Several years ago, I was dropping my first kid off for his freshman year of college. The actual moment of our separation, the moment they asked the incoming freshmen to exit through the door to join their freshman orientation groups is still a moment that makes all five of us family members cringe. Nothing can prepare you, and yet you’ve spent every moment for eighteen years preparing; how can that be? He rose from his chair and walked toward the door: the same boy who rose from the floor at fourteen months (thirteen and a half if you consult his baby book) and walked toward us for the first time. We parents and siblings were left in an uncomfortable silence afraid to establish eye contact. Luckily, the room full of parents was promptly guided to our next activity; we went to the basketball gym to hear the President of the University speak.
It’s rare when you hear someone speak and years later you can still remember almost exactly his precise words. The esteemed university president did some gentle parent mentoring that day in a room that had National Championship banners and Rhode Scholar plaques.
“Raise your hand,” he said, “if you’ve just dropped off your first child at college today.” And many of us did.
“Dear parents,” he continued, “you’re going to get a call, maybe in a week, maybe in a month, and your Johnny is going to call with a problem. You need to get ready.”
We chuckled; all of us are used to solving problems. We’re parents after all, right? We’ve hovered and helicoptered and smoothed the path for years and years.
And then he said, “Repeat after me, ‘Well Johnny…”
And the room of family members dutifully repeated, “Well Johnny….” And we smiled our amused smiles.
And here he surprised us a bit by asking us to repeat a bit more. He continued….. “Well Johnny, it sounds like you have a problem, what are YOU going to do about it?”
And a stadium full of people responded with this in turn, “Well Johnny, it sounds like you have a problem, what are YOU going to do about it?”
The point, of course, was that we are trying to raise adults who can handle their own problems. We’ve helped them in every single way we can but sometimes not in the way that would help them the most. Sometimes we need to NOT help them.
The speech was still echoing in my ears a few short days later when my son made one of his first calls home. He’d tried to register for classes and some silly piece of paper asking for our health insurance information hadn’t been turned in, or hadn’t been logged correctly at the school, or a box hadn’t been checked by accident, and he had not been allowed to register for classes with his classmates. He’d been pulled to the side, and eventually, when the error was discovered, he was allowed to register. Unfortunately, some of the classes he’d wanted were now full. He was “forced” into intermediate violin (which is pretty hilarious given that he’d taken one year of french horn in middle school) so that he’d “have a schedule” in the hopes that he could add/drop later on the advice of the registrar. I felt the old familiar stirrings inside, “I’ll fix this; we pay good money for tuition; they’re not going to do this to MY kid…”. And I dug deep and said, “Well Johnny, it sounds like you have a problem, what are YOU going to do about it?”
Julie Rothfeld
Immediate Past President
Parenting Matters