Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Going Home Again: Advice for College Students and Their Parents
By Lynne Gots, posted on May 15th, 2012.
Recently I’ve been hearing from many frantic parents of college students. The semester is coming to an end, and they’re worried. How will everyone adjust to being together again after a year of living apart? And they’re not the only ones looking ahead with trepidation to the long break. The students have their own worries.
So I’ve been mulling over the issues quite a bit, especially as I’m also anticipating the return of my own college student, who will be taking up residence in his old room for a few weeks—the longest stretch in a year—before he heads off again.
With approximately eleven summers as the parent of three college students under my belt, along with the semester breaks I’ve weathered with students in my practice, I’ve learned what works, and what doesn’t, to keep harmony. Here are my suggestions for parents.
1) Don’t expect things to be the same. Your child is a young adult now, and it’s normal for your relationship to change.
2) Talk to your college student at the beginning of the summer. You need to discuss your expectations about curfews, household responsibilities, use of the car, and checking in with you about comings and goings.
3) Lighten up on the rules. Within reason, your young adult should be in control of his own schedule and how he spends his time.
4) It’s not unreasonable to expect your son or daughter to get a job. But understand that finding paid summer work isn’t easy. Volunteering or taking classes to get some distribution requirements out of the way are other options.
5) If your student comes home with a new political perspective, unfamiliar dietary regimen, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs that differ from yours, have a conversation and try to understand her position rather than becoming angry and shutting down communication.
I asked my own kids—current and former college students themselves—what they’d like parents to know. They said, “Give us space! We’re used to having freedom and no supervision, so you shouldn’t treat us like we’re still in high school.” They also pointed out, “You feel like a totally different person when you come back from school, and you don’t want to go back to being your old self.”
It’s not one-sided, though. They acknowledged that college students should compromise when they’re at home. “We realize we’re not at school and different rules apply.”
Well put. I’m looking forward to having my son under my roof again for a little while. I’ve put fresh sheets on his bed and stocked up on his favorite foods.
I don’t expect any conflicts as long as he follows one longstanding, but oft-ignored, rule. He has to empty his suitcases and not leave them sitting in the middle of his room for the entire time he’s here. I know he doesn’t live at home anymore. But I’d rather not have the luggage out to remind me that he’s just passing through on his way somewhere else.
Tags: college students, Parenting, summer vacation
Posted in College, Parenting |
Getting into College: the Beginning, Not the End
By Lynne Gots, posted on April 21st, 2012.
It’s that time of year again. Spring pollen and college rejection letters are making lots of folks around here feel miserable.
“Gone to find God’s greater purpose” was what one high school senior Tweeted when he got rejected from Princeton. Since when did being denied admission to the Ivy League become fodder for an existential crisis?
Gaining entrance to one of the top-ranked, elite institutions is like winning a place on the Olympic team. They’re both extremely long shots, even with the most single-minded dedication and drive. And here in the DC metro area, which lays claim to the most highly educated population in the country, it’s sometimes hard to know who has more at stake, the teens or their parents. Many mothers and fathers who’ve made it to the top of their own careers treat parenting as one more arena where besting the competition means success. The gold medal is a decal from Ivy U. on the rear window of the Prius.
Yes, the university admissions process has gotten wildly out of hand. I’ve seen up close the damage caused by intense parental expectations—college dropouts who had great promise but couldn’t handle the pressure, high school valedictorians who swallowed bottles of Tylenol rather than face telling their parents about failing grades, former premeds who cut off all contact with their families because the weight of unfulfilled expectations were too much for them to bear. True, most young adults don’t buckle under the strain in quite such dramatic ways. But far too many have trouble maintaining their emotional equanimity and motivation after they leave home. College retention rates (only about 55% of students entering four-year undergraduate programs actually stay in school and earn their degrees in four years) testify to this disturbing trend.
A college counselor once shared with me his advice for making a student an attractive candidate for a selective university: “Be pointy.” He tells his clients to develop a talent that makes them stick out and then build the ever-important college resume around it. Having too many varied interests can seem dilettantish, which the consultant would say isn’t a sound marketing strategy in today’s hyper-competitive climate.
As a result, kids can’t just be kids these days. Those who show athletic promise are playing on travel teams before they’re out of elementary school. Their musical counterparts are competing for coveted seats in youth orchestras. Even the class clowns are refining their talents in summer theater camps with an eye on creating a compelling college admissions package.
In response to the push for teenagers to brand themselves as specialists, middle and high schools have created “signature” programs in the humanities, arts, science, and technology. While concentrating on one area of study may appeal to the highly directed student, pressures to choose a career path by the end of fifth or, at the latest, eighth grade may discourage the youngster with less defined goals from sampling a broad range of electives. I’ve known many kids who’ve enrolled in specialty programs not because they have a clear direction, but because they’re afraid if they don’t sign up, they’ll appear unfocused, unmotivated, or just plain uninteresting when they apply to college. And when they finally get there, they worry about their lack of passion in their chosen area of concentration.
It’s no wonder. Pursuing the carrot at the end of the stick is an example of “extrinsic motivation”—doing something for a tangible reward rather than for the pure pleasure of just doing it. Research has shown that this type of incentive isn’t as lasting as the internal, or “intrinsic,” kind. If you take away an extrinsic payoff propelling a desired behavior, the urge to continue working at it often dissipates.
