General advice for parents
Sending a son or daughter off to college is a major milestone, often accompanied by a variety of feelings, including pride, excitement, anxiety and trepidation. Letting go is rarely easy, and it can be hard to adjust to having a child away at college. However, it is important to remember that most students do make the adjustment to college life—and to life at Clark, in particular—quite successfully.
In the first few days and weeks, it is not uncommon for a student who encounters a challenge to turn to the major source of support he or she has always had, namely, you. You may get a phone call from your son or daughter complaining about a roommate who is "impossible to live with" or a course that has an "unreasonably heavy workload." As parents, it is natural to want to fix the problem. If this happens, we recommend you take the following steps:
- Talk about the situation with your son or daughter and explore possible solutions to the problem.
- Ask if he or she has taken advantage of various campus resources, such as a faculty adviser, resident adviser, or a staff member in the Dean of Students Office.
- Look through the list of offices and services in this handbook to help your son or daughter identify the best place to look for help on campus.
As the semester unfolds, there will be other stressful junctures for most students. They may feel especially anxious around midterm exams, the deadlines for and return of their first research papers, or the start of the reading period and final examinations. Figuring out how to handle these stresses on their own is a major developmental step for students and is essential to their growth. Helping them to deal with disappointments and frustrations themselves enables our students to mature in ways that will benefit them for the rest of their lives.
In general, the best way you can help your son or daughter adjust to college life is to offer your love, support, understanding and encouragement. It is also important to remind your child to get enough sleep, physical exercise and nourishment to be able to do his or her best work.
We are confident that, over the next several months and years, you, and we, will experience the gratification that comes from watching your daughters and sons demonstrate their continued capacity to learn and their growing ability to act independently-to make choices wisely, learn from their mistakes and accept increasingly higher levels of responsibility.
The next several weeks will go by quickly; so will the next four years. Try to relax-from time to time-and enjoy them.
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Additional Resources
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