<p>Parents on this forum are so clingy. Some of the stuff I’ve read in the parent’s cafe is appalling - if your kids are in college then their lives and what they do with them are not your concern (yes, even if you pay the fees). If you must worry, do so quietly. You’re doing them a disservice by being so controlling.</p>
<p>I usually neglect to tell my parents if I’m going abroad, and even if I did they certainly wouldn’t worry about me. I’d laugh in their face if they asked me to call them everyday and hell would freeze over before they offered to accompany me.</p>
The very opinion I myself would have…if I had no money, but thought I should still get to do whatever the hell I liked, on somebody else’s dime, with nobody telling me what to do.</p>
<p>We have a self supporting 23 year old daughter, with a lot of responsibility at work. She lives 2500 miles away from us. Last night she called to tell me she was going out of town to meet up with her friends and staying with her BF. We spoke about how she felt about her job and she asked me for my opinion what direction she should go. She said she would call me when she is back at her apartment. </p>
<p>Not sure if we are treating her like a baby since we are not bankrolling her, or she just likes to keep in touch because we like each other.</p>
<p>Hard for me to understand why someone you have lived with for 18+ years wouldn’t continue to have contact with you.</p>
<p>But how often does she have those conversations with you? A career change is a big deal that one might discuss with one’s parents. I wouldn’t discuss it with mine (they wouldn’t know what I’m talking about), but I can understand. But if she is consulting you about every little thing in her life, that is a bit odd imho.</p>
<p>But, keep, you are the one who made a huge–and I suspect, unwarranted–leap of the imagination in this thread.</p>
<p>The OP asked what people think about having his or her mother and sister along during a six-week study-abroad experience in Australia. Virtually everybody agrees, that’s not a good idea.</p>
<p>Somehow, you have made the leap to all parents being controlling, infantilizing micromanagers of their children’s lives. Somehow, you have developed the idea, and asserted it here, that an 18-year-old who doesn’t pay his or her own expenses is still an autonomous adult who shouldn’t have to answer to the parents who are still providing financial support. And that, I contend, is every bit as preposterous as the idea that Mom and Sis should just hang around for the first week or two of the OP’s Australia experience.</p>
<p>*Adulthood *does not mean answering to no one; neither does independence. In most families, people do keep each other apprised of their comings and goings. If I am going to be out later than expected, I telephone my wife. Is that because she’s a helicopter spouse? No. It’s because it’s the considerate thing to do. If I am going to make a major purchase with the family’s money, I confer with my wife, because she deserves a say in how the family’s money is deployed. And if my 18-year-old is going to deploy over a hundred thousand of the family’s dollars on college expenses, she has a duty not to waste it, and we have a right to see that she doesn’t. And as for your assertion that paying college-age children’s education expenses is somehow coddling them? I don’t think most 18- to 22-year-olds have the kind of money that a college education costs. I know that my kid would have to sell an awful lot of cocaine to come up with that kind of scratch.</p>
<p>She has those conversations with me whenever she is contemplating a change, and because we talk often, I could always detect when something is not right. She won’t necessary tell me about what’s going on with her BF, but if there is something overall about him that she is not happy about, she would say something to me. Similar with her job, she may not tell me everything little thing which happens at work, but if there is something overall which bothers her, she would discuss it with me. I normally wouldn’t offer my opinion (especially when it comes to my kids’ BFs) unless they asked for it. </p>
<p>Not to say we have perfect relationship, but as I said before, we enjoy spending time together whenever possible, and it just getting to be more far and in between. To D1, it is not strange for her to take part of vacation time to visit us or take few days off to get her sister settled at her summer program/college move in day.</p>
<p>D said “If parents choose to bankroll their kids (a mistake in my view) that still does not give them the right to treat them like babies.”</p>
<p>Your using a rhetorical fallacy to muddy the issue. There’s a huge difference between consulting on major issues and “treat them like babies.” and no one here has suggested it’s prudent for the OPs mom to go on the trip.</p>
<p>I don’t know where you’re getting that because I didn’t say hardly any of those things. Did I say that paying college-age kids’ expenses is somehow coddling them, for example? I don’t think so. Please apologise.</p>
<p>To your broader point: yes, everyone agrees that the mum going to Australia is a bad idea. I was mostly responding to the (almost as wacky) idea that:</p>
