Send-off

August 21, 2008 12:15 am

ASK ANY TEACHER: The most important skill a child brings to kindergarten is not the ability to write his or her name, or rudimentary reading skills--it's self-control: the ability to get along with others and follow classroom rules. And so it is with college.

Even now, parents across the Old Dominion are packing up minivans and SUVs with clothes, computers, DVDs, sheet sets in extra-long twin, and memories, lots of memories. The K-12 years are at once interminable and instantaneous. Years of piano lessons and pediatrician appointments, report cards and recitals, sports and scabbed knees that once seemed to stretch forever into the future are now all behind.

Taking a kid to college means ripping off part of your heart and leaving it on some distant campus, yet carrying home with you the hopes and dreams of your young adult. It's a bittersweet process.

The keys to academic success at college are fairly straightforward: 1) Go to class; 2) do the reading and the homework; 3) get help if you need it. Developmental success--becoming a productive and independent adult--is more complex. For that, college kids need the confidence to solve problems and overcome adversity and the self-discipline to succeed in a relatively unstructured environment--qualities developed in the K-12 years, and fostered by parental nudges now and then.

Far from losing contact, many university officials today find college students are tethered to their parents by e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging. A National Survey of Student Engagement found that 86 percent of first-year students are in "frequent" contact with their mothers, while 71 percent remain connected with their dads. Despite some college counselors' concerns about "hovering parents," studies have shown that when the folks stay connected, risky behavior is lessened.

Specifically, a Brigham Young University study by Laura Walker found that college kids who communicate with their dads were less prone to risky sexual behavior, while those in touch with their moms tended to keep drinking within bounds.

Most kids make the transition to college life. Most parents do as well. Soon, it's Thanksgiving, and the students come home for their first long visit. The hot-water heater is suddenly empty again, music is blaring, and the kids are up at all hours. That's when the relative peace of the empty nest doesn't seem quite so bad. It's also when parents notice a new maturity dawning in their offspring, the first edges of the wonderful adult he or she will become.

Roots and wings, it seems, are gifts to both generations.