College Parenting 101: Why we can't just "let go"

If you attended college any time before 1990 there were probably no parent orientations, parents’ associations, or family weekends at your college. In fact, if your parents ever spent any time at your college beyond move-in day or graduation you were part of a small minority. Obviously, things have changed dramatically over the past few decades, and colleges and universities are ramping up programs for the parents and families of their students that were completely absent 30 years ago. Some reasons for these changes in programs are:

1. College costs much more. I mean, much more, than it did 30 years ago.  I know I don’t need to tell you this since you are still swooning from the sticker shock you have undoubtedly experienced in the past several months. With these higher costs come higher expectations, especially from parents who are footing most, or at least more, of students’ college expenses.
2. We live in the age of twenty-four hour per day, seven day per week , three hundred and sixty five day per year communication and information. With cell phones, video chat, and social media readily available to almost everyone, we have come to expect the ability to find information and contact anyone, in any place, at any time immediately. This means that when students have even small problems they can immediately call a parent for advice instead of having to wait to find a phone. Years ago, waiting to find a phone, and the time to call one’s parent, meant that we had the time to process problems and decide whether or not they were worth discussing with a family member, which they usually weren’t.
3. Constant access to news media from around the world also means that any crisis that occurs at any college in the country, or anywhere in the world seems like it happened next door and is surely a crisis where our child attends. We fear that it is threatening them personally, instead of an isolated incident. We no longer have the comfortable insulation of time and distance to temper these sensational news stories and safety is always on our minds.
4. Our generation of parents has had fewer children than previous generations, and we have been more involved in their lives both in and out of school. In other words, we have a lot of time, money, effort, and love investing in our 2.06 children and their success. We have been told since they were in utero that we are 100% responsible, both socially and legally, for their care and behavior. Now, all of a sudden when they enroll in college, we are supposed to simply let go of this “adult” who it seems was just yesterday hitting a baseball off a tee. Letting go of your child is easier said than done, and most of us, and our college-bound children face a steep learning curve in these lessons of letting go.