<p>Hi, I live about ten miles away from my school and want to commute next year. I have a chronic illness that makes the stress of being away from home hard. However my parents believe that the best thing for me is to stay on campus and that I need to have that experience. </p>
<p>How can I convince them to let me commute?</p>
<p>and i already tried the saving money aspect</p>
<p>I would ask them why they want you to live on campus. See why they really think it is so important. Some parents want their kids to grow up and live on their own. Maybe they believe you need to start learning to cope with your illness while not living at home.
Many parents can not wait for their little birds to fly away and stop fouling the nest.</p>
<p>I personally wanted my dd to commute but she had other ideas and went to a college just far enough away that she could not commute.</p>
<p>They said that it will help me “grow” as a person. whatever that means. They also said that its not that they don’t want me to live at home but that it isn’t the best thing to do</p>
<p>Stay on campus. How do you expect to move away from home and get a job.</p>
<p>I feel like thats different though, especially now considering my circumstances and the fact that I’ve only been diagnosed with this illness for a little over a year</p>
<p>Live on campus. Arrange your classes so that you have no Friday classes and go home every weekend starting Thursday night. It will almost be half and half. You might enjoy college more and more and feel more comfortable over time.</p>
<p>You are not your illness.</p>
<p>Take the opportunity your parents are offering you to redefine yourself without disclosing your illness as a calling card.</p>
<p>Start fresh at college and discover who you are without labels.</p>
<p>They want you to embrace life and be uncomfortable and be stressed out.
How you cope is how you grow as a person.</p>
<p>I honestly just want to live at home, my illness isn’t the reason I want to live at home but does make living away harder</p>
<p>Why are you afraid of living with strangers?
They will reject you and you will be friendless?
You have odd personal habits?
Give us some insight.</p>
<p>no none of those things, i have anxiety which is worse when I’m away from home which in turn makes the physical side of my illness act up</p>
<p>I’ve had severe, crippling anxiety (eg. dropped out of high school, scared to do anything) but eventually I got 100% past it by facing it head on. Nothing gets better by avoiding the situations you get anxious about, it just further confirms the belief in your head that you cannot do x and y. Your parents would not be pushing you to live on campus if they thought you couldn’t do it; I’d do what the above poster said, live on campus Mon-Wed and go home the rest of the week.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>thanks for the input guys. mine is not crippling or even anything near that bottom line is that I’m just more comfortable at home and would rather live at home with less distraction. i love all of my classes but hate weekends at school and my parents do not want me coming home every weekend either. they say college is about the experience which i agree with but at the end of the day you go to school to go to school</p>
<p>“they say college is about the experience which i agree with”</p>
<p>I wanted to commute to school as well, and my parents said that I could. However, in the end, I decided that I DID need to grow up, and that I would never move out if I didn’t start at some point, so I decided not to commute. The “experience” they’re talking about is the fact that you’ll be learning to be independent - they’re not saying you have to party all the time. It sounds like this is PRECISELY the lesson you’ll eventually have to learn. Quite frankly, it sounds like you need to put your big-kid pants on and stop hiding behind an “illness” that you say isn’t the problem in the first place. If you absolutely hate it, go home every weekend; I’m sure your parents will understand (and thus let you) if you’re hating it there. Chances are though, you’ll meet a lot of people and you’ll become invested socially and emotionally into your school. If worse comes to worst, you can always insist upon moving back.</p>
<p>There are plenty of people who live away at college, and end up moving back home afterward either because they can’t find a job, their job doesn’t pay enough to support them, or because they don’t want to live alone, etc. So moving away to college doesn’t guarantee that a person will “grow up” or be more independent. </p>
<p>Depending on what your chronic condition is, I think quite a few people here are being insensitive and thinking very little of the impact it can have. I have a chronic illness, however, I think living on my own would the healthiest thing for me. I would have better control over what food is in the house, exercise, and just be able to create my own healthy lifestyle that I am having a problem with at home (not to mention mold problems at home that make my condition far worse!). </p>
<p>As for your anxiety (or maybe that is the chronic condition?) this is the time to start working on that. See a counselor at your college. Perhaps discuss medication to help cope with your anxiety. Find strategies to release stress that work for you. Eating healthy and exercising play a large role in how anxiety affects us - stay away from caffeine and sugar, that will increase anxiety.</p>
<p>If you commute, won’t that get in the way of so much “out of class” learning that takes place? Like study groups, extra lab time, good discussions about class topics over dinner…these are the things that really extended my learning experience during college. What went on outside of “class” was almost more important in terms of my learning from classmates, etc. I would not have wanted to miss out on those opportunities by commuting.</p>
<p>no the chronic illness is physical but stress and anxiety exacerbate it even more. thanks for the support nova i feel the insensitivity as well</p>
<p>
Who says you have to go home right after class?</p>
<p>To the OP: Are your parents paying for the dorm as well? Scholarships? Or do they expect you to pay for it using loans? If the latter is the case, try to telling them that having tons of debt is never a good thing.
Also, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to “grow up.” Society today is different - no one expects you to get married before 20 (or something like that).
Commuting to college is not unlike commuting to work - plus you’ll gain more experience as a driver.</p>
<p>Agree to dorm for 1 year and show independence, social growth and maturity to your parents and they may agree to let you commute from home the next 3 years.
Compromise.</p>
<p>parents say that money is not the issue nor the point. I’ve decided to live on campus, and worst comes to worst i come home whenever i want because some people don’t have the luxury to be able to do that simply because they just live so far away</p>
<p>Do you think having a single room will decrease your anxiety?
You can petition for a single for medical purposes.
Contact Housing and find out what documentation is needed to apply for a single.</p>