What Parents Should Learn About College

It’s summer’s end and, all across America, hundreds of thousands of young people are about to leave home and start their freshman year at college. Poised between childhood and adult life, they are packing, saying goodby to high school friends and dreaming about the new life ahead in classrooms and dormitories.

These soon-to-be freshmen may not realize it, but these same weeks often have powerful meaning for their parents. Pride mixes with fear that their children may become involved with sex and drugs on campus. As tuition bills come due, money worries combine with relief at having a quieter home for a while. Expectations for a child’s career blend with the shock of getting “old.”

‘An Incredible Luxury’

And there can be plain jealousy, taking some parents by surprise.

“In a period of life when career, family and financial demands sometimes seem overwhelming, the prospect of spending four years in a peaceful environment, with almost total devotion to matters of intellect and one’s own development, seems to be an incredible luxury,” a father of a 17-year-old son said.

He and many other befuddled or bemused parents are quoted in a new book, “Letting Go: A Parents’ Guide to Today’s College Experience” (Adler & Adler, Publishers Inc.). Reportedly the first “how-to” book aimed specifically at the folks who usually pay the tuition bills, it was written by Karen Levin Coburn and Madge Lawrence Treeger, both professional counselors at Washington University in St. Louis and mothers of college-age offspring.

Their recurring theme is how difficult it is, on both sides, for a college student to become independent while still financially and, at times, emotionally dependent on parents. Evidently, that dilemma is so common that some colleges--such as Occidental College and UC Irvine--will keep a few copies of the book on hand during upcoming orientation sessions for parents.

“It had become very clear from my counseling experience that parents often intervene with the best of intentions and sometimes get in the way of their sons’ and daughters’ development, mostly out of misunderstanding of what college life is today,” Treeger said during a recent interview.

For example, she recalled how her own daughter was assigned a roommate whose boyfriend spent the night in the room frequently. Treeger’s daughter found the situation intolerable but rebuffed her parents’ suggestions that she tell the dormitory’s supervisor. Instead the young woman simply slept in a friend’s room when the boyfriend was an overnight guest and she managed to get a new room assignment the following semester. The lesson was one of independence. “She found her way out of the situation herself,” Treeger explained.

According to the two counselors, college students want their freedom but they still need a home base, just as they once hurried back from playground adventures to find mother on the park bench where they left her. Except now the source of reassurance is hundreds, even thousands of miles away.

Calling Home

So, don’t be surprised, the authors said, if a young woman who handled the packing and departure from home with utmost bravado suddenly tells her mother she wants to spend the first night with her in the hotel instead of sleeping in the dormitory. And, don’t be shocked if a previously unsentimental son starts calling home a lot.

According to Coburn, other tensions arise when parents live vicariously through their children or use their child’s college experience as a status symbol to be flashed at cocktail parties. Those parents want to hear only the happy side of college. “These are the best years of your life!” they tend to shout into the telephone, Coburn said from her office on the Washington University campus.

“There are some parents for whom it is important to have ‘my son the doctor’ or ‘my daughter on the dean’s list.’ There is no clear separation of status and accomplishments that belong to the students and belong to the parents,” Coburn explained.

This sets the family up for conflict when, for example, the beloved pre-med decides to major in art history, she said; it also exacerbates the student’s anxieties and may inhibit him or her from academic risks, such as avoiding a brilliant professor who is known to be a tough grader.

Pressure to Perform

And the steep costs of college make matters worse. “Most families are feeling a lot of economic pressure and making some sort of sacrifice even if the student is on scholarship,” Coburn added. “The students feel that pressure to perform.”

She and Treeger caution parents not to demand a specific grade point average and not to panic if their child sounds very discouraged about schoolwork. Parents, they say, should show they are interested in the student’s difficulties, but realize that most students can and should solve the problems on their own, or with the help of teachers and counselors.

All in all, parents must be aware of the college environment today’s students face, the authors stress. Beyond the alcohol, drugs and sex is a competition for grades and careers that is much stiffer than a generation ago. While many universities have returned to a more structured curriculum since the late ‘70s, they have not brought back in loco parentis --the philosophy that college should act as local parents.

“It is more complicated now in that students have more responsibility and have to choose when they are coming home at night, if they are coming at night and who is coming with them,” Coburn said.

Interestingly, the authors contend that the current batch of students suffers more anxiety than students of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when campuses were embroiled in protests over the Vietnam War and civil rights. The last generation pushed its energies outward and young people could submerge themselves in a mass movement; students now have more time to be homesick and face a more complicated political and social scene, Treeger and Coburn say.

The Path to Learning

Their book traces the steps leading to college: the SAT tests, the applications, the interviews, rejections, course selection, packing. It deals at length with the goodbys.

A father whose son and last child left for college told of how he placed a pair of his son’s old track shoes in the front hall for weeks after the teen-ager left; that eased the hollowness the father felt when he came home from work to an unusually quiet house.

The separation, according to “Letting Go,” can be especially painful for a divorced or single parent who built his or her life around the children. It can place extra stress on couples who, whether they realized it before or not, had been staying together until the children were grown. Or it can be exhilarating, jolting parents into making a career change, paying more attention to their own health and looks.

Coburn and Treeger also warn parents that visits home can become confusing struggles over old rules and new freedoms and advise that, almost inevitably, children come to see their parents in a different light. “I went home to a nursemaid and Buddy Hackett,” one young man is quoted as saying. “My mom started washing my clothes and folding them for me. My dad started telling me dirty jokes, slapped me on the back, and said ‘Hey, you want a beer, kid?’ ”

On the other hand, the nursemaid and Buddy Hackett might have to receive home a creature who dyed her hair purple before vacation or decided to put several earrings in his right earlobe. Coburn recalled how she left for college a “classic preppie” and came home the first time dressed “as a pseudo-sophisticate” wearing a black coat with a fur collar, her hair all done up and carrying a cigarette holder.

“It was hysterical. I had met people who were very theatrical and copied that style,” she said. “My parents barely recognized me at the airport. Luckily, they had a sense of humor.”

Search for Identity

Changes like that, she and Treeger say, are symbolic of the main struggle of the college years: A young person’s search for identity separate from his or her family, a search that is just as important as studying history or physics.

“Students often tell us that they learn as much outside the classroom as they do in it,” Treeger said. “That’s hard for parents to hear and understand this when they are paying so much money. But those late night bull sessions in the dorms are important and meaningful to students. It crystallizes a sense of themselves. And, they may never have an opportunity to do that again.”