A few months ago a poster told someone that living with her boyfriend would require that she budget extra for infections. Romance seems dead here!
OP:
How frustrating for you & your family! My thoughts on your situation:
- Like another poster said, you have to WORK at getting all D's and F's. Not ever go to class. Never turn in an assignment. Stuff like that.
- Your DD is going to learn through the School of Hard Knocks.
- Whatever led her to get D's and F's and flunk out of the scholarship this past semester, clearly whatever she is dealing with is overwhelming and she isn't responsible enough to handle going away to school.
- Her choices should NOT be rewarded with you paying for everything.
- It IS possible that she's been lying to you the entire time. for example, WHY does she have headaches and a back that hurts? A normal back ache would not result in you getting all D's and F's.
- She COULD truly be having health issues that she's embarrassed to tell you about. OR she could be lying about it all. She also could be just not ready to go away to college. Or she could have fallen in with a partying crowd of friends & started down the dangerous path of alcohol and drug abuse & perhaps she's trying to cover it up.
Give her some tough love…
a. She can move back home, but has to find gainful employment and take 1-2 community college classes that SHE pays for OUT OF HER OWN POCKET.
b. She has to pay you for room & board.
c. Set up a formal rental agreement with ‘house rules.’ Breaking the ‘house rules’ = she gets evicted and you kick her out.
d. Once she’s not only paid for those community college classes and gotten decent grades in them & shows that she is going to be a responsible adult, THEN MAYBE agree to pay for the next semester’s community college classes. Make paying anything toward her education contingent upon a certain GPA.
If she doesn’t like it, then she can move out and live on her own with no help from you. A few months of living like that will teach her some very valuable lessons. If she doesn’t like it, that’s too bad!
Keep in mind, also, that your younger children are going to be watching how you handle this situation.
Or, you could just miss the final.
Has the OP come back with more info?
I’m confused a bit…
Was this the DD’s freshman year or soph year?
Where is the story that the DD is living with the BF? Did I miss that?
If the DD isn’t living with the BF and has no plans to, then it seems odd that she would jeopardize attending this school by losing her award which keeps her near BF.
Was the award tied to a specific major? If not, why couldn’t she have just changed to her desired major?
From the earlier posts, it appears that the mom wanted/needed this child to get a “free ride”. If so, then the logical concern is that even if she now goes to a CC and transfers, there won’t be a “free ride” for when she transfers.
I’m not sure how many kids are in this family. Her screen name suggests 4 daughters, but she also mentions having a son. If so, then she has at least 5 kids and that may be why she’s really upset over the loss of award. She may never have had the funds to pay much for college w/o the big award.
BTW…the DD had a good ACT, but her GPA has always been “less than” great. If her high school wasn’t that difficult or was very “parent-like” with reminders, then she may not have adjusted well to college where you have to pay attention to details yourself.
It’s funny. Some friends of ours in another city went through something a lot like this with their younger child. (We knew much more about it than we would have liked, or than was appropriate, mainly because we happened to be visiting them and staying in their house the week that SHTF for the first time.) Anyway, many of the same ingredients: college freshman, common sense issues, new boyfriend, loss of scholarship, systematic lying, depression. Our friends were intensely suspicious of the boyfriend – maybe not as nuts as @OldFashioned1 , but they were pretty certain that he was enabling whatever the problem was, if not causing it, and was dragging their daughter down with him.
Flash forward five+ years. The daughter just got her BA, from her original college. Yes, it took six years, but really it was that the first year took three. There were lots of fits and starts (and lots of discussions of what it was and wasn’t appropriate to pay for; this is not a wealthy family), but ultimately the child got on track and stayed there. And a substantial contributor to things going right turned out to be . . . the “loser” boyfriend. He’s still in the picture, even though he’s very busy with medical school! (We happened to be with them when they found out he was applying to medical school, too. You could have knocked them over with a feather. This was maybe a year into the crisis, and they still viewed him with a lot of suspicion. It had never even occurred to them that their screw-up child’s boyfriend might be a high-performing academic star with an admirable work ethic.) Our friends adore him, and they will be thrilled to pay for the wedding.
So, yeah. Don’t jump to conclusions too fast.
Frosh with AP credits who has soph standing.
We all missed that, I think one poster made the assumption.
Not necessarily. For some individual students and certain educational environments, being in a romantic relationship of some kind can be a huge distraction which could detract from academics and fully experiencing college life. This is a reason why some parents/families discourage dating in HS and sometimes even during undergrad.
Also, while I did date a bit during undergrad, I found balancing work and social life…including romantic relationships much easier once I entered the working world than during undergrad or moreso…in HS*.
No need to worry about hours of homework/take-home projects/studying work on a daily basis in the working world. Even with working 70-90 workweeks and occasionally being on-call…at least once work is done…I can leave it at the office for the most part.
- My public magnet's campus culture and enormous workload/rigor was such the only folks I knew who dated were either geniuses who started undergrad taking upper-level undergrad/grad level classes...especially in STEM as first-years or if not....folks who ended up transferring back to their respective zoned high schools because they weren't able to balance the magnet's high workload and the relationship. The student culture was also such that daters tended to be regarded as "frivolous" folks with "misplaced priorities".
