I’m a professor and I’m preparing to welcome a new freshman class to campus.
I’m also a mom who just sent my youngest son off to transfer from a community college to a large local university.
I am conducting research on child rearing of adolescents.
I am very concerned about university students and their parents. After drop-off and pick-up, I spent most of yesterday thinking about my son and adamantly didn’t text him. why? I was trying to avoid some of the traps that college parents fall into.
Fundamentals: The goal is autonomy
For many American students, college is a period of semi-autonomy, where parents, professors, and professionals provide scaffolding to support young people’s independent decision-making. They live away from home. Make your own decisions about how you dress, eat, sleep, and schedule. And navigate difficult choices about friendship, sex, and safe versus unsafe recreation.
This scaffolding, or supported growth, is designed to help young people grow stronger and develop adult skills while keeping guardrails in place. Mistakes happen. Drama ensues. However, through this process, students need to develop more skills and confidence. This includes confidence that if things go wrong, you can get back on track.
Avoid parenting mistakes: Micromanaging and hovering
Young children fall when learning how to walk. Then they get back up, try new strategies, flex new muscles, and make more mistakes. If we don’t let them go and let them fall, they will never learn and experience that glorious, excited joy of running into our arms.
Hovering over young people who are making big decisions about their career, friends, and activities conveys an important message: They can’t make these decisions on their own. That we care about them, but we don’t trust them. How can they believe in themselves if we don’t believe in them?
New students are likely learning about their new environment, including chatting with roommates, finding their way around the cafeteria, and finding their way to class. You shouldn’t be thinking about your parents, reassuring them that they’re okay, or responding to their texts. Let them live in the moment and be where they are.
Having students contact us instead of assuming they need help conveys trust and belief in their abilities.
Effective scaffolding: Utilize your university support system.
Universities have changed significantly in recent decades. The biggest change is adding more layers of student support. Students are assigned an advisor to assist them with course selection. This includes making choices to find a major, meeting graduation requirements, and avoiding overload. Going to college is like visiting a candy store or a used bookstore. There are so many options and they all look delicious. It’s the advisor’s job to remind students that there’s plenty of time for dessert, so they need to make sure they’re getting plenty of quality protein and vegetables.
Advisors can also direct students to resources. These include disability services and accommodations, mental health professionals, and career services offices. They can teach children how to effectively advocate for themselves and develop strategies to get help when needed. When things don’t go well, students may be so embarrassed or embarrassed that they avoid talking to their professors or inappropriately ask for help. Advisors help students move forward effectively.
Most universities also offer study skills workshops, library professionals to help students conduct high-quality academic research, writing and quantitative skills centers to help plan and hone their work, and mental health services. Masu.
One of the most effective things parents can do is encourage their students to take advantage of these resources.
Your job as a parent is not to intervene and solve your student’s problems. That’s so you can identify the problem and find the tools to solve it yourself.
Avoid parenting mistakes: Cutting off communication
Monitoring is a core part of effective parenting during adolescence. Without knowing what is going on, parents cannot give appropriate advice, set appropriate rules, or establish sanctions. Research over the past 20 years has shown that parents monitor their children most effectively by listening to them and encouraging them to open up. This is especially true at university.
Essentials for raising children
How can I get them to open up? Don’t jump down their throats.
When adolescents and young people have had troubling experiences, talking about them can help them process their feelings, think about what happened, and discuss ways to avoid it happening again or deal with the consequences. .
Adolescents will continue to share their experiences and talk if they trust that their parents will listen and help them through the process. What causes the process to shut down? Judgment. The adolescents I surveyed say one of the most common reasons they don’t share information with their parents is because they think it will upset them. When parents react negatively, they have two problems. It’s your feelings and yours. It can also make their problems worse by reinforcing their feelings of shame and blame. None of these are conducive to effective communication.
When children open up, listen. You might ask, “Do you want to vent?” Need help? Want help fixing it? Different people in different situations need different things. Give them what they need. Your job is to support them. To do that, we need information. Help them speak.
Effective communication: soak up the sunshine
One thing I realized about myself was that I spent way too much time talking to my kids about my troubles (kids call this nagging). It wasn’t particularly helpful to me. It wasn’t particularly interesting to them.
One of my students, Yan Lu, did an honors project studying the impact of chatting with parents on international students attending university away from home. They found that chatter was associated with increased stress. why? Chatting did not help reduce students’ stress, but talking with parents did not help students with new worries about what was going on at home or new stressors with parents adding pressure. brought about.
Please don’t do that! I’ve been intentional about talking to my kids about things that aren’t nagging. I asked questions about things I knew they were interested in (I became fluent in Dungeons and Dragons). I shared what I do with my dogs. We talked about common fun things.
In other words, I wanted people to respond to communications and emails from me with a smile, not an eye roll. Cut it short, please. Stay positive. listen.
Avoid parenting mistakes: Ignoring clear signals
University can be difficult, and many students may experience problems. Parents may be essential in identifying serious concerns regarding mental health, substance use or relationship issues, academic concerns, etc. I have experienced many students not asking for help, or the right kind of help, and spiraling out of control. I think this is especially common for students who have come through things easily. They are hitting their first speed bump. This is also common among students who have experienced many problems in the past. Times of change require new learning and strategies.
Physical illness is one of the most common reasons students drop classes, fail a grade, or have to drop out for a semester. A urinary tract infection or ear infection at the wrong time of the year can seriously disrupt your academic schedule. Most students never had to manage their own medical care.
These are the kinds of situations where a listening parent can help the student find help on their own or intervene if the problem is serious enough.
Maximum challenge and maximum support
The great developmental psychologist Yuri Bronfenbrenner always quotes Alexei Leontiev as saying that children need maximum challenge and maximum support in order to thrive. In other words, they needed to be encouraged to stretch out and do things on their own, trusting that if they fell, someone would help them.
To me, that’s the ideal way to parent a college student.
