and want assistance from someone on campus, definitely ask for help. But do not ask them to lie to your student about your involvement.
- Ask yourself how you would have felt about your parent making the call you are thinking about making. If you went to college, what would you have thought about your parent calling the dean or your advisor to raise the issue at hand? If you didn’t attend college but served in the military or went straight to work out of high school, how would you have responded to your parent contacting your CO or your boss to express the concerns you had shared? Most of the time, the right response is to help your student think through the problems they are confronting, and identify steps they can take to resolve them.
Remember when our kids were little and we thought about how much easier it would be when they got older? Hah! Not so much, right?
The truth, I suppose, is that figuring out how best to parent a college student is a lot like figuring out how to parent an infant or a toddler or…. It’s good to read the books, follow the doctors’ orders, and listen to advice from others who have done it before. But in the end it usually comes down to telling our kids we love them and doing the best we can.
