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I would most definitely respect my child's preference with regard to this issue.
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<p>Absolutely. We did open some mail for our S, but only with prior permission when he wasn't going to be available to open it for himself (he went to a residential high school but the mail came here). Even then that was only during the application process and we were making sure that the mail didn't need an immediate response.</p>
<p>Open mail when acceptance/rejection letters were due? No way. </p>
<p>On keeping your parents away from the mailbox, though. I assume everyone knows that you can't always go by the size of the envelope, right? Some schools are famous for their big envelope, little envelope thing, but my S's acceptance came in a little one with more material coming in a later mailing.</p>
<p>Squiggle - just as it's YOUR mail and you should be the first and only person to open it, so it is HER mail box and she has the perfect right to remove what the postman deposits in it. Much of it is probably addressed to her and/or your dad, and some of those items are likely to be important stuff (i.e., bills, tax stuff, this week's issue of The New Yorker, etc.).</p>
<p>What would happen if you explain to your Mom how important it is to you that you be the person who gets the mail each day, in order to insure that you're the first person to know about your college decisions? Our daughter asked us this favor last year, and we were happy to accommodate her. However, she made clear that she realized it was a FAVOR for us to forego getting the mail until she came home. There's a difference between a student opening his/her mail, which is as it should be, and the rest of the family waiting for their own mail because the student doesn't want anyone else to guess the contents of their decision envelopes. I can get pretty cranky waiting for my New Yorker.</p>
<p>Even if your mom agrees to let you collect all the mail, there's always the possibility she'll go out to the mailbox before you get home just to see what's in it.</p>
<p>frazzled- thanks for the reply. i understand that it's my parents' mailbox too, but this would just be probably a one week period starting on march 30th (i guess it's ok if they see the one decision that i'll get on march 14/15) that i wouldn't want them to open the box. and besides (i forgot to mention this) my dad doesn't get home from work until 5, so maybe it wouldn't kill him to not know what mail he had for an extra half an hour.</p>
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Squiggle - just as it's YOUR mail and you should be the first and only person to open it, so it is HER mail box and she has the perfect right to remove what the postman deposits in it.
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frazzled~
I would absolutely concur with this statement. What is the difference between whether the student finds his mail piled on the dining room table or pulls it out of the mailbox himself? To me, this is a bit overboard. It would never have occurred to my son to ask for this type of "favor." ~berurah</p>
<p>Squiggle88: if you don't want your parents peeking in the mailbox before you do, you could go to the post office and fill out a request that mail addressed to you be held at the post office for you to pick up in person. (People routinely do this when they are going on vacation and don't want the mail piling up and overflowing their mailbox, possibly alerting criminals to their absence. The post office form has a standard form for this request. It's possible to designate that the entire family's mail be held or just a specific person's mail be held. In your case, of course, you'd just want the latter.)</p>
<p>Of course, the post office doesn't have a 100% perfect track record on actually fulfilling such requests, but it's worth a try, if it's so important to you.</p>
<p>For any future applicants who also feel strongly as squiggle does, you could always rent a post office box and fill out your college application forms specifying that all correspondence should go to your PO box.</p>
<p>I'll split the difference: absolutley the parents get to bring the mail in. Absolutely, any mail that arrives during what loosely could be considered "acceptance period" is the student's to open. [I still "goofed" on one anyway that came a few days earlier than we expected...it was either Barnard or Skidmore.]</p>
<p>As "project manager," all the routine communications, pitches, wheedles, financial stuff, that came from colleges during the whole search/application period was opened and sorted for D to read at her leisure...this by mutual agreement. Prepared be for now, when due to the legal fiction of some implementations of student privacy, mail from Student Financial Services, e.g., the tutition bills, come addressed to her at our home address.</p>
<p>But acceptances? <em>Absolutely</em> the student's right.</p>
<p>"Squiggle - just as it's YOUR mail and you should be the first and only person to open it, so it is HER mail box and she has the perfect right to remove what the postman deposits in it. "</p>
