<p>^^OUCH! He’s totally busted.</p>
<p>not busted. he told me to come here to get advice and guidance on this issue.</p>
<p>Yes- he started his thread 2 days ago. Looks like the advice is pretty consistent in both threads.</p>
<p>OK, good. So it looks like the vast majority of responses have suggested that you should let her go. Have you decided?</p>
<p>I sympathize with you completely as we had this same conversation at our house last year right around this time.</p>
<p>What’s good for your daughter and what’s good for you are two different things. You may think a college degree is a college degree no matter where you go, but your daughter seems to feel differently. </p>
<p>Aside from the need for extra planning and extra expense of traveling to and from NC, your D will be away from home either way and out of your sphere of influence. Unless your objection is secretly a money issue camouflaged as something else, I wonder why you are OK, given your concern with responsibility issues, to let your D go to the larger, more impersonal state school where there is less attention given per student and where a kid can run off the rails much more easily without the profs noticing, but not to Elon, a considerably smaller place where the chances are much higher that if something is going awry it will get noticed and addressed sooner rather than later. Do you believe in the back of your mind that your D has to to be in-state because you need to be within easy travel distance to swoop down and rescue her from herself in case she runs into trouble? If that’s it, you’re going to have to take a leap of faith and trust that she may stumble around a bit but will eventually figure things out as they all do. As they all MUST do. </p>
<p>If your D is pressured by you into going to where she doesn’t want to go, and she ends up hating it you know who she’s going to blame. On the other hand, if she goes to Elon and ends up hating that, she might end up at ISU anyway, but she’ll have arrived at that decision herself. Same outcome, big psychological difference. You would also have “I told you so” rights (but that’s something I’d keep to myself if I were you). However, if she ends up loving Elon and wants to stay for the duration, will YOU be all right with that? </p>
<p>In the end our D chose the small LAC three states away over a nice selection of good in-state public and private options. The out-of-state LAC was the best fit for her, as D rightly concluded. The first couple of months were hard for all of us, with a profusion of texting, phone calls and Skyping initiated by D, but she loves where she is, she continues to work on her own disorganizational shortcomings, and she has learned to navigate the various modes of interstate transportation admirably (although she got off to a rough start initially). Although my H was the one who seemed to be A-OK with her going away, he appears to be the one initiating Skype conversations with her more than me. Funny, that.</p>
<p>I guess I should be more sympathetic, but I really don’t understand how families find themselves in these situations … in April of a child’s senior year. How did Elon end up on the list? Why did the OP schlep all over the country looking at schools with her D if she wanted the child to stay nearby? Why did not one of the many fine small to mid-sized schools in or near Illinois make the cut? If the only thing the D can say about Elon is that it is “pretty,” I’d be reluctant to send her there myself for reasons other than its distance from Illinois.</p>
<p>^^^that is hilarious jym! OP you sound like you’ve got a good guy for a spouse if that is him. Go have dinner and listen to what he is saying to you. You need to let your D try her wings…she may come back closer to home or not…but as parents it is our job to help our kids leave the nest and fly with their own wings.</p>
<p>Seems obvious that the problem here has little to do with the specifics of whether Elon or ISU is better for the particular student’s academic or professional goals or is otherwise a better fit.</p>
<p>It has more to do with setting up a set of expectations from an early stage (searching for and applying to colleges all over the country) and then changing them at the last minute (imposing the geographic limitation after application deadlines have long since passed). That is a recipe for problems.</p>
<p>^^I don’t think anyone would disagree with that ucb. Set the boundaries financial, geographical whatever from day 1. After that barring mental or physical or legal problems you don’t renege.</p>
<p>kkd123 - my D is doing the exact opposite of yours. We live in North Carolina and she’ll be attending UChicago next year. Am I nervous about it? Sure. But I know in my heart that she’s ready to go, and would never forgive myself if I held her back from such a wonderful opportunity…</p>
<p>I hope the OP is not conveying too much of her own angst to the daughter. The kid has enough to struggle with to go out in the world on her own. It’s too much to have to handle an extra burden of guilt over her mother. </p>
<p>I know this is hard for the OP, I sympathize, as a mother myself, but i hope she’s keeping her struggles to herself. The child has to leave home feeling strong and secure.</p>
<p>I dunno maybe I’m missing some maternal gene, but I was so darn proud of my oldest two for WANTING to go far away. It made me feel all good inside that they were feeling secure and mature. It scared the heck out of me to wave goodbye, but that feeling of loss/weakness/fear/etc goes away quickly and reminded me of all those feelings I had when they stepped on the kindergarten bus and roared away. Sure I miss them and only see them once or twice a year but I love seeing the men they are becoming.</p>
<p>OP–I’d suggest the book “Letting Go: A Parents’ Guide to Understanding the College Years” by Coburn and Treeger. Your local library may have it. </p>
<p>My son is disorganized and procrastinates, but he did very well in HS, went to a distant selective college and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. I’m disorganized and procrastinate and still managed to get a nursing degree, a Masters and a PhD, all far away from home. I do hope you will decide to trust your D with this decision. You might surprise yourself with how well you do with this. I surprised myself and everyone who knows me. My beloved son was so obviously happy with his choice of college that I couldn’t be anything but happy for him when we left him on campus that first time. Of course I missed his daily presence, but I found I could deal with it, knowing he was where he wanted to be.</p>
<p>Give yourself great credit for having raised an independent young woman. They aren’t fully formed when they start college. They do a lot of growing up in those 4 years and our trust in them as their parents helps this process of personal growth.</p>
<p>Ok, it can be worrisome to let your child go away, especially if you are afraid that she may not be “ready” for life on her own. The bottom line - whether it is closer to home at ISU, or farther away at Elon, it’s time for her to figure it out.
