Soothing the Parents – How to Send Your Kids off to College without Making Mom and Dad Cry

Soothing the Parents – How to Send Your Kids off to College without Making Mom and Dad Cry

This past week I attended “family orientation” at the University of Texas at Austin. I wasn't quite sure what this was going to turn out to be.

After all, when I went off to college twenty-seven years ago, my mother dropped me and my trunk off at my dorm room and left the next day. My husband's family simply put him on a plane and trusted a family friend to transport him to campus. They didn't ask for information about my classes or student support services or safety on campus, although my family, I must admit, was half hoping I'd become desperately homesick and think about attending a school closer to home.

But here I was, almost thirty years later, in a beautifully appointed, air-conditioned ballroom with hundreds of other middle-aged men and women listening to administrators, college kids, and deans reassure us over and over with the mantra: “We're going to take care of your kids. We're going to take care of your kids.”

At first this seemed like a kind gesture, and then it started to feel almost a little creepy, as if they were all expecting us to burst into tears and grab our kids saying, “You can't have them! You can't have them!”

A couple of days later after I had had some time to think about this some more, I began to wonder what motivates this kind of concern on the part of universities and colleges to try to make parents feel comfortable about leaving their kids in a “safe” environment.

Is it because college costs so much these days that schools feel they must treat families like customers and make them feel better about the “product” (a college education) they are purchasing?

Is it because more families are sending their kids to college and this elicits more anxiety in families who have never sent a child away to school?

Is it because of media coverage of sensational crimes on campuses like the shooting at Virginia Tech?

Are we all now living in a culture of fear that may magnify the real dangers we face in everyday life?

Are middle-class kids so much more sheltered now growing up when they spend most most hours of the day supervised at day-care, school, after-school activities, and sports that the transition to the independence of college living is a much bigger step towards adulthood than it used to be?

For me, thinking about this anxiety about the safety of my children made me realize once again how ambivalent I feel about our cultural obsession with eliminating every possible danger.

At some point, it seems counter-productive, the same way we've discovered that using anti-bacterial household products have made our homes “too” clean so that our kids may be underexposed to enough germs to generate a healthy auto-immune response or that we may be risking creating “superbugs” that our drugs can't treat.

If my kids hadn't biked to school on their own, or taken public transportation on their own, even traveled by themselves, I'd be a lot more worried about how my oldest son would make the transition to college.

But with a functioning cell phone, common sense, and his karate training, I don't worry too much about his physical safety. We don't live in a perfectly safe world, and I know that really terrible things can happen when a young person is the wrong place at the wrong time, but I also trust that most of the time we are perfectly safe, and perhaps safer than we assume

So after we get back home from orientation, I'm going to put my son on a plane to college by himself and trust a family friend to help him get his stuff to campus. Even after thirty years, I don't think the world is a much more dangerous place for most of us.

So thanks UT-Austin for the pep talk, but I already know I can't keep my son under my care and supervision forever, and I don't even want to. He's ready to taken on his new-found independence and so am I.