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<p>As far as paying for college meaning that you have some say… that’s a tough one. I happen to think the American system where parents are expected to pay for their adult children’s expenses is a stupid one. I think it is fair to lay down conditions at the start: something like, I’ll pay this much, for that school, so long as you don’t drop out and keep a certain gpa etc. </p>
<p>But I think it’s dubious to intervene any more than that, for example in choice of major or extracurriculars, or wanting to babysit on study abroad.</p>
<p>American college tuition is a lot higher than most other countries. I don’t think there is any 18 year who could afford 45K tutition, unless he/she has a trust fund. When my kid studied at Sydney U, her one semester tuition was 10K less than her college in the States and she was paying the international student rate. In the States, unless parents pay, it is very hard for a student to afford it on his own.</p>
<p>I for one, do not see anything wrong with parents going with the student in the beginning or visiting later on, as long as it is something both parties would enjoy.</p>
<p>Virtually everyone I know who studied abroad in college had a parent or sibling visit them at some point during their stay - it’s a great excuse to travel/visit a new place and see the sights while having fun with your kid/sister/brother. My parents would absolutely have come to visit me and help me set things up like oldfort did for her D in Australia - let’s face it, if your parents are paying for it, they’re pretty much entitled to at least one visit! Also - I happen to like spending time with my parents. Shocker, I know!</p>
<p>Several posters on here are not American, and I think that’s also where the differences lie - Europeans think way differently about this sort of thing. My dad’s whole side of the family is from the UK, and when my cousin and two of her friends decided to tour around the States on greyhound buses at ages 18/19, her parents didn’t bat an eye. My parents would NEVER have let me travel the country with two friends at that age b/c of the being young, female, and pretty dang vulnerable factors. Doesn’t mean that my cousin’s parents don’t care about her safety or that my parents are clingy/too overly involved- it’s just a different mentality stemming from cultural differences, imo.</p>
<p>Agree, and this is getting to be a silly conversation because we are all coming from different places (literal, social, emotional). I’m sure everyone agrees that too much doting is bad. There is disagreement on how much rope parents should give to their adult children. Individual circumstances largely define this. Ie some kids have mental health issues, minor or major, and would benefit from more supervision, often. It all depends.</p>
<p>Agreed, and it is this that I think is terrible. The US system of ‘charge really high tuition, and then have an ugly patchwork of grants and loans’ just doesn’t seem to work. It makes adult children really dependent on their parents well into their 20s, and it makes the whole thing so angsty.</p>
<p>I’m not talking about he OP’s situation; I was making a general observation about what I’ve seen parents say on this forum.</p>
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<p>UK universities are more expensive than American public universities. And because British universities do not offer financial aid to poorer students, we end up paying rather a lot more than many people at even the most expensive American colleges. Nearly all British students take out loans to pay for this, there’s no reason American students couldn’t do likewise.</p>
<p>^ Dionysus, careful. The UK has a very good student loan system, that guarantees that loans are sensible, and are paid back at a reasonable rate through the tax system.</p>
<p>The US has nothing like this - it’s more like taking out a giant mortgage.</p>
<p>Out-of-state at many American public unis will also cost you more than $25k per year in tuition. That’s a whole lot more than even the most expensive English unis.</p>
<p>Oxford annual tuition is 9000 pound, 15,000USD. Most private schools in the US are 35K-45K. Rutgers for in state is 10,000k, but for out of state is 23K. U.Michigan is even higher. When D1 was at Sydney, most kids were able to commute, not in the US, and the cost of room & board could easily be 15K.</p>
<p>I have a lot of colleagues who are Brits. They all plan on sending their kids back to UK for college because they can’t afford the US college tuition.</p>
<p>Most US students also take out loans, but most people can’t afford 250K student loans.</p>
<p>They would be able to commute if they went to their local college. Not everyone, but I bet most people in the US have a college less than an hour away.</p>
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<p>They should be careful. If those kids live outside the UK, they will probably have to pay full non-EU tuition (about $25k) and won’t be eligible for loans. It’s by residence, doesn’t matter if they have a passport or not.</p>
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<p>They would be able to if the US had a sensible student loan system. In the UK, loan repayment is something like 10% of anything you earn over 15,000 GBP (until the loan is paid, of course).</p>
<p>Most of my colleagues are expats, so they do pay taxes to their home country, they are also quite savvy when it comes to finance. No different than myself, even though I live outside of US, I sitll pay federal and state taxes, and my kids would be eligible to go to our state U.</p>