Of the two schools, which one is going to provide a more nurturing, supportive environment that will help her to grow? The state school with larger classes, more TAs and more people? Or the smaller LAC with smaller classes and professors focused on undergrad teaching?</p>
<p>My son had plenty of “senior moments” and I was worried too, but I let him go to school across the ocean, thousands of miles away, instead of to our state U 10 miles from home. And he is thriving, and is growing up and learning responsibility, and he is getting As. </p>
<p>As a mom, I want to keep my DD close to home - she has had health problems and I want to keep her safe. But I’m going to “suck it up” and let her go next year - because it’s what makes sense for her.</p>
<p>Elon is a great school, and the kind of place where your DD can really come into her own.</p>
<p>I couldn’t agree more about Elon offering a nurturing environment. I know a graduating senior that chose Elon over a CA state school because she knew that she needed a safe happy place to grow. She has blossomed. While she missed her family, she skyped and even wrote letters because she knew how happy her parents were when they received them.
It is obvious from reading your DH posts that you have a great family. Let her go…she will make you proud.</p>
<p>kkd, my daughter is a sophomore at Elon. We live in New England. And yes, it was very hard for me to let her go that far away (800 miles).</p>
<p>But here’s the thing: I hear from her more than I heard from her brother who went to college only 200 miles away. She skypes us fairly frequently. She and I text each other almost every day. And there’s regular cell phone calls and email. I know more about her day, her friends, her classes - more about everything she is doing than I did about her brother. </p>
<p>Elon is more than “pretty.” It’s a school that truly engages students in learning. They have a low student-faculty ratio, and NO large lecture classes. My daughter says every single professor she’s had has known her by name within 2 weeks, and her first semester psych professor still greets her by name when they cross paths on campus. Would your daughter get that experience at ISU? Elon has a well-respected school of education. </p>
<p>Elon also has the strongest sense of community I’ve seen in a college. Every Tuesday morning there is a 45 minute period with no classes, and the college hosts College Coffee around one of their beautiful fountains. Students, faculty and administrators can mingle and talk. Elon has a beautiful lights, luminary and caroling sing-a-long event in early December. They invite the students to the President’s house for a Christmas/holiday party. They hold many events throughout the year to be sure that students feel like they bELONg to a community. And most Elon students are from far away (less than 1/3 are from NC) so it is NOT a suitcase school. </p>
<p>Elon does all this for a significantly lower cost than most private universities.</p>
<p>Elon has a fall break, Thanksgiving break, Christmas break, “fake break” (between January term and Spring semester), a day off after Easter, and Spring Break. Finals end mid-May. There are plenty of opportunities to go home, and Raleigh-Durham has almost every airline, including Southwest and JetBlue.</p>
<p>But to me, it boils down to this: you let your daughter look everywhere, apply everywhere and get her hopes up, and now you’re pulling the rug out from under her. Unless you’ve had a significant change in finances, she has every right to resent you for this.</p>
<p>Our guidance counselor told us that as parents we had two areas of control in the college search: finances, and safety. Beyond those two areas he said we should let the kids decide. Because if you force your kid to go to a college they don’t want to attend, you’ll be spending the next 40 years listening to your kid tell you how you ruined their life.</p>
<p>I know it’s not easy. I KNOW. I had a sense of panic when my daughter told us that Elon was the place for her. But I had to swallow my fear and remember that it’s HER life, not mine. I went to college already. I had my turn and made my choices. Now it’s HER turn, and as a good parent I had to support her decision to attend a college that we knew was a good fit for her, even if it was further than I wanted her to go.</p>
<p>Am I jealous of people whose kids are an hour away? Sometimes I am. (I live near Boston - there’s a zillion colleges here). But my daughter is happy, and I’d rather have a happy daughter who attends school far away but texts and calls frequently than a miserable one only 2 hours away.</p>
<p>My daughter and I were close when she was in high school, and we are still close - even though she is 800 miles away.</p>
<p>One other point - your daughter wants to be a teacher now, but lots of kids change their minds and their major. She will have plenty of other good options at Elon - can you say the same for ISU?</p>
<p>Oh god, don’t be like the people here in Illinois who dare not venture out of the Midwest. It’s a big world. Let her explore it.</p>
<p>I know several Elon grads. They all rave about the school and its sense of family. She can have 2 families- her biological and school families. It will not take anything away from you, unless you pull the rug out from under her at the last minute. She may have resentment and trust issues if you insist. Let her go, and make an appointment with a good therapist to deal with separation struggles. They are hard. And real, but they are your issues, not hers. And I mean that in the kindest, most supportive way. Validate your feelings, but dont use them to hold her back.</p>
<p>No matter where she goes to school, there is no guarantee where she will end up afterward. Thats the real tough part, IMO. So if you are thinking that by staing in Ill. for school she’l stay after shde graduates, there is no guarantee of that. MY s’s went to school many states away. I missed them dearly, but it was was best for THEM. As a parent, tahts our job- to do what is best for THEM, not us. Good luck. She will be fine.</p>
<p>My daughter is very close by, but do I get to see her? Hardly ever. She has only come home for Thanksgiving, Christmas break, and Spring break. I don’t think her computer and phone are even able to receive parental messages. 
Still, we are thrilled that she is so happy and is in the right place for her. Proximity will not guarantee that you’ll see her often!</p>
<p>You really have to set the parameters at the beginning of the college search. Absent a drastic change of circumstances (serious health or financial problems), you should stick to what you agreed to let her do. I feel for you. However, if going to Elon would truly be the wrong thing for HER, she’ll find out quickly.</p>