Parental Advice: Guidelines for Communicating With Your College Student

Constant parental advice can make adjusting to college life difficult on your college student. Some parents expect a phone call from their college student daily. If the student doesn’t contact them that day, they will call late at night to make sure they are doing fine. This can make day-to-day college life difficult, as they often have to take time away from schoolwork to email or call parents. Here is some parental advice designed to improve the communication with your college child.

Communication Guidelines

First, understand that it’s unrealistic to assume your child will be able to communicate with you on a daily basis. As parents of college students, it’s important to remember that your child is now an adult, and college is a busy time. Your child has to worry about school, socializing and is often dealing with figuring out where he or she fits into the college picture. It’s sometimes just as hard for your child to be away from home as it’s for you to have your child away at school. Constant phone calls, texts or email messages may help you miss your child less, but might have the opposite effect for your child, increasing his or her homesickness.

Second, understand that sometimes your college child will not return your calls, texts or emails right away. This does not mean your child is not thinking of you or is trying to be rude. Instead, there are a number of reasons why your child is not contacting you back right away. Your child might be really busy with school or work. He or she might only have time to call you back late at night and might be respecting your need for sleep. Your child might need some space, especially if you’re calling or texting excessively. One bit of advice for parents is to be patient. Unless you need to discuss a time-sensitive issue, being patient may require you to wait a day or two before trying to contact your child back.

If this becomes a problem, maybe you could create an agreement about contacting each other back. Maybe there should be a rule that if it’s going to be more than a day before your child can get back to you (or vice versa), a text should be sent saying when he or she plans to call you back. It can be as simple as: “Noon Saturday.” With this rule established, make sure you also follow it.

Third, now is your child’s chance for a little independence. Sometimes this means you will have to accept that even if you’re close to your child, communicating with your child is going to be less frequent than it was when your child was living at home. This also means you might have to back off a little. When your child calls crying about a fight with a roommate, rather than pointing out how you knew rooming with her high school best friend was a bad idea, just be the person who listens. It’s also important that you do not try to solve all your child’s problems. Just because your son calls complaining about a bad grade he got on his English paper does not mean you should contact the teacher and argue about how your son is too smart for that grade.

As hard as it might be, sometimes parents of college students also have to be the ones who reduce contact with their child. If your college student is the one trying to contact you three or four times a day, you may have to establish guidelines for how often you’re going to call, text or email each other. Of course, these guidelines can be broken if there is a real crisis where more regular contact is needed for a short time.

Do you have any additional tips on communicating with your college student? What have you found works best? How often is too often? How can you establish realistic expectations for communication with your college student? Share with us in the comment section below.