To regularly collect and actually look at their physical mail. In college their mail may not be convenient (like it was at home) and they can’t ignore important things like jury duty notices.
Make sure you give him so vitamins , supplements and over the counter drugs. So he knows what to take when flu, or headache hits. When my son was ill with a bad flu, without the doc (it was close to finals time), he recovered in a few days.
I agree to the above. Give them a tutorial on basic meds. My kids were always very healthy and hardy in their younger years, so were unclear on what common symptoms meant (eg. how to know if it’s a cold or seasonal allergy) and what over the counter medicine would be appropriate for them to take for a fever or a certain type of pain or discomfort.
Posters are claiming that college students need advice on ordering food “over the telephone,” knowing where to buy a lab notebook, and can’t use Google to figure out what to take for a cold?
Make sure he has an Uber account for transportation beyond the local public or buddy services and understands how much it can be used and under what circumstances. Uber Eats, Favor, Amazon, NetFlix, and online banking have made my kiddos more independent, faster. They’ve got my MIL requesting online food orders now. LOL! I’m also shopping alone as the mother of a son, but I gave him a box and he is collecting everything in his room ahead of packing.
We will fly in for the last orientation and do some light stock up shopping at Walmart. I try to explain why I buy certain things when I shop with my children so they understand price per unit and where they can save money.
NO NO NO! The parent’s SSN is not used as the account number. It is illegal for the insurance company to do that. I don’t even allow my kids to give their own SSN to doctors and dentists and they certainly aren’t giving mine out. There is no need for that information to be in a doctor’s file.
The biggest source for filing false tax returns is getting them from dentist offices. An employee who has been there for a short time gathers up as many names, addresses and SSN as he can and then sells them.
My daughter does write one check per month, but only started that junior year as she moved off campus. She pays the mother of one roommate who then writes checks to the landlord and the utilities. The bank gives her a few sheets of checks for free that last a year.
Thanks for all the tips! BTW, how often does your child check in with you freshmen year? Daily? Weekly?
A discussion about sex and permission etc…
Also your expectations as to grades (especially if you are paying for college)
My kids checked in once a week freshman fall and then it tapered off to once every two weeks unless we were in the middle of something like transportation home or they needed something or I needed something.
I cannot think of one time when they needed my social security number. The one thing I didn’t know was they would need a birth certificate or passport for their job and had forgotten about the fed requirements and I had to send that FedEx for the first one.
Our D, who is now a junior, still texts us often if she has questions. She flies between college and home and has never had a car, so the Uber account is vital, although she can rely on some friends at college for rides.
She has a frequent flyer account in her own name for two different airlines, although I try to book all of her flights on the same air carrier and mostly use my award miles to book her tickets. We use award miles to book tickets for her to and from college as one way trips and if you need to change them, the change fees are usually less than if you purchased them, especially if you have elite status with an airline. We also got her a Known Traveler Number so she can qualify for TSA PreCheck. She has qualified for TSA PreCheck on every flight she has taken between home and college and it’s a timesaver.
We made sure she has the airline apps on her phone as well as a major hotel chain app, too. There is an Amtrak station near her campus and she has taken several Amtrak trips on school breaks, so we made sure she opened an Amtrak Guest Rewards account in her own name and has an Amrak app as well on her phone.
We had her open a charge account in her own name at a department store closest to her campus where she can buy things she needs. This will minimize her need to carry cash and also helps build her credit history, even with the very modest spending limit they give.
I also gave her a credit card as an additional one on my account with the understanding that if she abuses it, it will be cut off. So far, she has used it responsibly and lets me know when she makes purchases on it.
I opened a joint bank account for our daughter and me, and she carries an ATM/debit card for it. I can see her transactions online and in the event she has an emergency and needs cash, I can electronically move funding into that account for her to access. She also has her paychecks from her Summer job direct deposited into it.
Although our D’s college has an on-campus medical clinic, sometimes they are backed up or refer students to off-campus physicians. Our D is still covered by my medical plan so I made sure she understood how it works before she went to school and knew where to go to get prescriptions filled or refilled.
We flew with our daughter when she started her freshman year, we helped her move into her dorm room, and we attended the parent orientation while she attended the new student orientation program. We pre-ordered bedding, pillows, towels, etc. for her dorm room to be picked up at a Bed, Bath, and Beyond near her campus the day we arrived. We also purchased lamps and some in-room storage units and a bedside table for her at a local store.
Her college has an arrangement with a local storage company that will come on campus during finals week of the Spring term and provide boxes and packing tape. Students and/or visiting parents can pack the stuff to be stored, and the company will pick up the stuff and store it for the Summer at their warehouse. When she returns for the Fall term, they deliver her stuff to her new dorm room. Of course, we pay for this, but it’s much more convenient than having to transport everything back and forth or trying to make local storage arrangements on your own. No need for her to bring cold weather clothes home for her Summer breaks, either.