<p>I always sort of thought of it as OUR family mailbox. Anyway, parents, remember that getting to the mailbox first is not an unmixed blessing. In our household, my son, who arrives home home from school first, got the four acceptances and a waitlist. I took in the mail on the Saturday when the other waitlist arrived. Not pleasant. I don't think that asking first dibs on the mailbox for a week or so is an unreasonable request. It offers a level of privacy that the kitchen table may not.</p>
<p>Actually, you can figure it out pretty easily most of the time. What you do is to track the forums on CC for the schools your child has applied to. In most cases, someone will have their results first, and they will post (in response to frantic questioning) the size, shape and color of the envelope, tube or box, with supporting commentary regarding the quality of stationary and any interesting inclusions (confetti, bumperstickers, and so on). </p>
<p>Only a few weeks to hold on, now. You can do it!</p>
<p>I have also read that the size of the envelope doesn't necessarily indicate an acceptance or rejection. Just to be safe, I am having our son open everything that relates to any school he's applying to--I am the one he wants to handle all the "junk mail."</p>
<p>If I were at school and the letter came, I would absolutely want my mom to rip it open and tell me on the phone or something. I don't want to have to wait any longer than I have to!</p>
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If I were at school and the letter came, I would absolutely want my mom to rip it open and tell me on the phone or something. I don't want to have to wait any longer than I have to!
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lollipop~</p>
<p>OMG!! FINALLY someone who thinks like my son!!! <em>lol</em>--I was beginning to think he was a minority of one! ~berurah</p>
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I don't think that asking first dibs on the mailbox for a week or so is an unreasonable request. It offers a level of privacy that the kitchen table may not.
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So, put it on his bed.</p>
<p>I guess my kids have a different concept of privacy...comes from 8 people living together in a regularly-sized house! <em>lol</em> ;) ~berurah</p>
<p>Well, there's only four of us, and we don't open each other's mail either. (My kid at college thinks I'm weird, calling him now and asking if I ought to send various mail items to him. "You're being stupid, Mom, just open it and tell me if it's something I need to know.") But, the first person home brings in the mail for the whole household. Items get placed (or piled, some days) at each person's seat at the dinner table. Period. Call me inflexible, but if I get home first, I'm not leaving the mail in the mailbox until my kid gets home to take it out. I would find that just silly. YMMV.</p>
<p>to the OP: it is a federal offence to open mail addressed to somebody else. in your case it is wrong because he simply asked you not to. do you really want to take that away from your kid? opening his yes letter?????
P.S. adamAnt</p>
<p>It seems that the majority is child opening it. In my case, my mom received an UPS mail (international) from NYU, and she opened it without knowing what it really was. Then, she came to school during class to tell me the news. Either way would have been good to me!</p>
<p>Umm, my daughter found out she was in at Reed via a singing email. The letter that came a few days later was an anticlimax. (And it was full of glitter that took weeks to get out of the carpet.)</p>
<p>Both of my kids went to boarding school, which lent a new twist to the whole "the envelope is here" thing. My son was home from school when he got a call from the college counselor that he has "a fat envelope" from MIT and could the <em>COUNSELOR</em> open it? Of course my son said yes, and the counselor read him his letter and then fedexed the contents so that my son got it the next day.</p>
<p>Because the kids were at boarding school--and now with them away at college--mail for them coming here has always been handled with an email: "you got a letter from X, would you like me to open it and scan it for you?" Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no. Now that they sometimes housesit for us while we travel, we get the emails from them.</p>
<p>Perhaps our perspective is changed by the fact that my step-MIL runs a service for overseas clients doing exactly that kind of mail service!</p>
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As "project manager," all the routine communications, pitches, wheedles, financial stuff, that came from colleges during the whole search/application period was opened and sorted for D to read at her leisure...this by mutual agreement.
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<p>I like that. That's what I was doing, but most of the time I had this nagging feeling I was doing too much. With that pre-agreed approach, I'd be able to draw lines on what I should and shouldn't do better. Thanks.</p>