Be an Aware Parent at College

The goal is to balance these opposing needs to help your child navigate through the sometimes stormy college years and help him or her avoid an academic and personal shipwreck. There is a compelling reason for making this effort: your child's educational ex­ perience depends on it.

What do you think is the biggest challenge facing your child today? Is it problems with sexual intimacy? Drug or alcohol use among peers? Choosing a major? Getting along with roommates? Before you answer this question, ask yourself if you have yet asked your child this question. The best way to find out what is on a person's mind is to ask. It is helpful to read this book and learn about the pressures on college students, but to use that information to help your child grow healthy and strong through the young adult years, you have to take time to find out your child's personal needs, challenges, fears, hopes, and expectations.

College is a time when we are asking our young adult children to think for themselves and develop emotionally and academically. Yet a big mistake we (parents, counselors, and administrators) make is trying to help, guide, and reach conclusions about them without the most important constituent at the table: the student. When we poll parents at student-parent orientation meetings, we find an enormous discrepancy between what parents think their students are concerned about and what students actually report. If you look at the factors that students themselves say impede ­ aca­ demic success, they are not the difficulty of classes, or poor scheduling, or bad professors; they are almost always health and emotional factors.

When asked in the National College Health Assessment in 2002 to name factors that affected their academic performance (received an incomplete, dropped a course, received a lower grade in class, on an exam, or on an important project), 31 percent said stress, 21 percent said sleep difficulties, 20 percent said concern for friend or family member, 15 percent said relationship problems, 14 percent said depression/anxiety, and 10 percent said alcohol use. Quite clearly, college difficulties are not solely caused by the challenging academic curriculum of higher education. Once you are tuned into that fact, you are in a far better position to be aware and prevent emotional and psychological problems from interfering with your child's education.
Student Thoughts

"I told my parents I needed to see a therapist when I came home over the summer. They found a good doctor, and I started going regularly. They never asked me anything about it. They're very hands off. When I asked them years later why they never asked any questions, they said they didn't want to interfere in my personal business and they figured that if I wanted them to know something, I'd tell them. Looking back now, I wish they had just talked to me even to say, 'If you want to tell us anything, we're here to listen.' I would have liked this kind of opening."

Here are some communication tips you can use to help support your child's mental health:

• Keep open communication going on a regular basis. If your child is free with the e-mails or text messages on her cell phone and loves to keep in close touch, that's great for both of you. But if your child chooses to try on independence by cutting off daily communication, make an effort to set up a regular contact time. You might suggest that every Sunday, for example, you will call to say hello.

Creating a communication routine is good for you because you won't feel intrusive when you call, and it's good for your child because if he were to stay out of touch for weeks on end and then need to talk about a problem, it would be too difficult to break the silence and admit he needs your advice.

• Let your child know that she does not have to protect you from her problems. You might assume she knows this, but it's something you should say out loud. You might say something like this: "I know  you expect to do well in your classes and make many good friends, but I want you to know that if you should ever want to talk about a problem or if you should feel unhappy or sad, I'm here to listen and support you. You don't ever have to hide your feelings from me. Okay?"

This is the kind of message that students tell me means a lot to them, but I've noticed that they are quick to forget those words of support when trouble hits. So say it once, send them off, and then remember to say it again and again as they move through their college years.

• Agree to disagree. When you find yourself going in circles with your child around the same point over and over, it may be time to accept the fact that you may always have different perspectives on the subject. In this case, you might try a new communication approach that does not focus on who's right and who's wrong. You might say, "Since we probably aren't ever going to agree about this, can we agree to disagree and find some middle ground?"

Sometimes that acknowledgment and suggestion alone will remove some of the emotional intensity. In black-and-white situations like deciding on a course of study, or whether to transfer to another school, or take a junior year abroad, or live at home, in a dorm, or an off-campus apartment, the goal is to think of some solution where you both can feel listened to and respected. For ex­ ample, if your concern is about academic performance because of a living situation, can you agree to a trial period with some expected results and consequences if the results aren't met? This kind of solution gives you both a part of what you want.

• Take a time-out. If emotions get out of hand while talking to your child, you might say, "We're probably too upset to talk about this right now. Let's take a break and come back to this discussion later." Then set a specific time to come back to the discussion, and be sure that you do. If you don't follow up, you give the opposite message: you are going to sweep this under the rug or don't take it seriously.