“My son screwed up on his housing and he’s in a complete panic he’ll have to live in the freshman dorms” said the Mom in August, just as he was to begin his sophomore year in college (Fall housing selection took place the previous March). The year was 2000 and after a brief exhortation about the student needing to be more proactive next time, with a consider amount of effort, we were able to secure a bed in the desired location. 

The following August the Mom called to once again plead her son’s case. He was a rising junior and he had convinced her that he would be devastated if he didn’t live with his peers. We had her call back when her son could join the conversation. After making it clear this was the last time we would intercede on his behalf — that if he had any hope to live in one of the senior houses that students aspired too in their final year of college, where space was at a premium and any open spaces were immediately filled from the waitlist, he would have to go through the same process as everyone else or he would end up in whatever space we had available. No more cutting in line, nothing Mom could do would make a difference. We were clear, this would be the last time. We followed it up with emails to Mom and son outlining the terms. After all that, we found him a room in junior level housing. 

The Mom called back the next August. After talking with us she called the President’s office in hopes of changing the fate her son now faced. 

The son lived in the freshman dorms for his senior year.

Jean Twenge studies the characteristics unique to each generation, focusing what defines the generation as children moving into young adulthood. She is a professor at San Diego State University and her research has been enlightening for many of us. She went public with groundbreaking research on millennials while the rest of us were still trying to figure out why they always thought every effort should be accompanied with a trophy. 

More recently she has been studying what she calls the iGeneration, what the rest of us call the generation Z. Born after 1995 Twenge points out that this is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence with smartphones, where much of the communication is via texting and social media and less time is spent in person with friends. She also notes: “ Technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. iGen is also growing up more slowly than previous generations: eighteen-year-olds look and act like fifteen-year-olds used to.” *

I look back all those years ago at the parent who kept rescuing her son from housing purgatory. Any response that comes to mind seems so antiquated now with all that has changed. As if good parenting was ever easy in the first place, the speed of societal change seems to make it more of a challenge than ever. What I learned is that it’s not my role to decide how much parenting is too much. For those of us who work with parents of today’s youth, the best choice is to view it as a partnership between parents and educators. Inevitably there will be times when we will get it wrong, however working together without judgement we’ll get more right than wrong. Parents today may be over-involved. It’s an easy target for criticism and as a former college administrator who has plenty of examples of parents who went to extraordinary lengths to fix relatively minor problems, the vast majority of parents I have interacted with seem to simply be trying to figure out what is best for their kid. When the old rules don’t apply…oh and those new rules that were just applicable for parents a few years ago don’t necessarily apply either, who’s to decide what is the right amount of parental involvement?

* Jean Twenge, IGen: Why today’s kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy, and completely unprepared for adulthood, 2018. Simon & Schuster

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