The Do’s and Don’ts of Parenting Kids in College
I am a professor getting ready to welcome a new freshmen class to campus.
I’m also a mom who just dropped off my youngest as he transferred from community college to a large regional university.
I study parenting adolescents.
College students and their parents have been much on my mind. After dropoff, I spent much of yesterday thinking about my son and resolutely not texting him. Why? I was trying to avoid some of the easy traps parents of college students fall into.
The Basics: The Goal Is Autonomy
For many U.S. students, college is a time of semi-autonomy where parents, professors, and professionals scaffold and support young adults while they make increasingly independent decisions.
They live away from home; make their own decisions about dress, food, sleep, and schedules; and navigate difficult choices about friendships and sex and safe and unsafe recreation.
This scaffolding—growth with support—is designed to help young people become stronger and develop adulting skills while keeping the guardrails in place. Mistakes will be made. Drama will ensue. But through this process, students should develop more skills and more confidence—including confidence that when things fall apart, they can get them back on track.
Avoiding Parenting Mistakes: Micromanagement and Hovering
Toddlers fall when they learn to walk. Then they get back up again, try new strategies, build new muscles, and make more mistakes. If we never let go of their hands and let them fall, they never learn and never have that glorious excited joy of running into our arms.
Hovering over young adults making big decisions about courses, friends, and activities communicates something important: that they are not capable of doing this on their own. That we care, but that we don’t trust them. How can they have faith in themselves if we don’t have faith in them?
New students should be learning their new environment: chatting with roommates, figuring out how to navigate the cafeteria, and finding their way to classes. They should not be thinking about their parents, reassuring you that they’re OK, or replying to your texts. Let them live in the moment and be where they are.
Letting students reach out to us instead of assuming they need help communicates trust and faith in their abilities.
Effective Scaffolding: Use College Support Systems
Colleges and universities have changed a lot in the last few decades. The biggest change is adding layers and layers of student support. Students are assigned advisors to help them choose courses.
This includes making choices that will move them toward finding a major, fulfilling graduation requirements, and making sure they don’t overload themselves. Going to college can be like visiting a candy and used book store: so much to choose from, and it all looks good! The advisor’s job is to remind students that they have lots of time for dessert and should pack in some good protein and vegetables.
Advisors can also direct students to resources. These include disability services and accommodations, mental health professionals, and career service offices. They can teach them how to effectively advocate for themselves and develop strategies for getting help when they need it.
When things go wrong, students can be so overcome with embarrassment or shame that they avoid talking to their professors, or they ask for help inappropriately. Advisors can help students move forward effectively.
Most colleges also offer workshops on study skills, library professionals to help students do academic quality research, writing and quantitative skills centers to plan and polish work, and mental health services.
One of the most effective ways parents can help is to encourage their students to take advantage of these resources.
Your job as a parent is not to step in and fix your student’s problems. It is to help them find the tools to identify and fix problems themselves.
Avoiding Parenting Mistakes: Shutting Down Communication
Monitoring is a core part of effective parenting during adolescence. Parents can’t give good advice, set appropriate rules, or establish sanctions if they don’t know what is happening.
The last two decades of research have really shown us that parents monitor most effectively by listening and encouraging kids to open up. That’s especially true in college.
How do you get them to open up? Don’t jump down their throats.
When adolescents and young adults have experiences they’re troubled by, talking about them helps them process their emotions, think through what happened, and discuss ways to avoid it happening again or to deal with the consequences.
Adolescents share experiences and keep talking when they can trust their parents to listen and help them through those processes. What shuts the process down? Judgment. Adolescents in my studies say one of the most common reasons they don’t share information with their parents is they think it will upset them. When parents react negatively, they now have two problems: their own feelings and yours. You may also add to their problems by increasing their feelings of shame or blame. None of those things are conducive to effective communication.
When kids open up, listen. You might even ask: Do you want to vent? Do you want support? Do you want help fixing it? Different people in different situations need different things. Give them what they need. Your job is to support them. You need information to do that. Help them talk.
Effective Communication: Let in the Sunshine
One of the things I noticed about myself is that I spent too much time talking to my kids about my worries (my kids would call this nagging). It wasn’t particularly helpful to me. It wasn’t particularly interesting for them.
One of my students, Yan Lou, did an honors project in which she studied the effect of chatting with parents on international students attending college away from home. They found that chatting was associated with increased stress. Why? Chatting didn’t help relieve student stress but talking to parents introduced new worries about what was happening at home and new stressors as parents added pressure.
Don’t do that! I have worked systematically to talk about non-nagging things with my kids. Asked them about things I know they’re interested in (I have become fluent in Dungeons and Dragons). Shared what I’m doing with my dogs. Talked about fun things we have in common.
In other words, I wanted hearing from me or getting a text to be something that they reacted to with a smile and not an eye roll. Keep it short. Keep it positive. Listen.
Avoiding Parenting Mistakes: Ignoring Clear Signals
College can be challenging, and many students can experience problems. Parents can be essential in identifying serious concerns about mental health, substance use or dating problems, and academic concerns.
I’ve had many students spin out of control because they don’t ask for help—or the right kind of help. I think this is especially common in students who have always sailed through things easily. They are hitting their first speed bumps. It is also common in students who have experienced many problems before. Times of change require new learning and strategies.
Physical illnesses are one of the most common reasons for students to drop classes, fail classes, or have to withdraw for a semester. A UTI or ear infection at the wrong time of year can throw a monkey wrench into an academic schedule. Most students have never had to manage their own medical care.
These are exactly the kinds of situations where a parent who is listening can help their students find help for themselves or—if the problem is serious enough—step in.
The Maximum of Challenge and the Maximum of Support
The great developmental psychologist, Urie Bronfenbrenner, would constantly quote Aleksei Leontiev, saying that what children need to thrive is the maximum of challenge and the maximum of support.
In other words, they needed to be encouraged to stretch themselves and do things on their own with the full faith that someone was there to catch them if they fell.
To me, that is the ideal parenting of college students.