My daughter saw a mouse in her dorm room — what should she do? What brand of rain boots should I buy for my student? Should I hire a private service to wash my child’s clothes, or teach them to do their own laundry?
When my older brother decided where to go to college four years ago, one of my mom’s friends sent her a link to something no one in my family had ever known existed: an admitted students Facebook page. Not for the students. For the parents.
It was full of posts from stressed-out parents commiserating, ranting, and asking many specific and overbearing questions: What were the specs of a certain dorm room? How can I get access to my kid’s grades? Do I need to get my child to sign something to get access to his medical records?
Facebook is now home to hundreds of groups specifically for parents of college students. Most of these groups are private and have thousands of members. To join, the volunteer administrators usually require proof of a student’s admission, like screenshots or scans of an admissions letter for a page administrator to review. These pages appear to be run by parents themselves, not the colleges, and passed down from parent administrator to parent administrator as students graduate.
Should I know your child hasn’t made any friends?
While many posts are about more practical matters, like what appliances are allowed and the need for mattress toppers, some parents are sharing detailed posts about a student’s lack of friends, mental health and other struggles — with thousands of strangers.
There are also posts from parents expressing their deep grief and sorrow about their child leaving home, and their fear that they and their kid will not be able to handle this new stage of life.
“Parents are … showing videos of themselves crying, where they drop off their kids. Like, they’re showing very skewed perspectives of extremes,” said Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, a Toronto area-based psychology and education behaviorist and author. “The vast majority of what we see anyway is the fact that like, yes, there’s big feelings and yes, there’s transitions, but it’s not nearly as extreme as what’s presented in social media.”
It’s true the transition from high school to college can be a taxing and scary time for students and parents, as I experienced last fall. But I think the Facebook groups, while answering some questions, overdramatize the experience of sending a kid off to college. While a few of my mom’s friends said the groups could occasionally provide helpful information, they also said it created unnecessary stress about the big change.
The scary transition to independence
Young adults living away home, without a highly structured school day with classes and extracurriculars dominating most of their time, are going to make mistakes. How could they not, with new professors, classes, friends and social expectations? Things often don’t go according to plan. That’s when some parents post about those struggles, trying to help solve the problems themselves.
When parents parachute in, they’re sending a message that their child can’t learn to fix problems themselves, according to Hanley-Dafoe. “It rocks the person’s confidence and their efficacy, which is their belief that they’re able to do things,” she said. This belief is vital for a student to do well in college and the rest of their life.
I giggled when my mom read out a post about a kid losing his expensive coat at a party, and his worried father asking hundreds of other parents to ask their children to check their closets to see if they accidentally took it. Then I cringed a little, because that son is a real person who might not even know his father is spreading his dirty (or in this case, lost) laundry all over the internet.
As my brother told me before I went to college, a little mystery can be a good thing. There is no mystery, or even basic privacy, when your worried parents are broadcasting your lost mittens or failed midterm exam to 5,000 people on a Facebook page. College students should not have to worry about their parents embarrassing them to an audience of thousands. And I should not know about another student’s personal struggles from their parent’s post.
Why are these pages so popular with parents?
The transition to college, especially freshman year, can be incredibly hard for students and parents. It was for me. By all measures everything went well, yet I was still painfully homesick for my entire first year. And there wasn’t much my parents could do, especially from hundreds of miles away. But they helped in little ways, like calling me, and I found ways to mitigate my struggles myself.
“If you are kind of an obsessively involved parent, it scratches that itch for you,” said Dr. Lynn Lyons, a Concord, New Hampshire-based psychotherapist, of the Facebook parent groups. “And if you are not, and you venture into that world, you can be very easily convinced that you are not doing enough, that you should be monitoring your kid, that you should be decorating her dorm room.” Lyons is the author of “The Anxiety Audit: 7 Sneaky Ways Anxiety Takes Hold and How To Escape Them.”
Parents need to shift from parenting up close to parenting from afar. Some parents are just not making the necessary change, according to experts.
“We’re starting to see parents who have become extremely involved in the decision-making and the critical thinking for a lot of our young adults,” Hanley-Dafoe said. “Sometimes, we’ve done our students a wee bit of a disservice by not letting them figure things out on their own.”
What should parents do to help?
During my move-in day last fall, parents were unceremoniously separated from their kids at 3 p.m., when the new freshman class went to a ceremony on the football field and parents were told to leave campus. I came back to my half-set-up single room and finished unpacking myself. I had no plan and no roommate to go with me to events. A day later, I left on a backpacking trip for orientation. Even though it was superhard in the moment, I’m glad I was forced to just figure things out on my own.
Many parents “have a really hard time tolerating their children’s distress, and so they don’t give their child the opportunity to tolerate their distress, right?” Lyons said. “But the ability to get through tough stuff on their own is a hugely important skill. The way that you know that you will be able to handle a tough transition is because you just got through one.”
Now, that’s not to say parents can’t show up and give helpful advice. My mom visited several times, for parents’ weekend or for my choral concerts. It was comforting to have set dates when I knew that I’d get to see my mom, so that when my homesickness was at its worst, I could remind myself that it was only two weeks or so until I would see her again.
I also called my parents for troubleshooting and advice. They were the ones to tell me that it was a good idea to make an appointment with my adviser to select classes, to go to office hours and to not worry about finding my best friends within the first week. A lot of problems I still handled on my own, and sometimes it really sucked. But I made it through, and now I know I can do it again. Other kids can, too, without their parents interfering on Facebook groups.
The-CNN-Wire
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