<p>My kid had no desire to go far away, but the schools he liked close by either didn’t want him or were too expensive to attend. He’s going far away because that’s what he needed to do to get the best opportunity at the best price. And now I think he’s pretty stoked about it.</p>
<p>I’m not at all sure how distance became an issue here. </p>
<p>Even when students go far away for college, they often maintain close contact with parents. Modern communications technology enables this. When I was a student decades ago, my school was a mere hour from home but I did the once a week telephone in the hall bit. Far less contact than today’s students who might phone, text, skype, and e-mail.</p>
<p>Some students discuss course and major selection, roommate problems, issues with professors, and even go over paper topics and study strategy with their parents on a regular basis, if posts to this forum are to be believed. Other parents help their students find internships, co-ops, and entry level jobs. Some parents contact schools if there is a problem. Many parents on this forum are here to gather information in order to better advise their students, and ask questions on their behalf.</p>
<p>Not that this is a bad thing - each of mine made some less than optimal decisions while away at college, that have turned out to be life changing in the sense of limiting future opportunities. These might have been avoided had they consulted with us. Not every student finds a suitable mentor in college.</p>
<p>I think it is time to stop making pretend that just because a student is at the other end of the country, that they are acting independently of their family, or that a student who is commuting or living nearby but making their own decisions is somehow not taking steps towards independence. </p>
<p>Niquii77, One of my kids was also almost 3 hours from home but really only came home on school breaks and holidays. If you are coming home once or twice a month, you do have some control over that and can decrease that amount of visiting if it is not working for you.</p>
<p>@fretfulmother - WADR (I love Ricky Bobby), I’m 50 and see my parents weekly. By your definition? I’m not independent!? =)) There is a big difference between living at home and in HS, vs. being on your own in college. Distance doesn’t hinder anything anymore. If a parent is going to hover? they’ll find a way.</p>
<p>Extraction plans can be for any reason. Mostly unforeseen - but a personal experience, D’12 got mono and needed to get to a clinic. We were there to help. No different than taking my parents to the doctor. Its “family” There is nothing of value to prove to anyone you can crawl to a clinic on your own. Around here? that is what family is for. Separately, one of her friends from HS passed away unexpectedly and she was able to make the funeral and be back to school. Missing those things? doesn’t prove independence.</p>
<p>sevmom, yes, that is my plan for next year, to only come home for breaks and holidays. It was too much going back and forth. </p>
<p>The word “extraction” just makes the whole scenario funny to me. :)</p>
<p>I guess I had my own “extraction” first semester. I caught a virus that took me down (literally) overnight. I passed out in my professors office hours and my brother picked me up and drove me home. And again, same with what giterdone said, sister passed away at the start of last semester. I was able to drive back home, fly out with my family for the funeral. That’s one thing that made me fortunate for being so close. Emergencies like that. </p>
<p>Distance was not really a factor for us. S1 was looking at everything from Boston to Pasadena. He ended up 3 hours away, but his choice was more about preference for the campus itself rather than being close to home.</p>
<p>The only reason we like it better is that the logistics are easier for moving in and out. We don’t expect to see him other than for holidays and breaks, but it is nice knowing that if something does come up he can be home in 3-6 hours (depending upon if we need to go get him).</p>
<p>Putting my bossypants on, there are things parents can do to foster independence regardless of how close or distant your kid ends up. In real life I am constantly amazed at the number of college Freshman who I hear about who have never made their own dentist appointment; never called the 800 number for their bank when there was a funky service charge which didn’t belong there; never filled out a medical history at CVS in order to get a flu shot; don’t know that a doctor’s office will fax/email a prescription to a pharmacy 50 miles away if you need a refill and can’t get to the doctor’s office (or don’t need to), have never called the DMV when their driver’s license got mangled and they needed a replacement, and have never done a load of laundry or bought a tube of toothpaste or sewed a button back on a shirt.</p>
<p>Your kid can be perfectly independent a subway ride away, or your kid can have 8 year old level “life skills” living 3,000 miles away. Use the high school years to teach your kids what they need to know in order to navigate the “adult world” in college- they need to talk to Deans, haggle with the bursar over a mistake on their billing statement, cajole the housing office into opening a locked door without charging a $40 key fee, and in many colleges, learn to navigate public transportation, etc. My kids all had roommates over the years who were smart kids but totally clueless when it came to this kind of stuff. It doesn’t matter how far they go- teach them to be adults while they are still living under your roof. And hey- wouldn’t you love coming home from work to a pile of folded laundry one night???</p>
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Niquii’s score - 4 out of 8. </p>
<p>I don’t know when my next dentist’s appointment is (or any of my other appointments…). My mom tells me.
I’ve never had to call the bank. My mom does it.
