We gave S many options on cars. He initially wanted a Prius. We said “no”. We discussed small SUV’s (safety), he said “no”. We met in the middle on an accord. He doesn’t care about cars. He will be in DC in fall and I’m thrilled no car necessary. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ever needs/wants a car again.
I like their generation.
I didn’t have a car till I was 30, but I’m a little weird that way. I was living on a grad student stipend and it was the easy way to save money. I could walk to anywhere I needed to be. I have had a license since I was 16 and rented cars a couple of times.
I agree. My nieces both attended a university that tended to have a significant turnover in advisors. Often they would be lacking in information. My sister helped both her daughters with the balanced and intricate scheduling they needed. Oldest niece double majored and earned a teaching credential all in four years while the younger daughter graduated from nursing school also on time. Both benefited greatly from my sister’s involvement in scheduling. In fact, the older one would have had more school had she followed her original advisor’s incorrect advice.
I don’t think helping in this way is necessarily helicoptering. College is expensive and parents often bear the brunt of the costs. Some involvement isn’t always bad.
Our S must be an outlier. To him every purchase is looked at like an investment. His reality is so much different than mine starting out. Thanks to his summer internships he has the funds to start out very differently. Example: originally he was going to rely on CA public transportation (which is very good where he will be living) but due to the virus he has now decided to buy a car. He wants smaller, with lots of safety features. After much research and test driving he’s down to a BMW 330i or 430i. Again, he’s starting out in much different circumstances than I did.
A BMW doesn’t seem like an investment to me unless he’s in a career where he has to maintain an image. But it’s nice he can start out like that! I started out on a shoestring and have been living like it ever since. I stay away from expenditures that don’t hold value, like cars.
His take is that with what he had budgeted he optimized his selection by safety features, reliability, and yes style. My main point is that some recent graduates are moving directly into careers that allow for many more choices than I (for example) had.
I help my older daughter make her course schedules as well. She has had minimal advising, no advising, and even flat out wrong advising- I researched her requirements as my sole attention and was able to make the schedule that best allowed her to meet her goals, which were slightly more than meeting minimum requirements. She asked and I was happy to oblige. My younger daughter will have a different experience altogether- her classes in her major are cohorted, and she will go in with most of her gen eds already done. I can’t imagine she’ll ever need me to help her with anything regarding her schedule. I’m happy either way- I just want to make sure they’re advised appropriately to be on track for their goals. Yes, I could’ve let my older daughter sink or swim on her own, but between gen eds, two majors, outside areas of interest, and wanting to be prepped for a full junior year abroad she had a lot to consider and I was glad she knew herself to know she was overwhelmed and wanted help.
I think this is totally appropriate. After all, if you’re paying for any of her college expenses, you want to make sure that she is on track to graduate. And the fact is that most kids get financial help from their parents for college. My attitude has been that I have every right to know that my money isn’t being wasted, and that the student is making appropriate steady progress towards graduation.
I helped DD’19 with course selection her first semester- she thought she wanted a double major and I knew she would have to make every course count. She and her advisor had a misunderstanding about exactly which major she was trying for, and I made her go back during her first week of school to change to a class that would count.
By now she has a better handle, and she’s dropped the second major, but now the goal is to graduate a semester early, so she still lets me know what she signed up for. She’s doing fine. I did discover during the last school year that her major got revamped to allow more freedom in course selection so we talked about that together and perused the catalog for options.
I would suggest that you’re looking at a representative sample of neither 18-year-olds nor 22-year-olds, and I would further question whether you actually have causal evidence.
For one anecdote, I was a messed-up enough kid at 17 to flunk out of college. By 22 I was together enough to be on my way to finishing up having a 4.0 in my major coursework, and targeting which graduate schools to apply to.
Yeah, I’m just one person, but you’ll excuse me for having a hard-earned skepticism of a claim that there’s a straight line to be drawn from the beginning of a student’s college experience to its end.
