Preparing Your Child Emotionally for College
The time has come for your child to go off to college. You have helped with the financial aid forms, visited her future college and bought a new laundry basket and filled it with dorm essentials. By most accounts, you are ready! But is your child prepared emotionally for beginning a new life away from her family, making decisions on her own and dealing with the new pressures that college brings? Are YOU prepared for your new role in your child’s life?
Dr. Rick Hanson, director of counseling services at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, has some advice for parents as they prepare for their child to go to college. Parents should be encouraging their children to be emotionally independent, self-reliant young adults while they are still in high school. Young adults should be comfortable making decisions for themselves and knowing when to ask for assistance. They should take responsibility for their own choices and actions rather than shifting responsibility to peers or parents, and they need to recognize problems and initiate action to solve them on their own.
But how can parents help their teenagers become self reliant and independent? Hanson compares the emotional preparation process to the process of teaching your teenager to drive. When you teach your child to drive, you first teach by example--your child has observed your driving habits through years of riding in the car with you. But that is not enough for you to pass your keys over to him. You also have to have conversations about driving and talk to him about what to do in different situations behind the wheel. And then you have to let him practice in safe environments like empty parking lots and quiet neighborhoods while you observe. Eventually you let him take the wheel and make his own decisions and hope that your preparation and teaching pays off.
According to Hanson, this is the process parents should use when preparing their children for college. Many parents have such a desire to protect their children and to shelter them from disappointment and failure that they end up being overprotective and over-engaged. Instead of providing input into decisions, all choices are driven by the parents: what the child wears, who they are friends with, what activities they participate in, where they go to college. A parent should definitely have a voice in these matters, but that voice should be one of questioning and conversation rather than direction. As the high school years progress, parents should shift from problem solvers to sounding boards, encouraging their children to figure out their own solutions to challenges that arise.
Will they be ready? Chances are, yes. “Having worked with college students for the past 20 years, most of the 18-year-old students arriving on campus are semi-autonomous, novice decision makers who will reliably get some things wrong,” Hanson says. “They are confronting novel situations with little or no parental input, surrounded by other 18-year-olds. As foreboding as this may sound, most young adults do pretty well. Guided by their own goals and aspirations, they incorporate the training received over the past several years and learn from their mistakes. Most don’t get enough sleep, don’t make nutritious choices at the cafeteria, aren’t as organized as they could be and may even forget to do homework or study for a test. Like learning to drive, they take a corner too sharp, brake too hard, or forget to put on the blinker. But they learn and they get better. The more parents have done in ‘driver’s training’--allowing their child to progressively take on more responsibility and more decision making--the better prepared and more confident both parent and child will be when the college years arrive.”
Sara Keenan is a mother of two who works at Rockhurst University. She is very happy that her two kids are still 10+ years away from college so that she has plenty of time to prepare herself emotionally! Special thanks to Dr. Rick Hanson for his contributions to this article.