Home is Not Necessarily A Problem

Parents of college students who live on campus have likely heard the advice — often represented as an unbreakable rule — that their children should not come home until at least the October break (which usually coincides with Columbus Day), if not Thanksgiving. This was also what I was told back when I was a student, a million years ago.

I have seen much suffering come from this pronouncement — suffering that I consider to be unnecessary. 

The general idea behind this “rule” is that living away from home for the first time is such a big transition for most students, such a big life change, that many of them struggle to adjust in a good and healthy way. Declaring a moratorium on visiting home until the October break is an attempt to help the transition happen in the quickest, healthiest, most efficient way; it’s “cutting the apron strings” or “quitting home and childhood cold turkey.”

Throughout my entire motherhood I’ve not tended to be a fan of the cold turkey method. Rather, “weaning” has seemed the wisest course of action in many/most cases — an often slow but fairly steady withdrawing from whatever the thing is that the child needs to withdraw from. The term is most familiar with breastfeeding, but I’ve used a weaning mindset for everything from being done with pacifiers to moving to a big boy bed to eating more “real food” at dinner to any number of things during my boys’ growing up. Often weaning can have a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of progress. Often weaning can feel painfully slow. Always, in my experience, weaning results in eventual success — eventual achievement of the goal — with a fairly minimal amount of unnecessary suffering for the child. 

Weaning is the approach I would advise when it comes to helping your college-resident children adjust to living away from home, as I believe keeping open ties to home can provide a necessary safety net during an intense and often scary life change. I’ve heard heartbreaking stories about students who are desperate to come home for a visit and their parents — who themselves want their kids home more than anything — trying to do “the right thing” by saying no (and kudos to them for trying so hard to be good parents!). Goodness knows that sometimes making the hard decision is the right thing, but sometimes making a hard decision just makes things unnecessarily harder and sadder for all involved.

I now have two children in college, and though my husband and I have strongly encouraged them to stay on campus for at least the first weekend, and strongly suggest staying on campus at least every other weekend, we won’t tell them they can’t come home. It’s actually kind of crazy to me to think of all the decisions that are now left to these “new adults” — decisions about money and academics and the general course of their lives, big-deal things that are seriously serious, stuff that often involves information that parents aren’t allowed access to unless these same new adult children give them permission — but they’re not allowed to decide whether or not to go home for the weekend? I work on a college campus and regularly hear about the need for safe spaces for students — but home is apparently not allowed to have that designation?

Of course, there are valid reasons to push for staying on campus. I work for a particular college program whose students are required to stay on campus specifically because the probability of success for them is higher without distractions from home. For you, you know your child better than I do. Maybe you’re a hundred percent sure that yours is exactly the kind who needs stern, forceful encouragement — even a prohibition from coming home — to stay on campus so that the hoped-for transition does eventually happen. That’s between you and your child! I do also encourage you to allow your child to want to stay at school — if he or she is having a great time and not asking to come home, leave it be.

I know people who went home frequently *before they were supposed to* and who ended up being fine, successful, well-adjusted adults. I’d like to count myself as one of them — I had a very difficult first semester in college and being able to come home frequently felt like the only thing getting me through. At home, I was able to leave the stress of school behind and also fill up my emotional tank in preparation to go back. I eventually ended up loving my on-campus life and all it had to offer, and I’m so grateful I was allowed to get to that point at my own pace. I see my college boys finding a similar comfort in frequent visits home, while doing just fine while they’re on campus: they have great friends, they’re busy and involved, their grades are good. 

If you’re a parent of a first year college student who has leaned into the common advice that your child should stay at school until well into the first semester, I’m so happy for you that we’re nearly at Thanksgiving! What a wonderful holiday it will be for you all! And I wish all of my readers a very happy Thanksgiving!

 Kate and her husband have seven sons ages 20, 18, 16, 14, 12, 10, and 6. Follow her at www.facebook.com/kmtowne23, or email her at kmtowne23@gmail.com.