How’s my kid doing? Certainly, this is the question most on the minds of parents who’ve dropped off a son or daughter at their new college or university, and have then made that (sometimes tearful) drive back home.
This certainly can be a moment of some ambivalence. We want our newly grown and flown student to be focused on their new college life, to be making friends, getting into their classes, and feeling at home on campus. But there’s a part of us that can miss our previous parenting stage of life and wish, even if just a bit, that they were still under our protective wings. Even though our rational side knows it is simply not to be.
What to do when your student calls and says that they are homesick
This double-consciousness can play out, especially, if we hear from our kid that they’ve encountered a problem or they’re just feeling a bit homesick (especially if they’ve left a dog behind!). Perhaps you’ve received a phone call from, say, your daughter who definitely sounds distressed. She’s in tears and just doesn’t know what to do about some situation she’s run into. She sounds totally lost. A parent’s natural first response can be to jump in the car and rush to help – to throw her a lifeline.
If you do get this phone call, please resist that impulse! In the vast majority of cases, dropping everything to help is exactly the wrong thing to do. Usually what happens is that the conversation ends, and then the parents don’t hear from their child again for a couple of days. So, they stew about it until their concerns overcome their reticence, and they call back. But this time, their student sounds fine. And if the parents happen to mention that unsettling earlier phone call, the student may barely seem to remember it.
Most of the time your child just needs to unload
Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. At that moment – during that disquieting earlier call – what your child was going through was fully real to them. Their feelings were entirely genuine. They very much needed to hear your voice and wanted to share with you whatever they were experiencing, to unload. Most of all, they needed someone who loves them just to listen.
But there’s so much going on in their new life, with experiences coming at them so fast and furiously, that they usually move on from such an episode pretty quickly. Your job is to give them the space to do that. If some helpful bit of advice occurs to you, don’t hesitate to offer it. But most likely, that’s not what your student is looking for.
As I said, what they really need is for you simply to listen. What they don’t need is for you to show up at their residence hall or apartment door and try to solve the problem for them – whatever it may be. In the vast majority of cases, they’ll be able to do just fine on their own, and they’ll likely learn some valuable problem-solving skills in the process.
But, as time goes on, if you do feel that something is going seriously wrong with your student – if the wheels really seem to be coming off in some way – it’s important to follow your well-honed parental instincts. But what’s the most effective way to do so?
What is the best way for parents to help their college students?
In the best of all cases, you were able to attend new-student orientation and participated in the sessions for parents. There you most probably were introduced to a roster of staff members and administrators from student affairs, academic affairs, and other areas on campus, who will become important allies and resources for your new college student. And if you couldn’t attend orientation, you can find that information on the school’s website.
Either way, you’ll see that today’s colleges and universities deploy an impressive array of offices and professionals whose job is to assist and support students, much more so than in former years (when most of us were in school). These positions include trained resident assistants (RAs) in dorms, academic advisors, peer advisors in the writing center, tutors, professional clinicians in the counseling center, and many others.
So, if you truly believe that your student has run into difficulty that they are unable to handle, please reach out to one of these administrators or offices. If you don’t know exactly whom to contact, get in touch with the office of student affairs or the office of student life (whatever that division is called in your child’s school), and talk with someone there about your concerns. They should be able to put you in contact with the appropriate person who is most able to help. And by the way, it’s almost never the president or chancellor’s office!
Direct your concerns about your student at the correct institutional level
The point is to direct your inquiry at the right institutional level: For example, if your student seems to be having serious personal or social problems (significant roommate conflicts, depression, anxiety, etc.), call the office of student affairs. But please don’t call your student’s RA. If your student has run into an academic problem they can’t seem to resolve, call the academic dean’s office (or, if there is one, the dean of first-year studies).
Please do not call your student’s professor or academic advisor directly. If there’s an issue with a sports team, talk with someone in the athletic director’s office, but please don’t contact the coach. The guiding principle here is that parents should avoid coming between their student and the college or university professionals the student needs to be working with on a regular basis. It’s imperative not to take those relationships out of your student’s hands.
Again, whomever you initially speak with should be able to direct you to the appropriate office or person. Talk with them, explain your concerns, and hear what they have to say. Then, let that person do some discrete checking to see if any kind of institutional intervention might, in fact, be indicated. Someone then should get back to you – either to assure you that things really are okay, or to let you know what they’ve discovered and what they plan to do.
College staff may be constrained by privacy laws
At the same time, please be aware that college or university staff members will often be constrained by legal privacy restrictions – some of which are mandated in federal laws (especially FERPA and HIPAA[1]) – that prevent their disclosing to you as much information about your student as you might (understandably) think you’re entitled to have.
For example, most colleges and universities will not automatically send you copies of your student’s grades. They typically offer your student the option to grant permission for them to do so, usually through the Registrar’s Office, but this requires the student to sign the appropriate authorizing form. These restrictions reflect one more significant difference between high school and a college or university.
Parents: trust your instinct
To summarize, for parents: In that rare instance in which your intuition tells you something is going quite wrong with your child, trust your instincts. But then contact the school at an appropriate level, and let the school’s administrators do their work – either to make sure there’s not a serious problem after all, or if there is, to let them do what they can to make things better.
The school should be prepared to partner with you in these cases. But as I’ve emphasized, in the vast majority of instances, it’s best to give your student the time and space to solve their own problems. Even if they seem to be struggling a bit, take the long view. Don’t deprive them of the opportunity to learn from the experience of dealing with a difficult situation as an autonomous adult. It’s time to let them go.
This essay is taken from Philip Glotzbach’s recent book, Embrace Your Freedom: Winning Strategies to Succeed in College and In Life (New York: Post Hill Press, 2024), which offers essential guidance for new college students and their parents.
[1] FERPA is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (1974), which protects the privacy of educational records; HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996), which pertains to the privacy of medical records.
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