Too often, kids who are engaging in activities primarily to amass accolades for the college resume develop a “What’s in it for me?” attitude at the expense of true intellectual curiosity. One young acquaintance of mine, a highly gifted student who devoted a senior-year biology internship to a biomedical research project that won him a prestigious award in a national science competition, has no plans to continue his scientific pursuits at the Ivy League school he’ll be attending next year. He doesn’t even take particular pride in his accomplishment, dismissing it as something he did just because “ it looked good for college.”
So pushing children to specialize at ever earlier ages can erode self-direction and lead to burnout. About seventy-five percent of college students experience uncertainty about their occupational goals at some point during their undergraduate education. Nearly half switch majors at least once. Shouldn’t we be encouraging adolescents to explore a variety of interests—to dabble, even—during high school, when their brains are still developing and their personalities still forming?
We’re asking too much of our kids. Few of us, even if we’re successful, ever achieve true celebrity status. Yet we expect the high school equivalent of superstardom from our progeny. It’s time to step back and get some perspective on the process of raising a competent adult. College admission is only a first step on the way to maturity and a fulfilling life, not the end of the road. And, hard as it may be to believe for all the high school seniors (and their parents) whose hopes have been dashed this month, a rejection from Harvard or Penn isn’t the end of the world, either.
Tags: college admissions, Parenting, stress
Posted in College, Parenting |
So You Want Your Kids to be Healthy Eaters
By Lynne Gots, posted on April 9th, 2012.
In my last post, I took Dara-Lynn Weiss to task for the tactics she used to get her seven-year-old daughter to lose weight. I was speaking as a psychologist, having treated many (mostly) women with clinical eating disorders and also those with what’s been called a “normative discontent” about their bodies.
But I’m a mother, too, and I often grappled with how to promote healthy dietary habits in my own kids, now all in their twenties and no longer within my direct sphere of influence, dietary or otherwise. Looking back, I can see that some of the ways I tried to nourish them were sound. But I also made my share of mistakes, vacillating between acceding to their pleas for sugary snacks and trying to implement stricter food rules. So in the spirit of the parenting confessionals that have become so popular these days (book deal, anyone?), I’ve decided to go public with some of my experiences.
I fed my first baby no processed foods or sweets. She was a paragon of healthy eating—until she turned one, that is, and got her first taste of homemade birthday cake (carrot with cream cheese frosting, which she still requests to this day). She stuffed fistful after fistful into her mouth before she fell dead asleep in a sugar coma, head on the tray of her high chair and face smeared with cream cheese and crumbs.
I was a little more lax with my second daughter, choosing ease of preparation over nutritional value. As a result, she became hooked on frozen fish sticks. I once tried preparing a more wholesome version from scratch with cod and breadcrumbs. But, then as now, being in possession of a highly discriminating palate, she rejected the substitute.
It was all down hill from there. By the time the third kid came along, convenience foods had completely infiltrated my kitchen. Graham crackers and juice boxes were easy to feed my toddler in his car seat as I chauffeured his two older sisters to school and gymnastics. McDonald’s became a too frequent destination. So it’s no wonder my son’s first two-word sentence was “mo’ soda.”
When my kids were in elementary school, I instituted a radical approach I’d come across in a book somewhere. Tired of the nightly dinner table whining (“Can we have dessert now?”), I decided to start serving dessert with dinner—peas, potatoes, chicken, ice cream, all together. The rationale was to give every food group equal status, making dessert just one component of a meal rather than a reward for a clean plate or good behavior. If the kids didn’t think of sweets as forbidden fruit, maybe they wouldn’t go so crazy over them. It made sense to me at the time, and it worked. Or so I thought.
The experiment didn’t turn out as I’d hoped. One day my daughters pulled me into the family room and gleefully showed me what they’d unearthed from behind the couch cushions: a stash of empty, crumpled candy wrappers big enough to have filled all the Trick or Treat bags in the neighborhood. Their brother was busted, and we went back to serving dessert in the conventional fashion.
The unintended outcome didn’t dissuade me, however, from trying a similar method with each of them when they were high school seniors, only this time with beer and wine instead of sweets. I hoped that letting them see how an alcohol buzz feels—while in the safety of their own home (and legally, in our county)—would make it unnecessary for them to turn drinking into an act of teenage rebellion. For the same reason, a consortium of college presidents has been advocating lowering the drinking age to eighteen. So I offered them the occasional glass of Cabernet or a bottle of IPA during holiday dinners. Although I’m not suggesting this approach would be appropriate for all teens, particularly those with a family history of alcoholism or those with impulse-control problems, it worked pretty well with mine. To my knowledge, with the exception of a few embarrassing, alcohol-fueled incidents in their collective histories, they’ve all turned out to be fairly responsible drinkers.
As for eating, they’ve each developed their own distinct preferences, some healthier than others. My oldest daughter has been a vegetarian since she was thirteen, more out of compassion for animals than from a desire for greener eating. She relies heavily on frozen dinners from Trader Joes, which she microwaves in the tiny kitchen alcove of her studio apartment while she’s hitting the books. My middle daughter, the erstwhile fish stick connoisseur, is my culinary soul mate. We swap recipes, and she’s introduced me to her favorite food blogs and restaurants. My son favors red meat, a taste he can indulge often in Austin with Texas barbeque.
And he still loves chocolate.
Tags: dara-lynn Weiss, healthy diet, Parenting
Posted in Parenting |