@sleeplessmom1 communication frequency seems to vary greatly as per reports on this website. Communication with our daughter evolved in the early month or two of freshman year. We thought we would Skype video quite frequently, but it turned out to be difficult because she was in a quad (one very packed room) with no privacy, and because we live in Asia, a radical time zone difference to contend with. We tended to text on Skype instead and it just became a daily thing that continues to this day.
I was just talking with my soon to be 1st year student DS about going far away from home and asked that he occasionally and randomly send me a selfie. He thought it would be fun.
@TQfromtheU ^^ I love this idea, and I am making my formal request tonight 
Time Management is a very important part of preparation for college. The rhythm of daily activity in college is totally different from the typical high school. The discussion here has focused to far on management of money/banking, laundry, etc. Great emphasis should be given also to healthcare and healthy living. But let me talk about time management.
High school usually has a fixed schedule, roughly 8 AM - 3 PM classes (7 hours, minus 1 hr lunch), EC’s after school. Homework in evening, weekends. That’s approximately 30 hours in classes, maybe 40-45 (or more for some activities) with EC’s added.
College, with a typical 15-credit hour schedule, might involve 15-20 hours in class/labs per week. On any given weekday, it might involve 3 or 4 1-hour a scheduled classes (lectures, recitation), perhaps longer labs. There’s often open time between classes, and overall much less time spent in classes during the week. When does one do one’s homework, reading, practicing, etc.?
When I was preparing to head off to college, I read in a book that estimated that a student should plan to devote 2 to 3 hours to study and preparation for every 1 hour in class. A (overly) simple implication is that if one has a 15-credit hour schedule, one should expect to spend 30-45 hours on COURSEWORK outside of class. That would imply a 45-60 hour “work-week.”
How to manage that? One key implication is that students cannot defer all reading and research and other prep to the evenings and weekends. They need to use some kind of “daily planner” type of calendar to schedule homework between classes or at least during daytime, not deferring it all to weekends. After all, weekends are also meant for R&R, not just studying. So students should schedule reading time, library time or wherever during the day, between classes. “Curricular” needs to come before “Extracurricular.”
I attended a college with a very demanding work load. There were times when I was stretched and even overwhelmed. One was during the second semester of freshman year, when my chem professor (this was yearlong course) suggested that based on my excellent performance in that course (and the decent chance that I might end up majoring in chemistry) I might want to add another chem course (quantitative analysis) to my schedule. For a variety of reasons this turned out to be a time-sink, and it hurt my performance not so much in chem but in other courses (e.g., math) where I needed to devote more time to master concepts and methods,* as well as my core courses in the humanities.
But I did succeed (after declaring a different major), went on to PhD, etc. Had I not been good at scheduling my time – even without the overload – it would have been a very messy outcome.
To make a long story short: time management and planning is essential in college. Most of your “work” hours are on your own. Yes, there are 168 clock hours in a week. But you need to organize your time.
- My brother, who was attending Caltech, was using the same calculus textbooks that I was. He was a mathhead, I was good in math but not in his "class." I needed to spend more hours on this material than I had available, especially when I added that extra chem course.
I will admit to being guilty of helping manage his time. He has thus far refused to use any type of planner to schedule
homework and studying. His high school did have an online homework planner BUT even the teachers were guilty of not using it consistently. My big fear is that I will receive a call from him in the middle of the night crying that he “forgot” to study for a test. He will only be signing up for 3 courses this fall so hopefully, it will help ease him into his new schedule. To be honest, I don’t recall having a planner in college and I did fine.
Time management might be one of those area where the input of outsiders can reach a child better. I’ve yapped on and on about how to schedule a student’s day to get work done and leave some free time but can’t tell if any of it got through.
I’m thankful that DS’s school has a summer prep program that will include time management. I’m not going to be calling to tell him to turn in his work. DS knows this and he will have to deal with any consequences. (He always does his work. Thank goodness more work is submitted online these days.)
He needs to know his alcohol tolerance, especially if he did not party in high school. Lots of kids get to college and end up in over their heads. So have a talk or two about drinking, even if you think he won’t be doing any.
Make sure he knows the symptoms of meningitis, acute alcohol poisoning and drug overdose, and never gets in a car with somebody who has been drinking. Everything else he’ll eventually figure out even if you forget to mention it.
Managing time is something that cannot be stressed enough. We’ve given up on the planner approach (too old school?) so we just stressed to do things as soon as possible and not to procrastinate. All of his classes list the average time required for psets and friends talk about which classes require even more time.
Between texting, cell calls, skype, and FaceTime we connect regularly. A testament to technology: recently my wife made a FaceTime call to son from Beijing while he was walking back to his dorm from a class!