Out of the Nest and Ready to Fly

Yesterday, my son Alejandro arrived home from UT-Austin for the last college vacation he'll ever enjoy. In May, he graduates and then moves on to a new city and new job.

As his mom, this is my last opportunity to spend time with him at home while I can still claim him as a child, rather than the young man I know he already has become.

Like any kid living at home, he has chores to do (and complain about), and he feels okay about asking me to pay for the gas that will let him visit his friends in Santa Cruz. For this short period of time, he is economically dependent on his family and quite happy to take advantage of parental largesse.

But we're in the countdown phase of the transition to adulthood. He's already married (legally in New York) and even has a credit history. Soon enough he'll have a car and apartment and all the dubious trappings of adult independence like insurance and utility bills.

I know he's ready to take on all of this, and I can't honestly say I'm sorry not to have to worry about tuition bills. But I'm also not quite ready to face the fact that our relationship is undergoing a profound shift.

In future, visits home will be limited by how much vacation he has and what it costs to buy airline tickets (and let me say here that there will always be a parental subsidy for these).

He'll have to negotiate with two sets of parents on where to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas and whether or not he can join us on other trips. His grandparents will also want him to visit them in Chile, and his aunts will want to see him in Long Beach and San Diego.

And, of course, I would be ecstatic if he went to law school in the Bay Area (hint, hint).

But it's not just the prospect of not seeing him as much as I want that saddens me; it's the feeling that I've still not had enough time to enjoy watching him growing up.

As my husband remarked before we had children, "Kids only become interesting around age 18." While I disagree with him on the "interesting" part, it is true that just about the time your kids are willing to talk to you again and treat you like another human being instead of this incredibly irritating, embarrassing creature they call a parent, they're off to college, and someone else is enjoying all the fruits of your labors.

I distinctly remember feeling cheated when a family friend told me how much he had enjoyed a long car trip up to the Sierras with Alejandro when they drove up to join his best friend and the rest of the family at their cabin. "I thought he'd just listen to his iPod," the father of his friend told me, "but we had this great conversation about Fast Food Nation."

Needless to say, I didn't get many of those great conversations. In fact, for several of his teenage years, he kept a sign on his door that read: "Sarcasm Club: Like we'd want you as a member."

The message to parents was clear: 1) Stay out of my room. 2) Leave me alone. 3) And don't talk to me, unless you want a snarky rejoinder.

In fairness, his adolescence wasn't all that bad, despite our first year in Albuquerque, where he found it difficult to connect with kids at his new high school and therefore told me on a daily basis that I had "ruined his life."

We can laugh at that now, knowing that if he hadn't gone to Albuquerque, he wouldn't have met his husband, Nathan.

I look at him today, all grown up and even a bit scholarly when he wears his glasses, and I remember a curly-haired, blue-eyed toddler who had a mischievous sense of humor and the biggest smile I've ever seen. And I feel so much love and gratitude for the joy he has brought me and the gift of seeing him put his tremendous talents to work in so many ways.

My first fledging is out of the nest and ready to fly, and I'm going to love watching him soar away.

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.

The TV Turn Off – Is It Still Relevant?

The TV Turn Off – Is It Still Relevant?

Next Monday, April 21^st, kicks off the annual “Turn off Your TV” week not only across the U.S. but in countries throughout the world, and some parents may be celebrating because fewer and fewer kids are watching TV.

But if TV is losing eyeballs, personal computers, iPods, and cell phones are rapidly emerging in its place as the hot new entertainment devices, especially for kids.

In the meantime, manufacturers (of televisions, computers, and cell phones) and content providers (from the traditional networks to Internet giants like Google) are all competing furiously to make sure that the next generation stays plugged in.

So what is a parent to do if the TV goes off and the kids just migrate down the hall to the PC or keep on texting? After all, there is a lot of money betting on parental surrender to this brave new world of instant entertainment.

I realized just how desperate the networks are to hold onto their tech-saavy teen audience when I came across a recent commercial while exercising at the gym.

There were the teens telling their mom they'd have to work her into their busy schedules after hockey and ballet. Even the youngest said in her sweet little girl voice, “Mom, I think I can pencil you in between 3 and 3:30 p.m.” Then a frame later you see the happy family all united in front of the television watching Ice Age, courtesy of a high-tech recording device that let the family all get together when they finally found the time to spend together –to watch TV, of course.

After I managed to stop gaping in horror at this travesty of family life– I think my jaw really did drop-- I began to try to figure out which of the many offensive elements of this family drama I found the most revolting.

Was it the idea that a parent should be subordinate to a child's after-school activities (I mean who is paying for all these after school activities anyway)?

Was it the idea of depicting six-year-olds as having social calendars (what happened to the idea of “down time” or even just “playing”, preferably outside instead of in front of the TV)?

Or was it the idea that “family time” would ever be centered around a television set (instead of something that actually fosters communication like the dinner table)?

In fact, some companies are exploiting parental concerns about the lost of “family time” by promising them that technology can actually help kids and parents overcome their hectic schedules and find time to reconnect. Last fall Panasonic even launched a new advertising campaign – "Bring Back Family Time” purportedly to “explore and document how High Definition technologies can enrich the American lifestyle.”

