How to Help Your Soon-to-Be College Freshman Behave Like an Adult
Every college parents wants his or her child to become a successful adult. Even if you think your parenting is good, you likely have some concerns. You see areas in which you would like your soon-to-be college freshman act more like an adult.
How can you foster adult behavior in your college freshman to be? Although I’m no parenting expert, as a college professor I’ve noticed a specific areas that separate struggling college freshmen from the well-adjusted ones. Strive to implement these 4 habits in your parenting!
Let your child face his own failures.
Failure is difficult to watch without also stepping in to fix the problem, especially when your child is the one failing. You feel your child’s failure. You know all too well the consequences of poor decision-making.
While you wish you could step in and prevent him from failing, your child’s transformation into an adult will not happen if you remove consequences. Failure teaches your child lessons he would otherwise struggle to learn. Some of these lessons include taking responsibility, taking risks, having grit, getting back up, getting help, and discovering his limitations.
Removing obstacles or consequences does little to help your child face mistakes in the future. He needs to learn how to work through personal failures now in the somewhat controlled environment of college. Work to take a step back rather than step in. These times are learning opportunities for your child.
As a parent, you may take your child’s failure personally. Even if your freshman does not perform as well as you expect, know that his failures are not a direct reflection on you. Failure, although sometimes painful and even embarrassing, is often the greatest key to your child’s success.
As a teacher, I would much rather a student miserably fail a short quiz than bomb a test, paper, or project. Small failures can sometimes cause a necessary wake-up call to an overly-confident or unprepared student. The consequences are minimal and his grade can easily recover.
Rather than giving him a chance to retake quiz after quiz, I view a failed quiz as a painful reminder to study more or better next time. The student may not always appreciate my viewpoint, but in the long-run he or she benefits from this small failure. As much as I may want to give him another chance, I know that he will learn far more from this painful experience than he will ever learn from a talk with me.
Letting your child face his own failures is difficult. You want him to do his best and succeed all the time. However, sometimes the best way to ensure he succeeds is to allow him to fail.
Let your child solve his own problems.
Parents can be extremely concerned for their children’s rights. They can be protective and even slightly aggressive when they feel like their child is not being treated fairly. And, their wariness makes sense, because they deeply love their children.
Connected with facing failure is letting your child solve his own problems. As your child transitions into an independent identity, he needs to learn the valuable skill of problem-solving. Unfortunately there is no class that can fully teach this skill, rather he must learn problem-solving from experience.
If you continue to solve your new college student’s problems, you may be unintentionally communicating two things. First, you may be communicating that you will always be there to solve his problems. While you would love for that statement to be true, you know that you can’t always be there to help your child solve problems. Sometimes you will be unavailable by phone, other times you will unintentionally miss his calls.
When first arriving at college, your child’s first instinct may be to call you when he doesn’t know what to do. But as time goes on, your child’s first instinct should be to try to solve his own problem. You can’t answer every phone call, even if you want to.
Second, you may be communicating you don’t believe your child can (has the ability to) solve his own problems. If your child is more independent but struggles with confidence, he may believe that your attempts to help him show that you don’t believe in him. Your motives and thinking are not at all doubting his abilities, but he might get that impression when you are quick to step in and help.
Circumstances certainly will arise in which you need to step in, but most of the time your child can figure out how to handle his problems. He just needs some practice, so let him practice problem-solving at college. His campus has plenty of resources to guide his problem-solving.
Let your child struggle.
This statement sounds heartless, right? As a teacher, I struggled helping a certain types of students. One of these types was the type who really didn’t try before asking for help. While I wanted students to approach me when they needed help, I knew that assisting this type of student caused more problems in the long-run.
As your child begins college, he will find that there are many things he has no clue about. Not only will he come to appreciate all you do for him on a regular basis, but he will also be tempted to call you before he attempts to figure things out on his own. In the first few weeks, this may seem fairly harmless, but as time goes on his constant calls may be frustrating.
Rather than picking up every time, consider allowing some of these calls to go to voicemail. Why? Your unavailability causes him to search for the solution. Instead of relying on you to always provide the right answer, it will cause him to do some searching.
One way to help your child without providing the solution is to ask questions. Basic how, when, and what questions usually work in most situations. Questions help guide him as he looks for the solution but allow him to go through the process of finding the answer he needs.
These kinds of questions can help your student get from struggling to finding the solution:
What do you think you should do?
What are your options?
How can you plan ahead to prevent putting yourself in a tough spot again?
If another student came to you with this problem, what advice do you think you’d give him or her?
Sometimes little struggles lead to great triumphs. Although watching your child struggle may be frustrating, this struggle is teaching him skills he needs as an adult. Help your child succeed by allowing him to struggle.
Let him advocate for himself.
Now that your child is an adult, he needs to start learning to advocate or stand up for himself. Unfortunately, the world today is far from fair. Your child needs to learn how and when to speak up, and the time to learn this skill is now.
Per FERPA laws, your child’s grades are no longer accessible by you without your child’s permission. Your child’s college cannot tell you how your freshman is doing in his classes. In addition, contacting professors about grades is typically prohibited. While you may have been heavily involved in your child’s academic performance in high school, you cannot have the same level of involvement in college.
Your child needs to know how to contact a teacher and when he should do so. If he doesn’t understand instructions or wants to contest a grade, he needs to learn the appropriate way to initiate these interactions. If he is having roommate issues or struggling with low grades, he needs to know where he should go to get help.
You can help guide him to campus resources or help proofread an email, but allow him to learn how to speak for himself. If he doesn’t learn this skill in college, he will struggle in his career or long-term relationships. These skills don’t happen by accident, they require constant exercise.
You don’t want your new college student to grow up too quickly, but he’s quickly becoming an adult. Help him behave like an adult by letting him face his failures, solve his problems, struggle, and advocate for himself. These habits can help him develop into the successful, well-functioning adult you dreamed he would be.
