how much communication should I expect from my son

<p>S1 is going to be freshman.</p>

<p>how much communication should I expect from him? It's less emotional than practical. I trust him almost absolutely: very responsible, independent and resourceful kid. We so far have a very open communication with him and we have a very good relationship.</p>

<p>However, I wouldn't be surprised at all if once he is in this new exciting environment, parents may be a distant second priority. if he does not call us for this reason, well, no problem. It's perfectly understandable. However, if I do not hear from him for a while, how much "for a while" is a "while" enough that I should start worrying about some potential mishaps. </p>

<p>I welcome both parents AND STUDENT input.</p>

<p>Thanks in advance</p>

<p>I’m not a student (still in high school unfortunately) but I would say that before you head up to Chicago for move in, you should lay down a ground rule that he call minimum of once a week. Once a week is really no big deal, and its understandable for parents to want to be in contact with their children. In fact, you have a right to talk to him at least once or twice a week if you’re shelling out $50,000 for him a year! He can’t complain over once a week. If he calls more, then great. But remember, this IS college, part of the process is to become more independent, so calling too much (2-3 times a day, every day) probably wouldn’t be too good.</p>

<p>When I go off next year I’m gonna advocate the same thing to my parents (and my mom is really protective of me). She’ll probably want me to call ever time I walk across a street, but I draw the line at 4 times a week.</p>

<p>I call my parents maybe twice a week max. No ground rules needed. If they want to talk, they call and I’m willing to talk. Not a big deal.</p>

<p>Your son will probably call 3-4 times a week at first, especially if he’s never lived away from home. Before I came to Chicago, I went to a residential high school so my parents were already used to speaking to me only a few times a week.</p>

<p>Our communication with S comes in fits and starts. We’ll have an extended email conversation over a day or so, then not hear anything for a while. We tend to initiate, though S is good about talking once we get him on the phone. </p>

<p>We did insist that he forward us anything official, so we can make sure things are paid, set in motion, etc. so that we don’t incur late fees.</p>

<p>I did have to remind him early on that we would be less intrusive and nosy if he made the effort to contact us regularly…</p>

<p>S calls when he’s happy and when he’s sad. I like to talk to him at least once a week, but mother gets to talk to him more often because she handles the phone at the office. I look up the webcam at Bartlett Quad (it’s not working now) and sometimes wake him up with the good news that the Sun is out and the snow has been cleared from the walkways. You can usually see the crews working between 6 and 7 am.</p>

<p>We speak with S1 at least once a week and text more often than that about a range of things. Text messaging is a good way to keep in contact, pass along quick anecdotes, and is asynchronous. We also, from time-to-time, do a video chat using our Macs via iChat, but the same can be done with Skype.</p>

<p>Once I settled into a routine at school, I found I was so mentally stimulated most of the time that walking to/from class, the times I was by myself, was frightfully dull… and so fell into a pattern of ringing home whenever walking alone. My parents got the day-to-day feel of things through these 5- or 10-minute daily or every-other-day (or so) calls, with longer calls from my dorm room when there was something especially exciting, dire, or otherwise important… every 2 weeks at least, probably averaging about 6 times a month. Until I got settled, though, it was really sporadic - O-Week, in particular, was so completely overscheduled and overwhelming for me that all my free time was spent just trying to process, and calls from home got little across, as I remembered only a small portion of what had happened anyhow (they’ve gotten better about giving you free time during orientation since mine 4 years ago, so this may not be as much of an issue anymore).</p>

<p>That said, my boyfriend maybe talks to his mother once every 2-3 weeks, when she can get him to. It’s not that he’s avoiding her or that they are not close - he’s just so focused on the other stuff he’s doing, he kind of forgets during times they’d both have free, and of course misses many of her calls due to activities. And then I know kids who call home for an hour every day! It really varies from student to student.</p>