I’ve never called the DMV or been there since I got my license. To be honest, I’d be extremely confused if I had to go there alone.
My freshman year was the first time I had to buy a tube of toothpaste. I felt pretty grown up doing that. </p>
<p>My take on this is that some parents may not want to let go of the reigns and are fine with their kids not learning until a later age. It may not be what is best for the child, but the parent feels the extra time is acceptable. </p>
<p>Agreed, but I also think it is good to keep communication open. Some of our children who are very independent in high school fall apart in college because they have not learned to ask for help. In some ways, those who have been carefully “helicoptered” through childhood and beyond have distinct advantages in a competitive and zero tolerance environment in which mistakes can have harsh consequences.</p>
<p>College brings on many new situations for our children. Some, even at reach schools, have never had to turn to a tutor or study very hard, let alone “prep” for SAT’s or ACT’s, even when taking a full load of AP/IB classes. Others might not know what to do if they find themselves failing a class that they never should have registered for, or a victim of a crime. Or they could find themselves unfairly accused of a transgression for the first time in their lives. They might not know where to turn if they find themselves overly stressed (much easier to make a visit to check out the situation if nearby) or need to make major changes in their course of study. Even many more mundane problems are most easily solved before they escalate.</p>
<p>As a student: </p>
<p>I moved 5000 miles away at 14 by myself and talked to my parents about once a month. I didn’t see them for an entire year. And I was perfectly fine, as were my parents after a short period of adjustment.
For college, I am moving 7000 Miles away; I will see my parents once a year for two weeks, and I will be just fine! As will they. </p>
<p>I think that sometimes, parents don’t expect enough of their children. Maybe I feel this way because I have grown up in an environment where moving into your first apartment at age 18 by yourself is considered the norm - but I truly believe that students only become mature when they actually need to. From what I have experienced, it’s more helpful in this regard to not see your parents frequently, to not talk to them all the time, and to actually live somewhere where you don’t know the customs, maybe the language, any people, or the general environment.
Of course, there are exceptions to this generalization. </p>
<p>But all in all - 18-year-olds are adults. Treat them just like you’d treat any adult and have the same expectations. Just be more lenient when they mess up because they are still beginners at this thing called adulthood. </p>
<p>@AmericanHopee - I could not agree more. Thank you for your post!</p>
<p>@nervousmom - I’m a HS teacher (and obviously also a parent). I would have little respect for a HS junior or senior who could not negotiate some of what you list, let alone a college student (!) It’s really important for students to make mistakes without being rescued. What college decision do you think would have zero tolerance? Maybe cheating, but that would be deserved and what could the parents do about it, anyway? Many students now, and virtually all students in earlier times, would have handled whatever came their way in college.</p>
<p>I believe that we handicap our children’s independence if we shield them from any kind of failure or stress. Professors, from what I hear, are even more unhappy than HS teachers to get grade complaints/intervention from parents when the student hasn’t even tried to self-advocate.</p>
<p>Let me add that I love my children so much. OF COURSE I don’t want them to be unhappy or stressed or confused. But I love them so much that I know they need to learn to become self-reliant, sometimes by just doing whatever the thing is. I also love knowing about their lives, having them tell me sentences about their day on the way home, etc. I hope they’ll keep calling, emailing, etc. forever once they leave home. But I wouldn’t presume to need to “extract” or rescue them, or worry that in normal civilization (they’re not attending college in a war-torn famine zone, thank Gd) that they couldn’t find what they needed.</p>
<p>@giterdone, attached is an article summarizing a study that appears to suggest that going farther away from home for college promotes greater intellectual self-confidence (at least among a population of Jewish women): <a href=“http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1616”>http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1616</a>.</p>
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<p>For men, distance didn’t appear to make any difference. </p>
<p>@Pepper03, parents on CC often seem to hold to a belief that what they chose to do is the only course of action and try to assert the logic behind it – e.g., I decided to send my kid to the most affordable state school and now strongly assert that there is no difference between that school and Yale or I decided to send my kid to Yale and imply that all other choices are inferior. Just take that with several grains of salt.</p>
<p>But lots of folks don’t do tha when describing what they have done and yet some parents infer, perhaps incorrectly, that because Junior is happy at Yale and getting lots out of it, that you should feel you didn’t do enough when they’ve never said such a thing. </p>
<p>Each kid is somewhat different and each parental situation is somewhat different (assets, prior biases like mine and Blossom’s that the only thing you can leave your kid with certainty is an education). Just because X made that decision, it doesn’t mean you should or should feel bad about not having done so.</p>
