Dealing with Your College Freshman

"I got my grades!" you hear someone shout and you make your way into the kitchen to see your home-from-college student tearing open a letter. She looks at it, then offers the paper with her grades on it to you with a huge grin. You look down. 2.5, 2.7, 3.5, 2.0, 3.2 . You look back up. "Is that all?" You ask, surprised your child isn't getting all A's. After all, you're forking over close to 15,000 dollars a year for their education, and your daughter is satisfied with a 2.0? "Good job baby."

A few minutes later, you find yourself asking about her job interviews. She claims she's been looking everywhere for a job, but she just hasn't had any luck at all. She doesn't seem to want a job. She seems annoyed whenever you ask her to do something - like its pulling teeth. Doesn't she want to be home?

So, what exactly is running through her head? Let's say she's been at college, living there, for two semesters now. She's home, she's either 19 or about to turn 19. She just fought through the hardest fifteen weeks of her life - papers, labs, projects, plus a social life - and the moment she gets home, you want her to do the dishes. Take out the trash. "You can take care of the house now, you're old enough." You insist to her. She misses her college friends. She looks at her friends from high school, and something has changed - her, or them, or maybe both sides. She still enjoys hanging out with them, but lets face it: there is something different.

At college, students are able to stay up until three in the morning, with music, and lights. If they have a question, they might run next door to see what their other friends think, who are stuck on the same problem. The college kid's day starts at 10. At home? Everyone is up and out of the house long before any of us college students dream of being awake. But, along with this college kid's day starting later - there is an immense amount of information overload taking place. The child who left you has come back a lot smarter, and doesn't know what to do with their now idle mind. They might take their 'I'm bored' "self", out to run, or to play video games, or to even just stare at a wall, lost in a day dream. The sudden release of stress is stressful, in itself. You may find your college kid is more solitary, or vastly more socially oriented than they were before. Don't worry about it.

At college, if we're hungry, we order takeout at midnight. At college, there are no pets, or little brothers and sisters, or parents. We are not expected to show up for dinner at a certain time, or begin to be quiet at 8pm. Now, instead of limiting social interactions to the peers, your college kid is forced to deal with the family on an every day basis. The intricate social interactions - agreeing with everything your mother says; censoring your words around the small children - can become taxing until acclimated.

At college, the room got cleaned when beer got spilled over everything or you couldn't walk around without stepping on a high heel. The expectation to vacuum or sweep the floors boggles the mind of the fresh-at-home student, who doesn't see anything wrong with the house's state. After all, it would take a month to get a soda spill out of the fridge. What's the matter with a couch cushion out of place?

I know that when I got home from college after this first semester, I felt drained, and trapped. Even now, a few weeks away from returning, I feel like a caged animal. I roam the streets at college - with my friends, exploring. Now, the biggest adventure has been going out to a restaurant with my parents. My brain is still struggling to adapt to not having to read chapters and chapters of textbooks, memorize them, analyze them, and spit it back out to the professors.

Give your kid a break - they worked hard. Yes, they should be getting a job. And yes, they should help around the house. But, give it some time. Treat them as an adult - the way they're treated at college - and not the way you treated them when they were in High School. Your student, in this one year of college, has absorbed more information and made some pretty difficult choices, and you weren't there to hold their hand. In fact, I doubt that your student would ever want to tell you some of the things they've done, or thought of doing, or watched.

Value them - it might not be long before they turn to you, and say, "I'm getting an apartment with a few friends." And then, your family time might just be limited to Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and the fourth of July.