<p>Not only did I read it, but I printed it out and will send to my son. I would email it, but then there is no guarantee that he’d read it. Hard copy in his hands will almost assure it and then he’ll lay it on the table and so will will everyone else in the suite. But I will go this kid one further and tell you that our generation was/is no different. When you say you don’t want a cocktail, please ask what’s wrong. The smaller the group, the more questions. Our culture, as a rule, is obsessed with having that drink to celebrate, reflect, whatever. Holiday’s, football games, etc etc. But what I find most interesting to our conversation previously is that it’s not that this kid doesn’t want to join in, it’s that he cant. Seeing through sober eyes for over a year to all the fall out and yet he still wishes he could join in on occasion? Hmm… now that’s worth thinking about why that is.</p>
<p>I just reread the article twice and of all the reactions I can think of this is probably the most obscure. Did you stop and think that perhaps he might want to join in occasionally because not being able to have even one drink is a constant reminder of his illness?</p>
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<p>Unbelievable! Maybe you better read it again.</p>
<p>Wow after reading thru this, I almost hate to reply to the original intent of the thread, lol…</p>
<p>For my S who is a freshman:</p>
<p>1) Food and dining hall hours (including not open until 11 a.m. on weekends)</p>
<p>2) Drinking and peer pressure related to drinking. He feels like a lone wolf, being a non-drinker and hasn’t found a group of non-drinkers to do things with.</p>
<p>I also have daughter who is a sophomore. Freshman year she drank and learned some of the painful issues related to drinking (not mixing different alcohols, moderation, etc.). Her biggest complaints were roommate related…slobbishness, eating the food that D bought, roommate and her friends excluding her, boyfriend staying over for several days without the required RA report and roommate concurrence. It was hard times but she met her best friend and they are sharing an apartment this year so all is good. She’s learned that even best friends disagree sometimes but they are learning to work thru the momentary issues.</p>
<p>I think we need to be careful not to attribute a student’s inability to bond with a new environment to the school’s drinking cultural. As a parent, who was very strict when D1 was in HS, I do not believe just because a kid didn’t drink then he/she couldn’t fit in or make friends. </p>
<p>D1 was not allowed to go to any parties where there was alcohol before she was a senior in HS. Her friends thought I was psycho. They all knew she could never go to a beach house for a weekend or stay out until 2 or 3 am. With all of those constraints, D1 still had 16+ closest friends (most of them were drinkers in HS), and she was the ring leader of her group. Even though those kids partied, it wasn’t the biggest source or the only source of entertainment. They went in to NYC for dinners (some of them would stay later to go to clubs), they went shopping, or just chilled at each other’s house.</p>
<p>Now D1 is in college, she goes out, but not for the sole purpose of getting drunk. D1 would say to me, “Oh, Mary, she is the kind of girl that would get sloppy at parties, hate to hang out with her.” I have never heard, “Oh, Emily, she is such a nerd, she doesn’t drink.” What she takes offense to is when people start to preach to her on alcohol, sex or religion. If a kid just go with the flow and doesn’t get on his high horse, I don’t think D1 or any of her friends would exclude the person because he/she doesn’t drink. D1 will have few more drinks at a party if she doesn’t have a lot of work the next day. If she does, she’ll often nurse a drink all night. D1 is also very conservative when it comes to relationship with boys, but she does not preach her friends who are more into the hookup culture.</p>
<p>I often take people in my department out for drinks to do some bonding. Most people will have a few drinks, but it is not appropriate for anyone to get drunk. It is something I stress with young people in my group. They need to know when to stop. We also have few people in the department who do not drink. They have just as good of time as other people.</p>
<p>What could we say or do with our college kids? Alcohol is not all evil when it’s done in moderation. Just because some kids have a few drinks at parties, it doesn’t mean they are “partiers.” They could turn out to be just very interesting, normal, studious people. If you don’t want to drink, then feel comfortable in not doing it. You don’t have to drink to have friends. You could go to parties without having to drink, just hold a drink in your hand if it would help you to blend in better.</p>
