Parents

Fresh Start

Parenting Strategies –January 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Kay Kimball Gruder, SuccessfulCollegeParenting.com

 

Your student is largely just happy that the semester ended and now his or her focus is on how to retain independence while living back at home. Even with grades looming your student may seem only remotely curious about how he or she did - mostly because your son or daughter already has a pretty good sense of whether or not he or she did well or poorly.

While you are wondering about the past, your student is wondering about whether he or she can use the car tonight. While you are anticipating what you might say to your son or daughter about a poor grade or overspending, your student sees last semester as just that - last semester! Students view each semester as a distinct experience with the new semester offering a fresh opportunity to do better than the previous and to get one step closer to whatever is important to him or her - taking a specific class, graduating, living off campus, having an internship, studying abroad, etc. Your student will rarely have the same professors when the next semester rolls around, and other aspects of your student's college experience may change as well - roommates, housing, friends, etc.

When you seek to have productive conversations with your student, consider talking about the future. If you are looking to have your student dig in his or her heels or express indifference then start talking about the past. Clients often ask me, "Well does that mean that I can never address the past with my child?" The strategy is to incorporate the past by talking about the future. Don't focus on the bad grades of last semester, but rather focus on helping your student to articulate what he or she can do differently this semester. Don't focus on how your student overspent his or her personal budget, but rather guide your son or daughter to make some extra spending money or to use different strategies to moderate or monitor weekly spending. And please, don't be surprised if the same patterns from high school surface in college. If your student wasn't particularly good in a subject in high school, he or she probably won't become an "A+" student in that same subject in college. Let's face it, there is often limited benefit to asking your son or daughter why something occurred. Your son or daughter will always have reasons for why things happened and it will rarely be because he or she "messed up". It will be because "You have no idea how hard the class was, or how much things cost, or how bad the professor was."

Interestingly, most children do recognize when they have made mistakes or poor decisions, but are averse to admitting it to a parent. So you have a choice: do you want to enter into the battle of convincing your son or daughter that he or she was wrong? Consider being less interested in the "why" and more interested in helping your student to figure out the "how" - how to make it better, how to avoid the same mistakes, how to do it differently, but without giving lots of attention to what was.