The most important thing to remember about
roommates is that almost every student will have a problem with his roommate at
some point whether or not he expresses it to you. If your child vents his
frustrations about his roommate, remind him that everyone who has a roommate also is a roommate and frustrations often travel in both directions. It
is impossible to share a twelve by sixteen foot room with someone and not have
some kind of conflict arise. Add to that the reality that most of today’s
students have never had to share a bedroom with a sibling and you have the
perfect storm for roommate conflicts.
Resident Assistants and other hall staff members point to roommate
conflicts as the number one complaint of college students so if your child
calls or texts with a complaint about his roommate don’t fret, there are a
number of things you can do to help.
As you’re talking with your child remember that
many times roommate complaints or conflicts stem from completely unrelated
issues. Imagine that you are a college freshman whose just had a bad day; you
woke up late, missed breakfast, lost your only dollar to the vending machine
and earned a D on your first English composition paper. When you finally get
back to your room after your terrible day your roommate is there, watching
Netflix and loudly crunching away on a bag of Doritos.
Under any other circumstances, a person
watching a show and eating chips wouldn’t bother most people, but after the day
your child has had, its enough to drive him mad. He snaps at his roommate “Do you have to
watch that stupid show and make such a mess with those chips? It’s gross, you’re
going to attract cockroaches!” He storms out of the room and calls you
practically yelling and claiming that his roommate is terrible and if he
weren’t always watching TV in the room, he would’ve been able to concentrate on
his English paper and earned a higher grade.
In the mean time, his roommate, who had an
equally rough day, is on the phone to his father complaining that his roommate
is such an uptight jerk and is “Always complaining about the smallest thing. I
had a bad day, and was just trying to relax and now he’s made it even worse!”
It’s no coincidence that roommates get the brunt of student’s bad days. Just
like family members, sometimes the last person you see at the end of the day
gets the entire day’s worth of bad baggage dumped on them just because they
happen to be there. Most of the time,
roommate conflicts arise from poor communication, misunderstandings, and
adjustment issues that all students face.
Learning to live with someone in a small space
whether it’s your best friend, or a potluck roommate assigned by the housing
office is just plain hard. The best thing that you can do for your child is let
him vent about his roommate and then ask him about other issues in his life.
Maybe while he was complaining about his roommate some other problems came out
as well, problems that have nothing to do with the roommate at all.
This is when you really have to listen to your
child and avoid the temptation to offer advice or suggestions for solving the
problem. When he has run out of steam, you’ll know it and can ask him about the
other problems he mentioned. “I hate it when I sleep through the alarm too, it
seems to make the whole rest of the day terrible. – pause - You mentioned that
you had a lot of other bad things happen today, tell me about your English
paper, what do you think happened there?”
The important focus for your child needs to be
his English grade and since this was just one paper, you know he can raise his
grade. Let him know you have confidence in him to find the help he needs and
while you talk with him, flip through the parent handbook or the college
website to find information about the writing center.
Roommate Contracts
If the roommate conflict is more than just a
series of bad days or misunderstandings ask your student to have the RA
intervene with a roommate contract. These contracts are documents that both
roommates can negotiate and sign and the document simply helps guide behavior.
Typical roommate contracts involved issues such as how late music or other
media can be played, how many times per week visitors can stay overnight, who
cleans what and how often. These are living arrangement guidelines that
individual families develop naturally over the years, but college roommates
don’t have the luxury of all that time to spend developing complimentary living
habits. Almost everyone has unexpressed expectations for their roommate’s
behavior, but if those expectations are not communicated verbally, or in
writing, they will go unmet and cause major problems.
No comments:
Post a Comment