Some parents, but not all. Also, in some families it would have been a moot point due to family finances. If I fell even a smidgen below the minimum GPA I had to maintain for a part of my FA/scholarship package, my parents had no financial means to make up the difference and I would have had to come home, find whatever job I could, and hope I can save up to attend another college and hopefully graduate several years later as a non-traditional student if i was very lucky.
Fortunately, that didn’t come to pass as I managed to keep my GPA well above that cut-off and graduate. I say fortunately as I know of a few kids from my old neighborhood along with some community college friends who are struggling to work through community college and are still in school even after 3+ years and having some prior college credits.
There’s nothing from the OP that suggests living with the BF. Just an assumption that “shacking up” must be the problem.
I think you have to skip the posts where flights of fancy have occurred. All I know from the OP, her child had a decent first semester and a horrendous second semester. The child met a boy sometime during the school year. The child also lacks ‘common sense’. And, of course, she lost a merit award. I do not know if the child is ‘shacking up’. She is NOT pregnant. Her boyfriend’s values and other qualities are unknown.
OP, I’m so sorry you’re going through this. Life does happen. Chances are your child feels much worse about this than you can. Look into an appeal process if one exists but also think about whether or not your child should go back to this particular college if she did have such a bad second semester. I hate to sound like a broken record but family counseling and individual counseling may be things to try. I agree with others who mentioned such a disconnect between the frequency of your communication and the quality and accuracy of the information you were getting. I would think if you talked multiple times a week, you would have known more about what’s going on in her life, be it her physical health or her grades or her social life.
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And by the way- many posters are acting like the D and BF is the most pathological event in the world. I think most people would be delighted that their kid found a SO in college- balancing work, social life, etc. is a skill that’s needed throughout adulthood and these early college relationships are a good way to do that.
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True…but I think the feeling is that she didn’t “balance work, social life,” and school. She may have done what some kids do in college once they get a SO…spend so much time with the SO that they miss classes, sleep in, and don’t do homework.
I have to say, I’m appalled by the tone of @OldFashioned1, and the broader assumption that this girl willfully disregarded her classes and just “decided” to fail. Maybe that’s the case. Or maybe she was having a health crisis and trying to manage it on her own, had borderline grades in her classes and then flunked the finals. Or maybe she honestly didn’t know where she stood in her classes, because everything is curved at the end (maybe less likely in non-technical classes, but definitely happens in math, science, and engineering courses). If you’re at or just beating the average on tests in such classes, and then a bunch of people drop the class, guess what – you’re now at the bottom of the distribution. Or maybe she was raped. Or, or, or. Please, let’s not jump to so many conclusions … none of that his helpful to OP.
@OldFashioned1, to hear you speak, anyone who makes a “catastrophic error” might as well just go crawl in a hole and die. That’s not helpful. Nobody is saying there are not consequences for things like this … if OP’s D does lose the scholarship, for whatever reason, her life will be unalterably different and very likely much more difficult than if she’d done well in school and kept her scholarship. And that is regardless of what her parents do or don’t do at this point. Even if she doesn’t lose the scholarship, working your way off probation and digging out of a GPA hole is no easy feat. But that doesn’t mean her life is over. And that doesn’t mean her parents shouldn’t help her in finding whatever the new path needs to be. That may or may not mean financial support, depending on the situation. There is a time to mourn the “could have been,” both for the parents and OP’s D, but there is also a time to move on and find plan B … and do the best you can with that.
Shacking up doesn’t mean living with full time, it means sleeping with and likely overnights. But don’t worry OP, someone on a forum shared a 1 in a million anecdote about a loser bf going to med school, so I’m sure it’ll all be fine.
What does illegitimate mean?
I have no idea how this thread went from the OP’s statement that her D “got a boyfriend” to the assumption that she is “shacking up”.
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Easy there. We don’t know she’s doing any of that either.
It went there because she’s failing and lost her scholarship. Do you think she’s failing because her and the new bf are devoting their day and nights to the local soup kitchen?
@oldfashioned1, it is entirely possible that the bf had nothing to do with it. We really just don’t know.
I don’t think the DD has ruined her life. There are lots of do-over opps when it comes to education and careers.
She isn’t sitting in jail after an armed robbery at the local bank. Now THAT would be hard to later over-come.
I do suspect that the BF/social life was likely a distraction…because that often happens in college. The mom has told us that she talked to her DD daily and she believes that the BF/social life was a problem. Likely, during those convos, when the DD was NOT mentioning bad grades, she was mentioning things like: “Bob and I did XXXXX today.” Enough of those mentionings might suggest that there was little attention spent on school.
It is an old fashioned way to refer to a child born out of wedlock. It is a synonym to a word that is now commonly used as an insult, even though the literal meaning may be more insulting to the parents in situations where having a child out of wedlock is frowned upon.
Actually, spending too much time on an outside activity could be just as detrimental to academic performance as having sex. Maybe more so. Sex doesn’t take as much time.