<p>When I was 18, the age of majority was 21. I lived in an all-girls' dorm with a curfew, and if I had gotten into trouble at school, my parents would have been called. That may have been an excess of supervision by today's standards, but it was not so much that students failed to grow up and become independant adults. I don't think that 18 year olds themselves are any more mature now than they were then.</p>
<p>It's a mixed bag when it comes to how mature people are. I know tons of people my age (I'm 20, so think in that range) who are terribly immature. Likewise I know some who are exceptionally mature. The same however goes with so older people. I can honestly say I've seen people well into their 30's who, in my opinion, were less mature then my 14 year old sister.</p>
<p>I went to college as an extremely immature and sheltered 17 year old, thousands of miles from home, in a different country with a different culture and language. BUT, the age of majority was 21, and like Texas, I lived in an all-girls'dorm. "In loco parentis" was taken seriously and the university provided a lot of support, especially to internationals. The college experience has become very different from what it was then. My college was awash with marijuana, but students passing out from booze was the exception. It was really hard to get the Pill, and date rape was not part of our vocabulary. Anyone read Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus?</p>
<p>I really don't understand why some folks on this thread are so determined to judge and label others in rather arbitrary ways. I could say that this cut-and-dried way of seeing other people may also reflect some cut-and-dried parenting, but that would be similarly over-simplifying, wouldn't it? ;)</p>
<p>Not to mention that college bureaucracies are assumed to be wise, efficient, responsive to 18 year olds and if there is a problem, a. the 18-year old is supposed to deal with it without outside (read parental) help or just suck it up.
When private citizens encounter a problem, they are encouraged to contact their representative in Congress. Nobody suggests they're immature for doing so.</p>
<p>I raised my kids to know how to deal with red tape and bureaucracies on their own early on. By the time they got to college - they didn't need my help with that sort of stuff. </p>
<p>It wasn't hard to raise my kids that way: all I did was make them attempt to sort out problems on their own when they were younger, by suggesting/guiding. My daughter told me she was really bored in class when she was in kindergarten, so I told her to write a letter to her teacher explaining how she felt. She fired up the computer and typed a letter to her teacher that was far more direct and diplomatic than what I would have come up with. </p>
<p>I was in college at age 16 when the age of majority was 21 - but there were no curfews or monitoring in my co-ed dorm. There was a lot of drinking, drug use, & sex, and no one was calling parents. The age of majority (voting) was changed to 18 the year I turned 18 - rather convenient for me. The reason that there was pressure to reduce the age of majority was because of the draft: 18 year old males were then, as now, expected to be old enough to be put on the battlefield to risk death and serious injury -- no one ever argued that they were too immature to handle an M-16 or a hand grenade. </p>
<p>I think that the reason some of these kids run into red tape kind of issues and need to call their parents is simply because they have not had experience dealing with these issues themselves, and haven't learned how to handle such problems on their own. The kids see themselves as victims in an insensitive bureaucracy, stymied because there are all sorts of rules and procedures that no one told them about until it is too late. But in reality, the problem was that these kids were clueless and missed opportunities because other, more sophisticated, kids were proactive and essentially shut them out. That is - maybe a class is already "full" by the first day of registration because there is a pre-registration option that the more knowedgeable kids use; and maybe after one kid is shut out of a "full" class he sees other latecomers getting into the same class, because the other kids know to attend the first few classes any way, so they can get on a wait list or take advantage of openings that occur after the first week. </p>
<p>Of course the parents play right into this view of their hapless & helpless kid in an insensitive bureaucracy. My role in my kids' life from middle school on has been one of cheerleader & advisor: when they have a problem they can't solve they tell me, and I offer suggestions; later on, I might say, "how did it go?" and offer more suggestions. </p>
<p>The minute the parent is on the phone talking to a professor, teacher or administrator - it is no longer the kid's process or problem, but the parent's. There are some situations that might be so extreme as to call for parental intervention: but class registration or roommate assignment probably isn't one of them.</p>
<p>Calmom:</p>
<p>My S wrote letters to his teacher saying he was not learning anything in class. Response: Well, you could help me teach the other students. Is this the kind of response one wants?