<p>I think at least once a week is a good rule-of-thumb, though. Everyone generally has some sort of free time at some decent hour on the weekend, and a week’s worth of news is enough to be worth telling (I found myself calling home for lengthy calls too often at first, such that when something big happened it became difficult to report, because of course nothing was wrong when I called just a day ago!) without being so long you’ve forgotten important events. Students will complain because their parents called, worried they had not heard from them in 36 hours… but I do not think I’ve ever heard someone upset their parents were worried when they had not heard from them in a week!</p>

<p>Here’s how it works for me: </p>

<p>My dad, brother, and I are all tethered to our e-mails, and we fire e-mail rounds at each other about twice a week. These e-mails have absolutely nothing to do with personal stuff, but we share YouTube links, Borowitz Report articles, stuff from reddit, crossword puzzle clues, and trivia questions. Believe it or not, this connection is vital to keeping me feeling in the loop-- even if it just gives me a laugh or something to think about. I look forward to our banter, our inside jokes, and our bashing each other. </p>

<p>About once every 1.5 weeks I send an extended e-mail home, detailing the neat things that happened to me that week. These e-mails are not that emotional.</p>

<p>About once or twice a year I call them-- I call them when I’m either very, very,very happy or very, very very sad.</p>

<p>One of my friends communicates with his parents primarily through text messages. Another one of my friends calls home about twice a day. Another calls about once a month and talks for about 3 hours.</p>

<p>So I would say that all families are different, but it’s important to let your child set up the terms of interaction. No news is good news.</p>

<p>Yes, families are different, kids are different, and different times mean different amounts and forms of communication.</p>

<p>One of my kids is really good about responding to e-mails, the other not, although he will text more often. Both tend to phone (or to return calls) when they have some distance to walk and no one to walk with them. Sometimes that doesn’t happen frequently, and sometime it does. We often went a week or more without hearing from either child, although if things are happening we can hear from both multiple times in a day.</p>

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<p>Same as my daughter! She’s been close to her parents, so we’d hear from her several times per week, usually less on weekends when she was really busy.</p>

<p>We parents need to remember that college is a very busy place. As others have said, our kids don’t have much time alone. When they’re with others, they won’t want to talk.</p>

<p>One thing we started doing quite a bit was IMing. Once I got a google chat account going, I’d get snippets quite a bit more - IMing works when they’re in places like the library where a phone call would be inappropriate. It is also a good way to schedule a call.</p>

<p>No doubt he’ll get carried away, so I wouldn’t be unduly worried about a lack of calls. Two to three times a week seems reasonable. I went to a three week program at a university last year and me parents made me call twice a day, which was absolutely maddening. For his sake, don’t burden him with junk like that.</p>

<p>I call my parents once a week. If things get really busy and I can’t call, I’ll e-mail. You can’t expect him to adhere to a schedule you set up during O-Week; things will start getting busy quickly and that schedule will quickly no longer be practical.</p>

<p>I’ve noticed that S also calls when he’s on his way to lunch. B-J has poor reception – or so he says – so I guess he feels like he can call without being on the phone interminably. “Gotta go, Mom, I’ve gotta get lunch before class and I’m going to lose —” </p>

<p>There are definitely times when we call him where we can tell he’s not in a place where he can talk. OTOH, I got three emails from him today about an upcoming presentation! It’s great when they start to come back and seek your advice…and it is a reminder to me to hold my tongue (or keystrokes) and not push too hard for info.</p>

<p>BJ does actually have poor reception. My family would complain all the time when I would walk through the courtyard/stairwell while on the phone with them! Reception within BJ rooms themselves varies - as long as I stayed near the windows of my various rooms over the 4 years I was there, things tended to be ok, but in some friends’ rooms there was definitely enough interference that my phone wouldn’t even pick up if a call was coming in.</p>

<p>Also complaint-worthy was the noise of the wind against the mouthpiece whenever I crossed the Midway. Got much better at cupping the phone in such a manner as to remedy that over the course of my time there, though.</p>