I have read many of the logical articles about how to steer your ‘adult’ child out the door to college or into the massive, complex world in general. All of the tips make sense! One article—and one that is on the top of any launch list—details the six legal forms you need to execute to help manage your adult child through anything from illness and accidents to financial issues. (Do this for sure!) Other articles talk about teaching your eager kiddo in those Spring pre-departure months how to microwave food. Sorry parents, if you have not clued them in on how to push the 2 minute button to heat last nights leftovers then you have far greater issues ahead of you! Same with doing a load of laundry. I have glanced at well meaning articles on how to help prepare your child emotionally to be ready to handle the move, the coursework and the loneliness of being away from the nest. All good stuff! But again, if you are doing all but the last one last minute, you may have far greater issues. By college, your hope and prayer is this: You raised your kiddo up right to manage life well, to understand timelines and deadlines, the importance of resilience and the basics of caring for their bodies and their belongings. You have hopefully parented for 18 years with the goal that one day your child’s decisions and morals operate well outside of your influence. That’s the hope. That we taught our kids well to manage themselves!
The logistical odds and ends we check off a list and the practical conversations about going to college are the easier stuff. Once college tuition gets paid and the first team jerseys purchased, information from the school of choice begins populating our physical and electronic mailbox. The essential nuts and bolts information continues to spew forth throughout the summer, spilling out in waves to all incoming freshman at any university in the march toward ‘moving day.’ If still your child feels untethered on Day one, there are many hand-holders to help them wade through a robust menu of facilities and programs to get them off and running in the first few months of higher learning. If they are curious, moral people with a modicum of self control—as is the goal when we raise our kids—then they will probably manage well without need for serious interventions.
In short, If you have not prepared your child for life in those first 18 years, then all the tips and tricks and available assistance is going to be all but useless. Sometimes we don’t find out until it’s too late just how many crucial elements went missing in the raising. We get blindsided when they don’t thrive once out of our watchful daily line of sight. Other times, you know they aren’t ready to launch, but you do it anyway out of sheer hope and ignorance. There were early signs of work left to be done in the rearing, sure, but nothing to make us think they would devolve into our worst nightmare—a school shooter or gang member/high school dropout. My insight is for the parent who has gotten to the end of junior or senior year and found your child spinning into a 180 from the responsible moral child you raised. Perhaps his unformed frontal lobe combined with erratic pre-adult hormones eradicated his ability to make good decisions. She appears to think she is bulletproof and untouchable by any manner of curve ball that life can throw to the stupid teen and acts out accordingly.
But just like the motivation for me to write Unconditional, (collect it for your library here), I invite you into another useful conversation about how we can easily mislabel our child's Senior year wild streak as sowing his oats. I thought he would at some point adhere to my attempts to thwart his self destruction and return to his sweet self ‘any day now!’ By the time we pulled out of the driveway loaded down with ‘stuff’ he would need for college, my child had taken a dark turn away from his values and into a detachment from caring about doing the right thing. I hadn’t seen that now he only cared about pushing the edges of cheap thrills that him walking a line between life and destruction.
Here are some things on a list of what I would do if I could return to my child's junior or senior year with understanding of the signs of non-thriving decline were all around me!