If you and your child are particularly close, then dropping them off at college may be a day that you have been dreading for their whole life. It can be so difficult to understand how the time passed so quickly, and it can be almost impossible to keep yourself from worrying about almost everything. If you’re feeling reticent to go through with it all, here is how to survive dropping your kid off at college.
Help Them Pack
Packing is one of the most emotional processes of the transition between high school and college. Your child will be faced with all kinds of tough decisions when deciding what stays and what goes.
If you help your child pack, then you could spend some invaluable bonding time together looking at all kinds of old, sentimental items that will bring back wonderful memories for you to reminisce about together. It’s also always very helpful to decide together which items would be appropriate for the dorms and which should stay home.
Throw a Going Away Party
It can be particularly difficult on a new college student to adjust and accept the reality that a chapter of their life has ended. This is especially true if they didn’t celebrate that transition in a major way.
Throwing a going away party is a great way to allow your child to connect with all of their close friends and family members one last time before they say goodbye. This is also a good opportunity to get all the affection and advice needed before the big adventure begins.
Connect With the New Roommate
Of course, your child won’t be living in a dorm if they are earning USC’s online mph, but for most college students, freshman year almost always means sharing a room. In most cases, that room is tiny. This can be trying no matter how long two people might get along.
In order to get to know one another ahead of time, you should encourage your child to reach out to his or her future roommate on social media or via email. You can also get an idea of what to expect when living with this person and make any adjustments in attitude or circumstance before school begins.
Make a Schedule for Phone Calls
It’s usually much easier to accept the transition of being so far away from your child if you know that you will always talk at a certain time each week. Usually one or two phone calls per week can really make it easier on both child and parent to adjust to life apart. Spontaneous phone calls aren’t a bad thing either, but if you schedule your call in advance then you’ll have something to look forward to and also have the time set aside to really catch up with one another.
Organize Everything They Need
One of the stressful things about dropping your kid off at college is that you always wonder if they have everything they need to succeed in school. That’s why you should put together a checklist and make sure that you get everything together and organized before you drop them off.