No one is suggesting that parents should phone profs, deans or presidents over class assignments or grades. But there are egregious problems that sometimes need someone other than a student to fix, just as sometimes, you need to call your senator or representative to fix. Let's not accuse one another of bad parenting without knowing particulars of speficic situation, shall we?</p>
<p>Marite, what was in your son's next letter?</p>
<p>You are right about "egregious" problems, but it seems to me that a lot of examples provided in this thread are not "egregious". For me - not getting a desired class, being bored in class, or not being happy with a dorm assignment are not egregious problems.</p>
<p>And I don't see where there is an accusation of "bad parenting" in my post. I think some parents do a better job of raising their kids to be capable, self-sufficient, independent adults by the time they reach age 18 than others. As far as I can tell from this thread, there is a difference in opinion as to whether kids should have that capacity at 18. I know that the law assumes young people to have that capacity, and that if anything happens to me, my kids will need to be able to take care of themselves at age 18 - so I have raised my kids in part with the assumption that I might not be around for them forever. Maybe part of this comes from the fact that my own mother died at a younger age than I am now, as well as the fact that I was very independent of my own family at that age.</p>
<p>Well, your post certainly seems to suggest that kids who are stymied by bureaucratic red tape feel that way because their parents have not taught them to be independent. That sounds very close to saying that the parents engaged in bad parenting.
Sometimes, they are stymied merely because they have not encountered a particular situation. If by junior or senior year students do not know how to navigate their college administration, that is one thing. But to expect that incoming freshmen will miraculously be ready to handle a slew of new experiences is another, especially since we don't know how good or bad individual orientation programs are.
As for the law assuming that young people are capable of being independent at 18, this is a totally arbitrary number. When I was in college, it was 21. People have not become mature faster since then; but life has certainly become more complicated, and higher education more expensive. I think of CC as a place to vent as well as to ask for advice. Just because parents vent does not mean they call profs or deans or presidents over trivial matters, or even non-trivial matters.</p>
<p>As to my son's letter to his teacher, it was the mandatory portfolio letter at the end of a unit. Students were asked what they had learned in that unit. My son very apologetically wrote, that he had not learned anything in that unit that he did not know before, and. PS, he had not learned anything new in the previous 2 units, either. The teacher's answer, as I posted, was that she hoped he would help the other students. I do not know what saddened me more: my son apologuizing for not having learned anything worth writing about or the teacher's assumption that he could use his time in school to teach rather than to learn. We decided to get enrichment for my S outside school.</p>
<p>
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What is so magical about 18?
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</p>
<p>I don't know. I didn't get my driver's license until 18.....and yes, a ton of kids are still 18 in high school. I think it has to do with state laws about how old a kid has to be in order to enter kindergarten.</p>
<p>Can't we all just get along??? Isn't the idea that kids should hopefully fight their own battles as early as possible? By definition, parents on this board are more involved than most!! Yet who among us doesn't ask our parents for help when things get tough, and they have an investment in college too.</p>
<p>Bluealien:</p>
<p>My question is rhetorical. There really is no scientific basis for assuming that at the age of 18, people are ready to be independent (that, of course, does not take into account the assumption that their parents will fork over nearly $200k for the education of these supposedly independent, mature, ready to live on their own, individuals). It's all a legal artifice. And in some countries, you can't get your license until 19.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Calmom:</p>
<p>My S wrote letters to his teacher saying he was not learning anything in class. Response: Well, you could help me teach the other students. Is this the kind of response one wants?
No one is suggesting that parents should phone profs, deans or presidents over class assignments or grades. But there are egregious problems that sometimes need someone other than a student to fix, just as sometimes, you need to call your senator or representative to fix. Let's not accuse one another of bad parenting without knowing particulars of speficic situation, shall we?
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</p>
<p>Yep. Sometimes parents have to curse out or say "I'm calling my lawyer" in order for things to get done for kids. Sometimes it is best if someone else handle situations for me, because I have a tendancy to get really really angry if I try hard to be nice and do not get results.</p>
<p>Giving kids advice and being a listening board and friendly shoulder has some how morphed into accusations of calling profs, admins, etc. I spent my kids' childhoods coaching them how to deal with stuff. If they call and ask for advice, still, fine. Why is that helicoptering?</p>
<p>And I agree with Marite; it does smack of accusations of bad parenting. Whatever.</p>
<p>Marite, when kids encounter a new situation at college that they have difficulty handling, I've got no problem with the idea that they might call a parent and ask, "what should I do?" -- my problem is with the idea that mom or dad is going to make a phone call to fix the problem, as opposed to simply offering suggestions. </p>
<p>But I also think that kids would usually get better advice from other students than their parents; the other students know the ins and outs of the system on campus much better. </p>
<p>My father was drafted within weeks after his 18th birthday, and my mother was married at age 19 -- neither was allowed to vote until age 21, but in all other respects they were expected to take on adult responsibilities. I don't think history really supports the idea of an extended adolescence; rather, throughout history most young men and have been expected to take on adult work responsibiities in their mid to late teens, whereas women were expected to marry and take on adult household responsibilities before they were out of their teens. College was a privilege reserved for the very wealthy. </p>
