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The average college student communicates with Mom or Dad 13.4 times per week, or nearly twice a day, reports WBUR.It’s no wonder, considering how cheap phone calls are nowadays and how easy texting makes communication.
When I was in college, we had to make long-distance calls from a landline phone and keep it short, dammit, because our roommate’s boyfriend is supposed to call! Are you done yet? Because, you see, we didn’t have voice mail or call waiting. (We did, however, have running water and electricity.)
In college, I talked to my parents maybe twice a week, which made me feel a little needy compared to my roommate’s phone call schedule with her father: Once for the entire school year.
My mother and I would talk about how my soccer team was doing and who I was dating. My father would pretty much say three things:
1. “How’s the weather?”
2. “Got enough money?”
3. “Here’s your mother.”
But today’s parents are so connected to their college-age kids that universities have created Offices of Parent Services, designed to field concerns lodged by parents that I am certain my own parents never even thought about.
WBUR reports, “Many students, however, won’t admit to having so-called helicopter parents and say their parents are simply concerned about what’s going on in their lives.”
Concerned enough to chat twice a day. But nowadays, parents can check the weather for any city and the kids’ bank statements on smart phones. Whatever are they talking about?
As my own kids near college age, I am reminding myself that I am raising them to leave me. I will keep in touch with them, but I won’t hover. I want them to look up from their phones and enjoy their college experiences, because those four years fly by fast. Especially when Mom and Dad aren’t monitoring your every move.
Woman in front of me at Pottery Barn last week was returning lamps and chairs because they were too big for her daughter’s dorm room. Clerk asked, “freshman?” She replied, “junior.”
I don’t know why, but it was a major wake up call to me to step even farther back. Even though my kids aren’t quite off to college yet, I want them to be able to decorate their damn dorm rooms without my direct involvement.
Pottery Barn? Heh.
I decorated my room junior year with Christmas lights, a map of the world and hand-me-down TV with rabbit ears that had to be adjusted for better reception when it rained.
Fancy! If memory serves, I decorated mine with piles of dirty laundry — a timeless look.
When I went off to college, my Mom started writing me a letter once a week, the same thing her father had done with her 25 years before that. I wrote Mom on a weekly basis as well. Few phone calls – still a hang over from the generations where a long-distance phone call meant bad news. We kept that up regularly until email came along, over 5 years after I graduated from college. Mom went electronic before I did and couldn’t wait until we had internet capabilities.
Now, my college kid is living at home for at least the first year. He’s going to school at the university across town (less than 2 miles away, it’s a small town). So we communicate daily, in person. But, I’m letting him handle his college decisions on his own – including dealing with the financial aid office and his student account. I’m here if he has questions, but ultimately his college decisions are his alone.