We are the proud parents of a Wesleyan sophomore. Her older brother is a 2001 graduate of a competitor institution, so this is our second trip through the college years. Although our previous joint writing has been limited to an annual holiday letter, our "empty nest" in this past year has given us time to discuss the adult development of college students and to realize that our professions make it reasonable for us to offer advice that might be helpful to other parents. Eugenia is the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bucknell University, a college similar in size and complexity to Wesleyan; and John is a clinical psychologist whose clients include students from a variety of colleges and universities.

We recommend the book Letting Go by Karen Levin Coburn and Madge Lawrence Treeger, especially to parents whose first child is just beginning college. Letting Go prepares parents for new situations their child will confront and for how their parenting will have to change. Letting go is the difficult task of parents of college students, after years of watching over them, taking care of them, and sometimes pushing them to do their best so that they can "get into a good college." Now we can no longer watch over them. Nor is it appropriate that we do so. We literally have entrusted our children to their chosen institutions, such as Wesleyan. We have to back off, while being there to back them up when it is necessary.

To illustrate the need to back off, we share a story about our son who called late one night in his first week of college. Pretending we still had been awake, we tried to rise to the occasion by asking what he and his friends had been discussing. He told us that they had decided that they really could learn everything they needed from the World Wide Web and that college was useful only as a credentialling process to get them into graduate school or to get them a job. We started to argue the point, but he said, “You asked me what we were talking about; I didn’t say I needed advice or your help deciding what to think.” This strong assertion of independence was a surprise to us; but, fortunately, the story has a happy ending.

One week later, our son called again and said that he had raised the same issue with his faculty adviser. His adviser disagreed with him and argued that he was in college to learn who he was and to develop his knowledge and skills by making mistakes that would help him grow intellectually. Our son was then thinking of himself as a playwright; his adviser began by pointing out the disastrous consequences of putting on a bad play in New York City in contrast to the college experience, in which his professors would ask him what he had learned from his failures and expect him to improve. His adviser restored his excitement about college by convincing him that this was true of his academic experiences in general.

If you want your daughter or son to be an independent thinker by graduation, you will have to back off enough to let her or him gather information from a variety of sources and come to her or his own conclusions—and you will have to have some faith in your child and in the institution even when the starting point seems a little off base. Although it isn't always the case at larger schools, Wesleyan is an institution that offers significant help to your child in thinking through important issues such as choosing courses, choosing a major, and deciding what to do after college. It's still hard for parents--because your child used to have such conversations with you. How can you know now (from a distance) how these conversations are going?

Legally, young people over 18 years of age are adults; and colleges and universities long ago decided to treat them as such instead of acting in loco parentis.  Wesleyan's Handbook for Parents states that, "In accordance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, the 'Buckley Amendment,' Wesleyan does not release students' grades or other educational records to parents or guardians without students' written permission." This can be frustrating, particularly since you probably are paying much of the bill and feel entitled to information about the education you are financing. But it is the law and, we believe, also best for students. In the summer before our daughter began at Wesleyan, we received a letter from the Dean of the College with a long list of resources that parents should encourage their daughters and sons to use if they needed help at Wesleyan. Note both the helpful resources that are available and the expectation that the Wesleyan student himself or herself will make the contacts. Although parental encouragement often is needed, students grow up more during their college years if they take responsibility for their choices and behavior and for finding solutions to their problems.

You need not be "clueless." Keep in touch, by whatever means work best in your family. One of our children likes and responds to daily emails, bolstered by one long telephone conversation each week. Our other child uses email less frequently and doesn't like long pre-planned phone calls with both parents, but likes to keep in touch with frequent, brief calls that may catch only one of us or even just the message machine. We make sure that they know how to reach us wherever we are and that they know that we are always available to them. If they send us their papers or proposals or the web addresses for things that might interest us, we read those offerings and respond.

WesMaps makes it possible for us to keep up with courses that our daughter mentions as options for the next semester and discuss them with her if she asks our opinion; and we can check graduation requirements on the web, too, to help her consider how she might combine various interests and study abroad, for example. However, we feel it would be overstepping if we were to seek out courses that she might like and suggest them to her; part of the college experience is trying on different subject matters and allowing one's interests to change, develop, and coalesce in ways that aren't always predictable. We are strong supporters of a liberal arts education that encourages exploration, and our predictions of what is just right for our daughter might keep her from changing or force her to conform to our expectations rather than to develop as her own person. Our son did not take the one course his parents agreed, on the ride home after we left him for his freshman year, would be most important as a way of viewing the world-- and it didn't matter. He learned how to think and how to learn and can make up for any deficiencies in content areas as he continues his life-long learning.

What about times when things aren't going well? As parents, you are used to being advocates for your son or daughter and to representing his/her interests in front of authority figures. You probably are more comfortable having such conversations than your child is. But, what message does it send your son or daughter if you contact a university official to seek redress whenever he or she has a problem? If your child is in a situation where s/he needs to stand up for her/himself, you are communicating that you don't think s/he is competent to do so. If s/he is suffering unpleasant consequences of her/his choices or behavior, your intervention could send a message about evading consequences that is more detrimental in the long-run than the consequences themselves would be. It is understandable that parents are upset when their son or daughter fails a course or is on academic probation. Perhaps this is a self-serving message based on one of us often being on the wrong end of angry parental phone calls to the dean's office, but we do not think the parents and the university should be negotiating the student's future. Remember that it may not be legal for the university to even discuss the problem with you (and that it is not the university's fault). The university needs to work with the student; and the parents need to find ways to work with the student, too, but ways that support the student's efforts to work things out with the wider world.

This is not to say that parents are no longer needed once their child enters college. Your continued support and guidance is very important. In our next installment, we will deal with backing up your son or daughter--especially with the difficult decision of when to intervene and how to do so without undermining your college student's developing independence.