Don't yield to worries on lives of new 'adults'

THOMPSON E-mail: Click here

© St. Petersburg Times
published June 1, 2002

On one side of the cake was an icing photograph of a little girl, a baby really, and on the other side a photograph of a beautiful young woman. Congratulations, it said, as so many cakes will say this weekend. It struck me that the two pictures on this graduation cake are illustrative of what's going on in the minds of the parents of these young people who've put high school, and home, behind them and are going off to college.

The graduate looks like a young adult, but the parent knows better: The graduate is really a child, a baby really. Which is why in the past few weeks this year -- as well as in other years -- parents of graduates have been really losing it.

They're freaking out because their child has already made a stupid adult decision -- even before graduation. He has chosen the wrong college. He has chosen a big state school ("He'll be a number there!") over a small liberal arts school. She has thrown over schools in the Northeast ("Because it's too cold there!") in favor of a school in the Sunbelt. Or vice versa.

And even if the choice of school is not at issue, there are other things to fear your child will screw up on once she's out of your view. There's campus drinking, and drugs and sex. There's getting up with nothing more insistent than an alarm clock. There's laundry!

I knew one mother who moved to Gainesville for a few weeks until her daughter got settled there.

Granted, this is extreme. And why the girl stood for it I don't know. ("Just don't leave your motel room, mom, okay?")

It's true, in loco parentis is no longer much in evidence. The college student is considered an adult by the college, if not by you, and is allowed to make his or her own decisions about things. Not like when I went to college, and we had to live our lives in front of three stern-faced housemothers, allowed to see guys only in little guest rooms off the lobby with signs on the open doors that said "FOF," meaning, feet on the floor. Now the guys are right there in the dorms. Even at places where you might least expect it.

When we took my daughter to a small women's college in Virginia -- totally her choice -- several years ago, at an orientation for the parents of freshmen, it was explained that men could enter the dorms only if escorted inside. Which meant, if one of the students brought him in with her.

"And escorted out?" demanded a father, perhaps one of the military types the school attracted.

No way. In a 24/7 dormitory even at a school like this, guys could stay around the clock, as long as they didn't sleep there seven nights in a row.

And when I called the dean of students at her home on a Sunday night (one advantage of a small school), she told me that no, they wouldn't go in and throw out the druggie who was practically living with my daughter's roommate; the young women were to handle these things themselves in mediation.

I wished for those stern housemothers then, for the fear they instilled in us, and for the former Marine officer who was our dean of women and informed us our first week at college, "This is probably the safest place you will ever be."

Things have changed, but that is probably still true.

To various degrees, colleges have resources to look after kids. My friends who are professors care about their students in more ways than academic.

And it's certainly safer to have your kid in college, making all his dumb mistakes where you can't see him, because if you could, you'd kill him.

Mea culpa: Last week I mentioned a current movie with Richard Gere, titled Unfaithful, and called it Infidelity -- a better title, to my mind, but nobody asked me.

-- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.

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