<p>Read it twice Toledo. What’s worth thinking about is our culture in its entirety. Why do you think drinking is such a big deal that everyone feels pressured to join in. This isn’t the thread for this, but if you’ve got something to say or believe I’ve misunderstood than spell it out so that I might see what you feel I’ve missed. My point is merely that as a society we glorify drinking. All you have to do is watch TV to see how that is the case, especially when it comes to sports and holidays. All that I was pointing out is that this is a kid who cannot drink even if he wanted to which says more about the culture of this country than it does about the culture on college campuses alone.</p>
<p>In the order they developed when I first came to college:</p>
<p>1) A lot of surprisingly dull kids will have the same university on their diploma as me.</p>
<p>2) Too many drunks and kids who think they want to be drunks now that they’re in college.</p>
<p>3) My roommate is such that he makes me not want to return to my dorm in the evenings.</p>
<p>4) The dull kids mentioned in #1 are a result of much easier admissions standards in the college of liberal arts/natural sciences and are probably why our uni is only top 50 as a whole with over 6 colleges in the top 20 and at least 3 in the top 10.</p>
<p>For people who are interested in reading responses which address the actual thesis of the article stringkeymom posted, I would recommend reading the comments attached to it.</p>
<p>My son is loving his experience overall, but misses “unadulterated meat” (meaning just a healthy, well prepared slab of quality meat with a properly cooked side of veggies instead of mystery casserole and pizza), alone time, his own bed, and is irritated by the late-night-return-noise of the seriously-drunk on weeknights. The latter is b/c he is in fact a night hawk who has super hearing, and is usually going to bed just before the return of the “seriously drunk.”
He wishes there was a little more dancing and a little less drinking (or that said, that the drinking resulted in more dancing) at some of the parties, but is increasingly finding weekend entertainment in lower-key, no-keg kind of settings (or Raves, but that’s another story and certainly not substance-free for most). Because he is not a big drinker, he has confided that parties where drinking is the prime objective (without dancing) are kind of boring when you’re straight, which is not to say the antics of the occasional binger has not formed entertainment (as well as the necessity of care-taking) for him.
I think he might agree with the suggestion elsewhere on this thread that you have to make a real effort and be a little creative in order to find a nice balance socially of ‘high-fun-quotient’ activities without an excessive focus on drinking. But that is all up to who he chooses to be about it.</p>
<p>My son has been relatively happy at his school. The minor complaint is that one dining hall is not nearly as good as the other one, so he tries to avoid it at all costs.</p>
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<p>I am sorry oldfort but does anyone else not see the problem in this statement.</p>
<p>First, the drinking age is 21 - whether anyone likes it or not.</p>
<p>Second, you held out until your D was a HS senior to let her go to parties where you knew alcohol was served. Just who is serving HS kids alcohol like this? And why would you feel complicit to allow your D attend even as a senior when she was clearly underage?</p>
<p>Third, your D’s HS friends (most were drinkers) before her Senior year thought you were crazy for not letting your D attend parties with alcohol. Ok, back to just who is now serving 15 to 17 year old kids alcohol at parties like this - and why do these kids think you are the crazy one for not allowing your D to join them?</p>
<p>By the time my daughter was a senior, I was comfortable to allow her to make her own decisions at that point. My daughter is a very responsible, well adjusted, well liked young woman. She is now 7000 miles away from, and she has consistently demonstrated her maturity to me. For that matter, most of her 16 friends are all very nice and responsible young people. They are all currently at some excellent schools and doing very well academically and socially, not vomiting every weekend.</p>
<p>S2 made decisions about whether to attend parties on his own, and then told me after the fact that he had declined X’s party because there would be alcohol. I was pretty pleased with him.</p>
<p>Back to original topic:
My frosh complains about the food. All must be on an unlimited meal plan, so he really has no money to eat anywhere but the cafeteria.</p>