<p>It also seems to me that the example you gave concerning your son's note to his teacher is an illustration of a parental reaction that suggests something like: if you don't like what authority-figure says, give up. I realize I don't have the whole story, and I really don't want to draw conclusions from a simple anecdote, but it seems to me that I related a story of how I helped my daughter begin to advocate for herself at age 5, and you related a story something along the lines of, "my son tried that but I didn't like what the teacher said in reply, so I figured the teacher was impossible to deal with and fixed the problem by arranging something else for my son." The truth is that my daughter never did get a satisfactory response from her kindergarten teacher, but she did get a lot of practice in the art of dialogue with an adult that year -- even at age 5, she knew how to respond to a suggestion that she help out other kids. ("Yes, of course I would like to help out some of the time, but I also need more things to work on myself.") </p>
<p>It is pretty rare for someone to get a situation resolved immediately -- almost always, if you have a problem, the person with authority will begin by reiterating their policy or reciting the reasons that the decision already made is necessary or right. To get past that, a person needs to have the communication skills to guide the conversation to a point of acceptable compromise. I personally think these skills can be taught, just like I could teach my kids to cook basic meals or do their own laundry before the age of 10.</p>
<p>
[quote]
As to my son's letter to his teacher, it was the mandatory portfolio letter at the end of a unit. Students were asked what they had learned in that unit. My son very apologetically wrote, that he had not learned anything in that unit that he did not know before, and. PS, he had not learned anything new in the previous 2 units, either. The teacher's answer, as I posted, was that she hoped he would help the other students. I do not know what saddened me more: my son apologuizing for not having learned anything worth writing about or the teacher's assumption that he could use his time in school to teach rather than to learn. We decided to get enrichment for my S outside school.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Maybe he should have written the teacher another letter saying "This class was a complete waste of my time. I could have been doing something better." At least that's what I would have said.</p>
<p>Marite wrote, "My S wrote letters to his teacher saying he was not learning anything in class. Response: Well, you could help me teach the other students."</p>
<p>Are you sure this was a sarcastic or snide response? Our sons had courses at West Point for which each member of the section (12 or 13 cadets) was expected to teach one class during the semester. Teaching material is one sure way to master it ... and having to present material in a manner likely to interest one's peers is surely not boring. Perhaps the prof. was trying to better engage your son.</p>
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But I also think that kids would usually get better advice from other students than their parents; the other students know the ins and outs of the system on campus much better.
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. calmom your kids have wiser friends than mine...I don't expect the better advice from friends thing to kick in until they are at least 25.</p>
<p>Laxdad:</p>
<p>Sorry if I was not clear earlier. We're not talking of a college student here, but of a 6th grader. I fully expect my S to do some teaching in college, precisely for the reasons you advance, even though he will not need to do TAing for financial reasons.
This was not a sarcastic comment. It was part of a portfolio that would be viewed by parents. Nor did the teacher expect my S to learn by teaching. She just did not know how to handle a kid who was functioning at several grades above his agemates. In many other ways, she was a terrific teacher. Her strengths happened to be in the humanities, not in math. I just wanted to illustrate that for a kid to write letters to teachers does not always lead to the hoped for result. This particular teacher would have accommodated my S had she had known more math than he. In college, students deal with this kind of issues by choosing more advanced courses, so they don't have to advocate for themselves or have their parents advocate on their behalf. </p>
<p>As I said in an earlier post, I think the service academies demand a lot of their students but have much clearer expectations and better support than a lot of universities. So I am not in the least surprised that your experience has been different from that of some of the parents who've posted here. I would not expect parents to handle most of the problems a student is likely to encounter, but there are some instances when intervention is necessary, especially if a student is in a potentially (or sometimes actually) dangerous situation and the administration is reluctant or too slow to act. </p>
<p>Calmom:
If you think that a 10-year old can take on a teacher and somehow change her life-long adherence to her no tracking philosophy (which would have caused zero inconvenience, just a change of location within the same classroom) be my guest. You certainly seem to make lots of assumption about my S and me. I'm done exchanging posts with you.</p>
<p>
You illustrate my point -- you don't like my opinions, so your solution is to stop the dialogue. You also missed my point -- twice -- I didn't say that a 5 year old or a 10 year old will necessarily prevail - I said that kids can learn the skills needed to assert their opinion and engage in productive dialogue to achieve their goals. They also learn about compromise and negotiation. They also learn how to cope with setbacks and not always getting their way. Obviously if they are taught early on that their efforts will be fruitless, they'll never have a chance to exercise and learn the skills that will enable them to handle problems on their own. </p>
<p>Geez, if my mom or dad had called up a prof or administrator at my college, I would probably have wanted to dig a hole and bury myself from the embarrassment.</p>
<p> [quote=Alumother] calmom your kids have wiser friends than mine...I don't expect the better advice from friends thing to kick in until they are at least 25.
I'm starting to think that my kids ARE the "wiser friends"... but I'm hoping that this board is not a representative sample.</p>