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Good grief. You come on here and chastise the OP, then when someone disagrees with your post it is “hostility”, and you make some nasty personal comment. I didn’t make some nasty aside to you, I stated a disagreement.</p>
<p>Of course. YOU are stating a disagreement and I am chastising someone. I was just wondering why this thread was necessary. OP wasn’t just saying that she wouldn’t do it, but she is telling others not to do it. As a matter of fact, if you read my post, I agreed with OP, but I wouldn’t think it is necessary to expect everyone to behave the same.</p>
<p>^^^
Is this the thongs thread? You appear to be lost.</p>
<p>I would say that most people on CC tend to say “this is what we have done in my family,” whether it is taking out loans, which school to go to, but not “this is the way you must do it.”</p>
<p>There is no way I would ever log in to my child’s account ( I don’t have any of his passwords so there is no temptation) but he’s going to be away on an international school trip when most of the decisions come out and won’t be back until 3 days after they are emailed…
He’s so low key that it won’t matter…
Going back 35 years, we had open campus so with parental permission we could leave for lunch as long as we were back for our next class. I would drive home every day and check the mail waiting for the decisions. I wasn’t the only classmate who did that as well…</p>
<p>My kids gave me permission to open their college acceptance letters (all of theirs were done via the regular mail…not online). However, I did not tell the, the content of the letter unless they asked. I read it…and put it on their bed with any other mail they received.</p>
<p>Different strokes for different folks…and there is no right or wrong here. </p>
<p>I will say…I would NOT have opened those letters without my kids’ permissions.</p>
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<p>I was very uneducated about the college process years ago. I applied to one school (state flagship). It didn’t occur to me that I would not be accepted. I got my acceptance in the mail and said, “ok, yeah.” No big deal. No stressing out whatsoever. I was excited to be going to that school, but there really was no “process” at all. </p>
<p>NOT the same experience with D1 and D2. I’m very glad to have all that behind me for good.</p>
<p>My D2 is the complete “absent minded professor” type. And possibly a bit ambivalent about leaving for college next year, although she definitively rejected the suggestion of a gap year and did all the work necessary to select and apply to her colleges. But she is not interested in keeping track of when her decisions will be coming, disinterested in logging on to the portals to look, etc. She has explicitely asked me to open all college mail, check statuses, etc., and just let her know when she has to do something. This includes checking admissions status if it is online.</p>
<p>However… the fist pump/jump to touch the ceiling in the school hallway when I told her she got into her EA reach school was a sight to behold. 
But honestly, she would not say she lost anything by learning that way vs. logging on herself. Let to her own devices, she might have asked me several weeks after the decision was posted whether there had been any info from them yet…</p>
<p>So different strokes for different families (and even different kids). As D1 did indeed want to check her own, and we let her do that.</p>
<p>When I read the title of this thread, I assumed there was going to be some expert authority or study backing up the admonishment, so I understand oldfort’s reaction to it. Even though I agree with the OP, I also agree that it is a family decision that is no one else’s business. I reminds me of the threads where some posters insist that parents have no business having a say in their child’s college choice, and they usually issue the commandment in all caps: “Its THEIR choice!” So annoying.</p>
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<p>Envelope?</p>
<p>Would this be some sort of forgotten archaic technology related to extinct forms of communication?</p>
<p>Bay, heh… always followed by parent posts say, “But it is MY money”. Not looking to derail this thread at all, so back to our regularly scheduled programming (the original topic).</p>
<p>Marian, there is another thread on this envelope vs. electronic notification going on. D2 applied to 8 schools, and only 1 uses an electronic form of notification that I can tell. So at least in the LAC world, there are plenty of envelopes yet to arrive!</p>
<p>Yep, waiting on plenty of envelopes here (11!). My older D didn’t care who opened her envelopes, especially when she was out of town for days and wanted to know the results. Youngest can open her own mail, except when she is gone for a week and will want the results e-mailed to her (our phones don’t work in Europe). However, she doesn’t even know the username/passwords to any of her online portals. Schools send them, she doesn’t check her e-mail unless I tell her she needs to look at something. So yep, I have set them up and checked them to make sure they received all her application materials and let her know. Part of my secretarial duties. She checks Facebook and blackboard, but not e-mail. And I have no doubts that she will be fine on her own in college. My son never checked his e-mail in HS either, but does daily in college.</p>