<p>Anybody else complaining about how long their university takes to sort mail? I have a package that is late in arriving and I have no idea if it’s arrived or if it’s just sitting in the bottom of a bin somewhere on campus, I needed it for tomorrow. They lost a letter that had a lot of cash in it for like a month, too, that was pretty distressing. I think that’s a good pet peeve.</p>
<p>My D’s pet peeve is her roommate who starts her studies after midnight and studies until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. most weeknights. She studies in the room with her desk light on. D can’t sleep with the light and the noise from her typing on her laptop. I’ve suggested that they have a talk and come to some type of agreement for quiet hours during the week but DD doesn’t want to (I think she is afraid to) so she is just suffering in silence. I did send her some earplugs and a beauty mask so hopefully that has helped some.</p>
<p>M’s mom - May I suggest noise-canceling headphones for her ipod. She would be able to fall asleep to her music or a book-on-pod and the other noises would be blocked.</p>
<p>My son is no longer a freshman, but in his first year, he was assigned to a suite with two tiny doubles attached to a spacious common room. Two weeks into the fall semester, one of the four kids decided he would be happier if he made the common room his bedroom, so he simply moved in. Although it bugged my kid, he and the other 2 suitemates just shrugged it off. I infuriated me, but I wasn’t going to interfere.</p>
<p>The kid who lived in the common room was a real dope smoker too, and a pig. Oh, well, my son has a single this year.</p>
<p>In going back over this thread, the most common complaints are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Drunken behavior</li>
<li>Bad food</li>
<li>Roommate issues.</li>
<li>Laundry</li>
</ol>
<p>The roommate thing varies in that you’ve got people complaining about never being in their room alone and others who have no social life and never leave the room. Seems like both have room to complain - but for as much as kid A doesn’t like to go out and party, Kid B doesn’t get a chance to ever be alone.</p>
<p>But overall, we as parents can do little about any of these things, especially dealing with the abundance of drinking on campus. Sure we can send them food - but a hearty meal of meat and potatoes does not travel well. However, when we go and visit and when they come home we feed our starving kids the best we can. Laundry… I am sure lots of it comes home and/or ruined clothes are replaced. Roommates – once they are back in their own beds for a few days, they bounce back. We encourage them to cope as best they can. The only thing on the list that we cannot seem to have any input is the drunken behavior of the masses. But just saying the conversation is irrelevant because drinking is illegal because you are under 21 only pushes the issues further underground. It actually encourages pregame drinking and a binge culture. The reason things are so much worse compared to the 70’s is that back then most states were 18, not 21 and so the culture of campus drinking was addressed in a more straight forward way. Of all the issues our kids face, we can assuage many of these things but changing the drinking culture of a population is a bit overwhelming even to the most superparents among us. Honestly? Just saying it’s illegal is not really going to change the behavior. And let’s be honest… we have not even touched on pot or other drugs. The only thing to changing social norms is holding people accountable. If you drink destructively, there should be consequences from the school for sure, but more helpful would be consequences from their peers. All we can do as parents is recognize what is happening and encouraging our children to live true to themselves, believe the statistics and the studies that show that not “everyone” is doing it to the extremes you think they might is accurate, and that we as their parents want them to be the best people they can be. </p>
<p>On another note: My oldest D is just loud in general. So… if she is coming in late at night, she has no idea just how really loud she is and this includes times when she hasn’t had a drop to drink. Not saying that the drunks arent loud, just saying that not all loud people at 1am are drunk.</p>
<p>Twisted: Son doesnt seem so fluked over the mail, but I sometimes do. He only checks it about once a week, but when I send a homemade carmel apple (with some other stuff) and send it priority mail (2-3 days) and it takes more than a week? Yes, it ticks me off as well. BUT…</p>
<p>Think about all the carmel apples we poor parents send our kids. It’s like Christmas every day in a school post office. And since people aren’t always clear on how to mail things to students on campus - do I send to dorm, their mailbox, different rules for UPS and regular mail… what about fed ex? I can see the nightmare for both sides.</p>