My daughter moved in 3 days ago and is now freaking out, am i handling this the right way?

@RayB78. If her emotions were up and down senior year then that was the clue. If you can go a day earlier and call and schedule an appointment with both of you at their mental health facility/counseling center. . She is giving you the clues that people are asking to go out and she doesn’t want to. She wants to be happy but can’t. Mood swings. She is not mulipulating you. She has an issue and is telling you she needs help. The clues were there senior year and with the pressure of college they are just manifestating themselves.

Call the counseling center today and speak to someone today and see what course of action they suggest.

I am sorry your dealing with this.

This is not just adjusting to college. I would do this together and not her alone.

There are a lot of gems in the above posts. What sticks out for me are the pieces that bring her into the process: she is the one who is struggling and she is the one who needs to learn how to do self-care. You are there to help her as she transitions to doing it for herself.

So, if she doesn’t want to go to the wellness center by herself, or make an appointment with a local counselor by herself, you can help her do that- for now. You can go with her to that first appointment. Note that either of those can be an offer or a directive!

But the point is to say to her that you are in the process of passing her the baton in the relay of her life, You can - and will!- practice the handover with her. You can- and will!- support her through it. But, over time, she can -and will!- learn how to do the things she needs to take care of herself.

Be clear that you have confidence in her ability to do this, and equally clear that if something isn’t working the way it should, you call in people with more expertise, whether it’s a mechanic, a teacher, a doctor, a counselor- whatever. And it doesn’t have to be “that bad” to make it worth going.

Because while we have all taken the car in for a rattle that turns out to be something stuck in the wheel well, or rushed an infant into the pediatrician only to find that the full-body rash is actually just heat rash*, at least those things were sorted- and better safe than sorry. And, we have all also had the opposite experience: of being very glad that we went in when we did. Like when telling the doctor about a hypersensitive adolescent was worth the wrath of said adolescent, as it led to the discovery of an easily managed allergy., or insisting the college student go to the doctor for a persistent cough that led to the discovery of a tumor that was still treatable- but would not have been 6 months later.

This launching of fledglings is a funny sort of dance between holding on and letting go- like when they learned how to ride a bike.

*I wish these were not real examples