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.

How to Avoid "Hovering" When Things Go Wrong

·               Get all the facts first, and then question the facts. When college students find themselves in trouble of any kind they are likely to gloss over, or flat out deny their responsibility especially if they know you’ll freak out. Whether it is a semester of straight Ds and Fs or an impending $600.00 charge for damages to his residence hall room, you can be sure that, according to him, he had nothing to do with it. You will be understandably angry to see a semester’s worth of failing grades or a bill for $600.00, but before you call all his professors or the Director of housing, realize that your anger is actually with your child. Deep down, you know that professors actually do not give grades, students earn them, and relatively few students are ever charged for room damage.

I’ll talk more about FERPA, or the Family Educational Right to Privacy Act later in this book, but FERPA essentially keeps professors and university administrators from discussing students’ educational, judicial, and financial records with anyone besides the student, including you. While this law is overall positive, and keeps your child’s academic records safe, it also causes problems for parents. It means that the housing staff can’t show you the photographs of the broken window, and a professor can’t show you the student’s record of low test scores or missed assignments. In other words, you’re only getting half of the facts at best, and university officials are unable to tell you the rest of them.

Parents are programmed to fix problems, but once your child is an adult your role changes from rescuer to advisor. Instead of trying to fix a problem or make it go away, your child really needs you to help him understand how to avoid the same problem in the future, otherwise he’ll experience it again and again.

* Students who complain to professors about grades rarely have the grade raised without a sincere effort on the student’s part. If your child has received a low grade on one assignment there are some things he can do to try to raise the overall grade in the class. 

Review the class syllabus. These documents are distributed to every student in every class at the beginning of the semester. While most students rarely read them, they offer a great deal of information about the grading policies for classes.  A student may discover that he can request to drop an unusually low test grade in the class at the end of the semester, or that he is allowed to write a paper or make a class presentation on a specific topic for extra credit. Professors allow this type of leeway to students because it creates more learning opportunities.

Make an appointment with the professor during his or her office hours. During the appointment the student should ask for help improving his grade on the next test or paper, not complain about the grade he already received.  The professor will usually offer some suggestions on ways to improve studying in the class or may suggest the student work with a specific tutor, study group, or teaching assistant.  On rare occasions, the professor may allow the student to repeat the test or rewrite the assignment or paper, however the student needs to be aware that the new grade might be lower. 

How to Avoid "Hovering"

Most parents don’t want to be helicopter parents. You certainly have better things to do with your time than solve problems for your adult child who is 200 miles away. Parents constantly lament to me “How can he be smart enough to get into college, but he can’t figure this out?” But, if after a few tear-filled calls from your child, you decide to call the college to fix a problem for your child, stop and consider the following.

·               Can he handle this problem on his own? The answer is usually “Yes”, but he just doesn’t know how. Most eighteen-year-olds don’t know how to trouble shoot problems because they simply haven’t had to do it before. Let me tell you a little story to illustrate this point.

Each year, when I worked in residence halls, at least three to ten students would request a maintenance work order for a broken desk light (the lights were built into the desks.) The first few times this happened, I took the students’ word that the light was broken, assuming that they had certainly already confirmed that the light was plugged in and the bulb was not burned out. But, after a few of the maintenance orders came back with notes such as “replaced bulb” I started to realize that students didn’t know how to trouble shoot. They just assumed that if they flipped on the light switch and the light didn’t turn on, then the light was broken. Defining the problem, and trouble shooting the simplest solutions are basic life skills that college students may not have developed yet, but they will definitely need in the future.

As you talk to your child about problems that are occurring in his life, ask him to clarify the problem first and then develop some simple solutions. Offer some suggestions, but don’t solve the problem for him. True, this may require that you have a few, or even several, overly complicated conversations about the same problem, but I assure you that once he has successfully solved one problem with your guidance, he’ll be able to solve many more without calling you. 

Helicopter Parent Epidemic?

What would a blog for college parents be without mentioning the terrible epidemic of helicopter parents? Well, I’m here to inform you that the “helicopter parent epidemic” is a myth. Sure, every faculty member or administrator has a few horror stories up his or her sleeve, but the truth is this. The number of parents who are always overly involved in their children’s lives is extremely small when compared to the entire population of college students. Most parents do an excellent job of letting their children grow and develop through the inevitable failures they experience in college.

Of course there is no valid way to measure what “overly involved” is but, the mythic parent who demands grade changes, and visits regularly to clean Jr.’s room only exists in very small numbers. If they were rain forest birds, they would surely be on the endangered list. We also have to look at so-called, “helicopter parents” from the university’s perspective.

Considering that many professors and administrators are of our generation or older, their only experience with being a college freshman is their own. Like us, their freshman year was about three decades ago, long before tuition skyrocketed, cell phones, social media, and the Internet existed, and parents became keenly aware of serious campus safety issues. If, like us, their only contact with their parents was in the form of an occasional postcard or a weekly call from the hallway payphone, their experience in no way resembles that of a current college freshman. I mean, have you tried to find a pay phone lately? Times have changed, and even though colleges and universities are notoriously slow to change, we need to change along with them.

Most parents who call me with a complaint or question aren’t helicopter parents in fact; they would be horrified if their child knew they’d called. They aren’t trying to solve problems for their child, and they certainly aren’t “hovering” they just want to be informed about policies or situations so they can offer educated advice or guidance. I am much more concerned about the parents who sit at home worrying about what they can possibly do to help their child who has called home asking for academic advice or complaining about a roommate who is using drugs in the room. Yes, ultimately, the student will have to resolve such situations on his own, but from the university’s perspective, a parent who is informed about what resources are available to the student is an ally, not an enemy.