As part of the program, up to 30 families will be awarded a $20,000 suite of high definition products including Plasma HDTVs, Blu-ray Players, HD Camcorders, Digital Still Cameras and other products and services that Panasonic wants to promote. You can have family time in this tech-dominated fantasy – you just have to pay for it!

Clearly the PC, the cell phone, and music devices like the iPod have become part of the fabric of American life, just like the TV before them. But this means parents need to think in new ways about how they help their kids manage this media saturation before they find that their kids really are plugged in 24/7 and largely doing so without anyone being aware of what they are watching or communicating.

For example, last September, Forrester Research found that those between the ages of 18 and 26 are are more likely to say that their cell phones or personal computers are more important media devices than the family television, and it's precisely because these devices let them access media and communicate privately without coming under the scrutiny of the parental eye that is usually focused on the TV. Kids under 18 are even more likely to follow this trend.

So this week of April 21^st, don't just think about turning off the family TV set. Instead, you might want to start a conversation about the following

• What device matters the most to your kids- is it the TV, the computer, the iPod, or their cell phones? Which one would they be most reluctant to give up? The answers might surprise you.

• Ask the kids to monitor how much time they spend on the computer, the cell phone, listening to music, and watching TV. Challenge them to limit the time they do these things on school nights and discuss a possible reward if their school work improves or grades go up as a result.

• Ask your kids what they think about “family time?” What do you all enjoy doing most together? Would they consider canceling the cable subscription and investing the monthly expense in something that would benefit the whole family (such as a trampoline, or a vacation, or new bikes)?

And when the week ends, don't just go back to old habits. Monitoring and limiting what your kids see on their television and computer screens isn't just about protecting them. It gives them the opportunity to keep their childhood free of the often corrosive media culture that seems to saturate every aspect of our daily lives. If they spend more time outside on their bikes, or inside talking to you at the dinner table, or even curled up beside you reading a book, that's precious time that you're giving them to just be themselves, not some advertiser's ideal of what a child or a family ought to be.

When Words Come Back to Haunt You

When Words Come Back to Haunt You

“Nico?” No answer. “Nico?” “Nico, can you hear me?” I repeat. Finally, he deigns to answer: “I'm taking Uncle Phillip's advice and ignoring you.”

I realize he's really upset that I've taken him out of school early to make it to a dentist appointment. I should have known the minute he seated himself in the back row of the mini-van as far from me as possible.

“But why is he talking about his uncle?” I wonder for about a second, and then I suddenly remember.

Words can back to haunt you in strange ways, and sometimes they are the very words you would never even give a second thought.

A few days earlier I had been reading a letter to my seventeen-year-old son, Alejandro, that I'd written to his father when we were both in college. In it I was complaining that my own mother had distracted me with so many task I nearly started a kitchen fire. “My brother, Phil, told me the solution was to go upstairs where I could pretend not to hear her,” I read aloud, laughing as I folded up the letter. Alejandro replied, “It sure explains a lot,” obviously thinking I'd turned into my own mother, at least as far as he was concerned. Clearly Nico had been listening in as well.

We continue driving in silence as I try to figure out how to distract Nico from his simmering fury.

When we reach the dentist, the hygienist asks Nico how he is, and he immediately launches into his grievances: “I was just here” he said. “My mother is bringing me back here for no reason whatsoever.”

Patiently I explain to Nico that he had indeed visited the dentist a few weeks ago when his brother had an appointment, but now it was his turn. “Could you tell him when he was here last?” I ask the young woman, and after she tells him it was six months ago, Nico grudgingly submits to having his teeth cleaned.

Then the dentist walks in and says, “Hi buddy, how are you?” Nico is happy to return his high five, but he isn't through complaining about me. “She,” he says accusingly, pointing at me, “interrupted my school work and made me leave early. She doesn't value my education.”

“Oh,” the dentist replies, clearly taken aback while I flushed red. “Well, my son likes school a lot too.”

“Where is this coming from?” I wonder as we return to the car, and then I realize that although the logic is completely twisted, the words are all mine. I do emphasize my negatives especially about climbing the roof or skateboarding without a helmet with a “no excuses whatsoever” finale, and as a professor, I'm sure the terms “value” and “education” come up fairly often in my conversation as well.

By now I am as mad at Nico as he is at me, so when we get in the car and he wants to hear “Skippin' Stones,” I say no as emphatically and turn on Ella Fitzgerald to soothe my nerves, knowing full well that this is one kind of music I like and Nico doesn't.

Nico realizes it's not time to push me so he stays quiet for about five minutes. Then he asks where we're going since he sees we're not on the direct route home.

“To pick up Tomas,” I answer. “Oh great, we're picking up Tomas,” Nico repeats happily, clearly all over his tantrum at the dentist and glad to have the chance to tell his tale of woe to his older brother.

As I stop outside the Lotta Burger and let Tomas in, I too let go of my lingering resentment. I dial up Flypsyde's “Skippin' Stones,” and Tomas starts to sing along, “Cause I'm skippin' town I'm skippin stones.” I join in on the next lines --“I'm skippin' town. I'm skippin' stones.”

I glance in the rear view mirror. Nico isn't even going to complain about my singing. He is listening too intently. “Probably trying to catch the 'inappropriate' words,” I think to myself and smile.