He was found in Spain , apparently after seeing himself on the news and finally calling his parents. The parents at one point seemed to warn other parents about study abroad but not sure study abroad was the issue here. Will be interesting to see if the whole story comes out about where he was and why there was no communication for weeks. Glad he’s okay .
What communication do you expect/appreciate from your adult children when they travel?
I’m so glad he is safe! I read that story a few days ago.
At minimum I expect a landed/arrived safely text and when moving hotels/location. We give our D the same curtesy when we are traveling.
Generally though she has historically done a quick text with a photo daily when she has a wifi connection.
I’d assume deeper issues are at play. Of course if a student is abroad it makes it that much more difficult to find them.
Glad he’s ok. It wouldn’t deter me from sending mine abroad which she is required to do and planning next year.
We will eliminate some countries of course like China due to lockdown threat and Taiwan due to the potential China aggression. but this seems a one off individual thing with no danger or nefarious situation involved.
Ours texts all the time and calls when out at night alone walking. I assume she’d work hard to ensure her safety and communicate regularly as she does now. Certainly we’ll instill guidelines for minimums.
I feel like the first post in this thread is missing a link to a story…or was split from another thread.
What are you all talking about??
It is all over the news, making CNN front pages at some point.
Here is an example:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/17/us/missing-college-student-france-kenny-deland-saturday/index.html
Nothing else to say.
Even from my adult D I ask for a text upon arrival - and I do ask that she check in as she is able. She went to SE Asia alone for 3 months, and is heading to Europe alone in the spring - I’m not “checking up” I’m just ensuring she’s good.
My daughter back packed through South East Asia by herself after being in Indonesia for a bit. We knew her iternery and she checked in. She did Workaway for a bit also. My son did study abroad in France and Israel. Just check in so we know everything is good. It’s basically mutual respect. My son was visiting us and when he gets on the plane. Lands, then back home we get notifications. But don’t require all that but he thinks we do… Lol.
This!
Helicopter parents embarrass their kid…
Bet he wishes he was doing this a generation ago when parents were lucky if they got a postcard.
In college I went on multiple month long backpacking trips and a round the world trip for several months and would never have considered calling my parents, nor would they have expected it. Nowadays I like to hear from my kids when they travel but wouldn’t consider reporting them missing, let alone contacting the media, if they don’t call.
Fellow students were the ones that first reported him missing. The parents were very concerned, since it was very uncharacteristic of him to just take off without any notice or contact for days(which became weeks).
Now, this will follow him any time anyone googles his name. He could have avoided all this drama if he had just had the courtesy of letting someone know what he was up to.
My DD is a globetrotter. In undergrad alone, she did 6 study abroad programs of varying durations and lots of backpacking. She sent at least one text per day except for 1 day she spent in the desert and didn’t have a signal. Even now, when she travels she texts when taking off, when landed, when picked up from airport, and basically keeps me apprised on a daily basis of what she’s doing and with whom. Since we communicate daily when she is home, I’d worry if she were traveling and I didn’t hear from her every day and she didn’t prepare me not to hear from her.
My DD had a fantastic year in China during Covid. It got a little dicey towards the end though when they locked down campus. Seems they’ve ceased the lockdowns now and are dealing with the Covid outbreaks differently. So I wouldn’t necessarily write it off if that’s where they want to go.
There is more going on here. Most 20 yr olds would not go without internet access. In Europe, it is cheap and easy to get a sim card with data. And certainly, there is free internet in most train stations, often in town halls even in the tiniest villages. It’s pretty obvious that he decided to ghost his parents, for whatever reasons. Glad he’s on his way home. Hoping that they get into some family therapy, because there’s got to be some serious pathology going on here, for him to have waited to call them even when he had to have known that they were so frantic with worry that they had blown this up into an international incident. His host family said he was having trouble “fitting in”. I’m assuming that his parents are footing the bill for his college and his travel, so here’s hoping that they leverage this strategically to get him some help.
Back then, calling home from a foreign country wasn’t easy. In some countries you would have to find a phone that had international calling (not all phones did) and/or go through an operator. It was a hassle and always, quite costly.
Now you have a device in your hand through which you can easily call or message (and for free if using WiFi). Expectations are totally different.
Expecting a periodic check in, or an update on travel plans isn’t helicopter parenting. It’s looking out for each other.
My DD traveled to Europe with her friends last summer. She messaged us regularly - sometimes sending us a photo of something interesting she saw, at other times just saying a quick hi. We never asked her to call us daily or set a fixed check-in schedule. But hearing from her at least every other day gave us assurance she was fine. Similarly, when my wife and I visited friends on the other side of the country last month, we let her know our flight schedule and messaged her once a day.
It’s mutual respect as @Knowsstuff said.
I went to Europe with friends in the 80s at 18 years old. We still had to call home once/week. We rotated whose parents got a call and then the parents started a phone chain to let the others know. Now a days it’s so easy to send a text.
I also think it’s the maturity of the kid and how they were brought up. One can’t compare when most of us were this age. Different times. Different world. Also we live in a major city. The kids do check it more about whereabouts. Kids took train to busses to go to school miles away from our homes. Daily. They understand the world around them. So checking in was a normal thing if they were going somewhere outside of their norm. We didn’t care what they did. But if your home from practice daily at 6:00 and your not going to be home till 10:00 pm. Just want a clue. So I think that just carries over.
For this kid there is definitely more to the story. I have my theories especially when he’s telling his father to stop talking to media outlets. My kid doesn’t call for days and that is NOT their norm. I assume something is wrong. So caring about your kid when out of the country is a bad thing to some and considered being a helicopter parent?? I think it’s bad parenting. My kids go what we call off grid for weeks. But if we really want to check in it’s usually a “You alive or you good” text and we get a “Yep” then sometimes followed with a call. We get they want to be independent. But they also know their are people that do worry about them. I think that’s normal being a parent. The world we live in is way more dangerous then what it was when I was a kid. Most of my suburban patients don’t let their kid’s by their self into the city. How do they expect their kids to navigate when abroad? I don’t think we would be considered a helicopter parent and then having our daughter back pack SE Asia by herself for months. But just having a clue where she is isn’t a bad thing. Plus the pics were outstanding to the point she had a photograph show at an art gallery when she got back called “GAP”… For her time during her GAP year (Junior year).
The world is vastly safer in every respect than when we were kids. Murders are down, cars are safer (seatbelts!)… we romanticize the past and forget the bad bits.
But go and watch films from the 1980s (eg the date rape of a passed out teenager in Sixteen Candles) and it’s really that we took a lot of awful things for granted back then. Life was cheap: it was common to hear about high school kids driving drunk and dying in car wrecks. I went climbing and mountaineering in college and could easily have died on multiple occasions: we lost one friend in an ice climbing accident and my best man nearly killed himself free climbing on his own (fell 30ft when a boulder gave way).
So forbidding your kids from going into the city certainly counts as excessive helicopter parenting to me. I like my kids to let me know what they are doing if they go on a trip, but I don’t insist on it. Would I be worried if my college kid decided to go off on their own for a couple of weeks in a foreign country? Yes, absolutely. But I wouldn’t be going to the police and media about it.
I agree with this. You don’t just walk out on school and go to another country and tell no one.
Clearly other personal issues are at play.