Try a New Way of Communicating with Your Children at College

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Once our children have moved on into young adulthood, there are not many things we can physically do to keep them mentally healthy. We can't tuck them into bed insisting that they get a full eight hours of sleep each night and then prepare a nutritious, well-balanced breakfast in the morning. We can't call their professors to explain circumstances that may have made them unprepared for a test. We can't arrange play dates so they can make new friends. And we can't sign them up for extracurricular activities so they have a balanced schedule of work and play. So . . . what can we do?

The parental factor that most directly affects the mental health of a college student is communication. This may surprise you because I'm sure it seems as if your college-age children haven't listened to anything you've said for the last few years and it doesn't look promising that they will start again any time soon. But don't give up. College health surveys report that 72.5 percent of students say that they get most of their health information from their parents. They do listen, especially if you take time to think about the way you communicate.

Consider that the goal of communication with young adults changes when they are in college. Instead of communicating solely to tell your child what to do, now it's helpful to use your conversations to strengthen your connections. In his book Worry, Dr. Ned Hallowell explains why connections are so important to emotional health:

It is made up of the sum of all our connections: connections to our immediate family and extended family; connections to our past and our traditions; connections to our friends, neighbors, and colleagues; connections to institutions, organizations and country; connections to information and ideas and connections to whatever is transcendent, whether we call it Nature or God or some other name. This entity, the sum of all our meaningful connections, I call connectedness, and it is, in my opinion, the key to emotional health and the surest protection we have against the psychological ravages of worry.

I often see students who are overcome with worry because they have lost some key element of connection in their lives: relationships ending badly; disappointment at not getting a role in a play; coming out to one's family and feeling rejected; a realization that a life goal (becoming a doctor, musician, lawyer, or something else) is not really what one wants to do. But I've also seen how those with a strong connection to their families are better able to get past difficult periods and move on.

This is especially apparent when we consider what can happen to students whose family culture is less open to dialogue and conversation. I was recently told about a student from Pakistan who had been talking frequently about jumping from his tenth-story dorm room. When he told a friend at lunch that he "knew how much aspirin you need to take to kill yourself" and then left the room saying he had to stop at the pharmacy, a series of events were triggered. His frightened friend told a professor. The professor had been to a workshop about recognizing students in distress (a communitywide effort to educate faculty and staff). He recognized this as a serious problem and called me for advice. Because we already knew the student and were very worried, I contacted his therapist, and we agreed to call the police to take him to the emergency room for an evaluation. It turned out that he wasn't "imminently" planning to kill himself.