The Worst Advice I Got About Sending My Kid Away to College

It’s taken me a few weeks to get my head around the feelings of sending my first child away to college. It’s only about 30 minutes away, but it’s also, well, not home, where I’ve been seeing him every day, keeping him alive, for the past 18 years. So yeah, some feelings there. 

What started as sadness morphed into lingering discomfort, and it took a panic attack and emergency therapy visit (your girl always dramatic) to realize, I was actually anxious and angry. Angry at the expert articles I’d read, the tips I’d been fed, the well-meaning voices, and also, at myself for putting unrealistic expectations on a completely new and scary experience. 

The judgement and shaming that happens during parenthood doesn’t just stop at breastfeeding, or vaccinating, or front-facing car seats, or sleepovers, or cell phone age, or…. well, any of it. Great news, people will question and critique your parenting until the end of time, get excited!

So I just want to be very clear, if you’re here, keyboard all fired up to tell me about how I am wrong and this advice worked for your child, I want you to know I am giving you so many good job thumbs up right now, picture them just raining over you, like that meme of the girl having hotdogs thrown at her face, but I also want to just flat out let you know that this post? Not for you. 

Now, if you’re a new or soon-to-be new college parent and you find yourself side-eyeing or floating in the grey areas of the advice being thrown at you, I promise you, you’re not alone. 

I got a lot of tips from people when I told them my son was going away to school, and it was weird how many were rooted in someone else’s painful or shitty experience with going away to college. 

But there was one line in particular that really pissed me off, and I heard it over and over again:

Don’t let your kid come home the first month… two months… three months…

It’s this one, right here. Listen, I know why people justify this advice, because it forces kids to make connections in their new environments instead of escaping to the comforts of home. If a kid goes home every weekend, they must not be making new friends, or experiencing all the trappings of a glossy college brochure. And I get how this could be helpful for a specific kind of kid, but it’s not helpful for every kid.

Have you considered that sometimes kids just have balanced-ass relationships with their families and friends at home, and I can’t think of anything helpful about going no-contact with your home community while also learning and building a new one. They can co-exist.

My son moved in on a Wednesday, and Saturday night we met up with him and his roommates family for dinner, we walked around campus, he showed his siblings the buildings where he had classes, we grabbed dessert, and then we left and he went to a frat party until 2am. 

We brought him home for the long Labor Day weekend, and he spent one of the nights doing a live fantasy draft with his new friends. 

We aren’t Amish and it’s not Rumspringa. We aren’t tossing out 18 year olds to see if the temptation of freedom is stronger than the comforts of family. Rumspringa is an ultimatum. Going away to college is an expansion of community.You can have roots and wings, and frankly, maybe our college students would be mentally healthier if we led with that mindset. 

Here’s the advice I wish I’d had gotten from other parents: 

• Just talk to your kid like normal. Maybe it’s a daily text, or a funny snap, or a shared meme. This doesn’t just serve as proof of life, but a familiar routine in a new, scary place is comforting as hell. My kid and I talk every day because he loves telling me about his classes, and then I fill him in on his brother’s high school sports scores. Then he has dinner with his roommates, goes to the gym, and does other college guy stuff with friends until whenever. 
• Be fucking helpful. It’s not realistic for a kid to suddenly problem solve roommate drama with their RA without some guidance. It’s unfair to expect a kid who’s never made their own doctor’s appointment to know what to say at an urgent care when they’re alone and sick for the first time. Just because your parents didn’t help you, doesn’t mean you have to pay forward some ancestral abandonment medal at the tough-it-out olympics.It kills me to see anonymous posts in the college parenting groups because the author is terrified of having their ass eaten in the comments section as other parents fly in to scold them for intervening, asking for guidance, and not just letting the “now adult kid” figure it out on their own. 

  I promise, your kid isn’t going to drop out and live in your basement until he’s 40 because you helped him find the address of the closest pharmacy. He will, however, probably continue to share things with you and come to you for advice because you’re a trusted person in their life. Weird.

• Don’t expect your kid to be a whole new person at college. If they weren’t the life of the social group in high school, rushing greek life or joining a club might sound a little intimidating. I am 43, I have 4 friends and it took me decades to make them, maybe we pump the brakes on convincing our kids how easy it’s supposed to be to find your people in college, so it’s not so deflating when that doesn’t happen right away. And for the love of god, if your kid is telling you they are lonely, listen to them. 
• Take the pressure for this to work off your kid. What I want to say: “OMG this is so expensive, please for the love of god get good grades and be happy here.” Instead, I ask him about his classes, talk about how cool they sound, and at the end of the day, I make sure my kid always knows these three things: You can always come home. You can always commute. You don’t have to stay here. None of this is the end of the world in this house, and if it happens, it happens and we’ll deal with it. 

Sometimes going away to college is how you learn that your kid shouldn’t have gone away to college. This is a scary realization, fraught with guilt and feelings of failure. I can’t imagine being a kid that’s afraid to talk to my parents about this, especially if it’s met with platitudes about toughing it out until it gets better according to some arbitrary timeline or facebook group advice. 

Going away to college isn’t for every kid. Hell, going to college isn’t for every kid. And maybe, I don’t know, we could all stand to be a bit more gentle and adaptable during the weird process of making 18 year olds decide the rest of their lives.