As an international student/parent, I have a slightly different perspective. I don’t believe in hovering over my son’s every decision; I steadfastly believe they need to figure out certain things on their own as part of the transition to adulthood. The distance, however, does mean that certain things need to be taken care of upfront.
We will probably manage our S21’s drop off pretty much the same way my parents did it 30 years ago. It was a long trip and they decided to make a trip of it (even bringing along my grandfather at the last minute, but not my siblings). We got to my college a few days early to buy stuff I would need, set up a local bank account and figure out the phone situation (which my roommate and I ended setting up). I remember that during our student orientation there was a day of sessions for parents, as well as some sessions for the internationals. Once my dorm room was set up, they left the following day.
I can’t imagine writing to a college prof or adviser…unless it’s some unforeseen emergency/crisis.
Great post. My rising junior
Boiler attended STAR day ALONE! We live three hours away and my only concern was him driving back and forth in one day. Fortunately he stayed overnight with his uncle in Indianapolis. I don’t feel like I missed anything.
I must say that I am enjoying the different perspectives shared on this thread. There are so many different ways that parents “help” their children and the common thread from my perspective is that most parents are doing what they think is best, which is all any parent can do. For my own household, it may be different from most because of our unique circumstances (both of my college students are both financially independent of my wife and I while they are at school). So they both have a large amount of autonomy that spills over to every portion of their lives. But it doesn’t bother me at all that some parents are more involved because we all get to do things the way we want with our kids and our young adults mature at different rates.
Yes, this reminds me of the best parenting advice I ever received: If It Works, Do It.
Whatever works for you – if everyone is happy and healthy and doing well – do it! Whether it is co-sleeping or putting your baby on a schedule, or having no schedule, or going vegetarian, or paying kids for grades, or making a party out of dropping off your college freshman, or sending them off to college alone with a suitcase on a cross country flight . . . if it works for you and your family, do it!
And it probably doesn’t matter WHAT you do, your adult kids will find fault with some of it…
Quote taken out of context, but it triggered a thought: Some of the ways we help our own children are invisible to ourselves. This can be a problem, because in discussions like this one there’s a tendency to feel like the things we notice are out of bounds, while the things we don’t notice are simply natural and beyond reproach.
A case study: CC attracts a very nonrepresentative sample of parents—the parents here tend to be (in general!) parents with a lot of academic cultural capital. These are people who are raising their children to understand how higher education works, not (solely, though I would suggest the right word is “largely”) because they’re actively doing so, but because that’s the culture they’re a part of.
So yeah, you might think that all the siblings and grandparents coming to help with move-in is out of bounds. But you know what? For them, you having your kid take SAT prep classes or take a lot of practice ACT exams may seem overbearing, or carefully weighing extracurricular activities on a scale of what would look good on a college application may seem soulsucking, or talking about their college essays with them might seem like cheating.
Basically, if you think other parents are doing things wrong, you know what? They are. And so are you.
And in a world where everybody is doing it wrong, that’s actually kind of a huge clue that there is no actual right way.
I think how you act and treat other people is a much better indicator of maturity then what and when you do things. Sure, some kids are fully independent at 19, but more importantly are they nice people? Do they have have good manners? I’d say that’s a lot more important.
I’m not saying coddle your kids, but I do think we focus on the wrong things sometimes…
I just helped my college grad daughter who is starting grad school in August. She thought she had a box of huge, heavy art history books ‘somewhere’ and I knew where they were (because I’ve had to move them several times from shelf to shelf).
She thinks I’m a genius and just ‘saved her hundreds of dollars’ because when she can’t find something she just buys another one. In that way, she’s NOT my child (I will look for the original for years before buying another)
My kids have had good manners and treated people nicely since they were 4 years old, as I valued those traits. That has little to do with maturity, and it is quite possible to raise nice, well-mannered adults who are also independent and capable.
My 30 year old is here helping ME after an injury. Independence is a great goal but it is also nice to know we can depend on each other when things are tough. My kids knew they could depend on me but I also stayed out of their way as much as needed. Now the tables are turned!