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<p>I don’t think that is the “normal” pattern for kids attending school far from home. My kids did not come home for Thanksgiving --that made no sense at all, as generally students only get 2 or 3 days off Thanksgiving week, and it falls only a few weeks before finals and the end of the semester. One year my daughter’s father traveled out to visit her for Thanksgiving – I think perhaps he was coordinating the Thanksgiving trip with a business trip he had scheduled around the same time.</p>
<p>My daughter never came home over spring break either. (I thought “spring break” was when kids typically go off an do fun things away from the parents). I did not plan for my son to come home spring break, but one year he surprised me and showed up on my doorstep (on his dime - as it was a surprise, I certainly didn’t buy the ticket!)</p>
<p>My daughter came home for the first summer after freshman year, but then never again – the next two summers were spent abroad, and the year she graduated she stayed in NYC (where she attended college) to start her new job. </p>
<p>Of course it’s fine if students do want to come home frequently and that’s a factor to consider along with the distance, but the point is that it is really not necessary to come home during every school break.</p>
<p>It is a good idea to check on dorm schedules, as policies differ-- at some schools dorms and/or dining facilities are shut down over breaks. It’s usually customary for Thanksgiving that students from remote areas will be invited to share the holiday with college friends whose families live nearby - I think that most parents are quite willing to host, but the student who lives far away might need to be proactive in letting the friends know that they need an invitation. </p>
<p>Interesting article, shawbridge. Not sure the takeaway is that women necessarily need to go REALLY far away to gain confidence, just that it helps to get away from the parental home. That can be done by going 100, 500, or 3000 miles away. </p>
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<p>Interesting study, and I’d love to think that my parental decisions contributed to my daughter’s confidence – but there’s a little bit of correlation vs. causation issue in this report. Does going away to school make the young woman feel more confident? Or is just that more confident women are more likely to travel farther away, even in the face of parental pressure to stick close to home.</p>
<p>I used to have a hard time keeping track of my daughter when she was 4, as she seemed to know every kid on the block and was always off on her own to play at someone else’s house. (Used to drive her dad absolutely nuts – but I ended up developing a sort of sixth sense about the whole thing).</p>
<p>She was also hopping the bus to get to the mall as a pre-teen, well in advance of the age when I had expected to give up the mommy-chauffeur role. (To my utter embarrassment, she was also rather adept at calling other kid’s moms for rides home if she couldn’t reach me or perhaps didn’t want to risk parental disapproval.)</p>
<p>So when she was traveling abroad on her own as a teenager and wanting to drive on her own to destinations hundreds of miles away as soon as she got her driver’s license – it really wasn’t much of a surprise. Opposite coast for college? I’d have to chalk that up to being one of the less interesting turn of events - though I was a little bit surprised when she informed me in no uncertain terms that I was not going to be accompanying her on the flight out for move-in day of her first week of college.</p>
<p>Confident? yes. But my guess is that it was a self-reinforcing type of confidence, that began with her own wanderlust. Perhaps a person with a more cautious or timid personality would only suffer increased anxiety if pushed too far beyond the nest for her comfort level. </p>
<p>@shawbridge people do that not only on CC! Of course not everyone does it-most do not. I take just about everything I read with a grain on salt but I appreciate your observations.</p>
<p>I have said many times on here and in life that what works for me may kill you-so there you go. </p>
<p>That is an interesting article and very thought provoking for me as my daughter is a junior and looking at colleges-I thank you for that.</p>
<p>I haven’t made a single appointment for my college kid since he went to school. I started making him schedule things as soon as he got his license and job-he knew his schedule better than I did and I felt it was time for him to take care of those things. I knew when he was supposed to go to various things and would remind him in a very helpful way to not forget to schedule them-which he often did at the beginning until he started losing the adult privileges he took for granted-he stopped forgetting pretty fast after that. I have done very little for him since he left for school-I am here to lend an ear or give advice (only if asked which is hard for me) and I did get a lot of texts of doom that first year and a couple of last minute visits-he needed them and it didn’t bother me in the least as he is a very independent kid. I don’t think rarely speaking to your parents means you are independent-nor does going to school thousands of miles away. He makes his decisions and lives with the consequences-that to me is independence.</p>
<p>I get all these different takes. Some parents teach their kids to swim by throwing them in the deep end of the pool (literally!) and they’ll argue that there is nothing wrong with that. While others try to ensure every experience results in a “soft landing” and they’ll as vigorously assert the rightness of their tactics.</p>
<p>Some kids come home once a year, others commute daily, for a myriad of reasons. Neither correlate to maturity.</p>
<p>If the presumption is; the greater the distance, the greater the self reliance? I call “hogwash” on that notion.</p>
<p>And some of have kids who jump right into the deep end of a pool whether we want them too or not. Literally. </p>
<p>Exactly. (And bringing to mind the old adage that sometimes “the strongest swimmers drown.”)</p>