<p>To each their own indeed. OP here. For my part, I don’t understand the MO of parents with thousands of posts who’ve been logging on daily for years with seemingly a sole purpose to tell kids “you can’t afford it” or wag their fingers toward what they perceive as lack of respect for elders.</p>
<p>My post was really directed to the parents on CC who are so invested in the college application process that they simply can’t hold themselves back. I’m not making this up, there are posts to that effect. If you saw that Target commercial last year, that’s what kids are missing - even those that ask their parent to do it. And it’s my right to comment on it. I personally can’t stand the posts by people saying this or that is an unnecessary topic. If you think so, feel free not to waste your valuable time commenting. (And yes, if I had close to 10,000 posts, I too might realize this topic had already been raised at some point.)</p>
<p>Finally, it’s laughable that some people open a thread on CC titled “let your child view their admission decision” expecting “data” (on what?) rather than anecdotal blather from strangers, which is the stock in trade of college confidential.</p>
<p>Search function is a wonderful thing.</p>
<p>Snowdog, nothing wrong with starting a thread on a topic discussing opinions on this. But opening it telling everyone who doesn’t do it your way that they are wrong is what is annoying.</p>
<p>Snowdog,
When you feel the urge to tell others how to parent,</p>
<p>Just…resist!</p>
<p>I can see the point of the thread but like everything in life you need to consider what works for your family.
I have one child who would be angry if someone opened the envelope or checked online. I have another who would have not opened any envelope unless we made him. He did not know a single online password. He was happy for us to open and let him know. He is still the child who calls to ask me what is his password for his bank. A third who could is easy and if she was home would want to open it herself but also if she was not going to have a computer handy wanted us to check.</p>
<p>The S of one of my friends received a large envelope in the mail over almost 2 weeks ago. Son, though it was junk mail and never opened it. Mom asked about the envelope, S said, “oh, it’s probably more junk mail.” Friday evening, mom opened the letter before tossing it out and it was an acceptance with a scholarship offer. Imagine, it mom just waited for son to eventually open the mail.</p>
<p>Parents, you know your kids. One size does not fit all. DO whatever works best in your house.</p>
<p>D’s ED decision was due at 6 pm on a Fri night. She was nervous / excited all day and wanted us (parents / brother) in the room with her waiting. She controlled the computer, but we were all right there. As it so happened, 15 minutes before go-time S checked his email, his ED came through and we all yelled, hugged and screamed - then did so again 15 min later. We fondly refer to it as “an epic day in (PG) family history” and while we didn’t open any envelopes or check any emails, we were right there. That’s how our kids wanted it. </p>
<p>I think what’s more important than a blanket pronouncement is that parents - student should be aligned. If for some family, kid is at an activity and prefers mom to check and call him, no skin off my back.</p>
<p>I was one of those parents who insisted on my son having a special college applications only e-mail address (and I had the password) because he does tend to be absent-minded about some matters. I would typically ask if he had checked his e-mail, just to remind him that it needed to be done. I did not make a habit of checking for him, but I had that ability if I felt it was needed.</p>
<p>In any event, I did not check his e-mails when his SCEA application was denied or when he received two early acceptances (not EA, just earlier than expected) that took some of the sting off the earlier rejection. I did ask about BSU, where he should have been an automatic admit, when he had not heard for a couple months. That inquiry resulted in his discovery that although I had paid the application fee, he had not submitted the actual application.</p>
<p>When the rest of the decisions were made, he was in school and borrowed a friend’s phone to check his e-mail, but he had no decisions. Later in the day, the same friend came bouncing up to him and gave him a big hug and said “CONGRATULATIONS!!!”. It wasn’t until he got home several hours later that he checked his e-mail to find his various acceptances, including one to Harvard. He, of course, came bounding out of this room to tell us. After the excitement died down, he realized that his friend already knew that he had gotten into Harvard, so he called her to confirm his suspicion, which was that he had forgotten to “log out” of his e-mail before giving her the phone back. He gave her a little “grief” for snooping, but they still laugh about it to this day.</p>