My Top 6 Reasons Why Sending Your Kid to College is Weird and Unsettling

Of the many milestones in the life of a parent, sending your child to college ranks high in terms of both pride and emotional discomfort. In other words, it will freak you the hell out. Here are my top 6 reasons why.

My Top 6 Reasons Why Sending Your Kid to College is Weird and Unsettling

Last week, Holly and I installed our two older kids, Sam and Ava, into college. Just plugged them right in there. This is Sam’s sophomore year at the University of Tennessee at Martin, and Ava’s freshman year at the same fine school. So out of our three children, two of them have peaced out and gone to college, leaving 13-year-old Pete blissfully in charge of the entire basement floor of our home. I walked down there last night to clean the cat box, and the entire place had been converted into Studio 54, complete with a Bee Gees soundtrack, a mirrored ball hanging from the ceiling, and John Travolta dancing in the middle of the floor.

Every year, usually in the early fall, parents send a kid or two off to college, so the practice itself isn’t particularly rare or unique. But this year, for us, is definitely weird. Just everyday life has become surreal thanks to the COVID pandemic, but then you throw in the concept of sending two of your three kids off into this germy, politically divided world, and things get awfully strange. For these and other reasons, I’ve decided to compile my Top 6 Reasons Why Sending Your Kid to College is Weird and Unsettling.

6. College itself.

There was a time, somewhere in the far distant past, when college was a place where very smart and dedicated people taught the rest of us doofuses the rules of math, how to construct a well-written sentence, what happened in 1776, and how the Periodic Table works. That’s highly simplified, but you get my point. These days, however, it seems that the college agenda has expanded significantly, and with many traditional courses now comes the supplemental and unwritten chapter: “How You Should Think Politically, 101.” It is no secret that this political indoctrination — and that’s what it is — leans almost exclusively in one direction. (Hint: It rhymes with “heft.”) Much like we’re seeing in the streets of America’s largest cities, there is very little room for philosophical debate on today’s college campuses, and I can only hope and pray that our kids return from college with the same value system they entered with, more or less. Frankly, this scares the hell out of me.

5. Figuring out what to do with all their stuff.

First of all, I had to hire a crew from the CDC to venture into both kids’ rooms through the same kind of expandable tunnels the bad guys used in “ET,” when they quarantined Elliott’s house. In most cases, college-age kids are about as clean as a hippo trying to cool itself in one of those shrinking mud holes during the African dry season. So after each room is completely deloused and sanitized, you’re left with two empty bedrooms filled with a bunch of unused, out-of-date, and neglected stuffed animals, taekwondo trophies, partially used containers of cheap makeup, dogeared Harry Potter paperbacks, and so on. I feel a very satisfying trip to Goodwill coming on.

4. To come home or NOT to come home.

In a normal, non-2020 year where all we have to worry about are the universally sanctioned dangers like plane crashes, earthquakes, wild stampedes of wildebeests, and giant meteorite strikes, we would instruct our kids to stay at college for at least one month before coming home. Otherwise, they are avoiding the necessary process of stepping out of their comfort zones, making new friends, and becoming properly acclimated to the college experience. But this year, with the very real likelihood that they will be fraternizing with other youth who are literally teeming with the coronavirus yet perfectly healthy, we may not allow our kids to return home until they graduate, have landed well-paying jobs, and have become eligible for AARP benefits.

3. Determining how often to FaceTime them.

When I was in college, it was quite simple to disappear off of the parent radar screen. My school was located around five hours away from my hometown, and the only plausible way for my parents to check in was for them to wait for ME to call them from a payphone. I could come up with a great many excuses for not venturing out to that payphone, including but not limited to:

• There was currently a hurricane, and they predict it will hang over my school for at least two weeks.
• Somebody filled the coin slot with super glue.
• There is always a long line of students desperate to call their parents at the payphone.
• The payphone has been trampled by a stampede of wildebeests and/or struck by a giant meteorite. You get the idea.

But in our current times, nobody in the civilized world can go anywhere without being accessible to somebody. It’s no secret that a teenager won’t travel more than six inches without their mobile device, so we all know that if they don’t answer our FaceTime call or plain ol’ cell phone call, it’s likely because they just don’t want to. This sets up an uncomfortable and conflicting battle between A) providing this fine young adult with the freedom they deserve and have earned and B) checking to make sure that your bonehead kid isn’t sleeping through class after leaving their room key in the doorknob and their car door wide open in the parking lot. And, by the way, if you and your kid have been using a parental app like “Life 360” on your phones — the kind where you essentially track your kid’s phone and hope that they are somewhere close by — you can expect that puppy to be deleted from the kid’s phone by the time you exit the campus parking lot to head home.

2. Re-thinking dinnertime.

As of the writing of this post, our two older kids are 19 and 18 respectively, while our youngest has just turned 13. For the past couple years, this has led to perplexing and unpredictable dinnertimes at our home, meaning we never know who, if anybody, will be participating, and will our much-agonized-over home-cooked meal be acceptable or met with the well-worn, classic phrase, “I’ll just have a bowl of cereal.” Now, though, it’s down to only Holly, myself, and our much more agreeable 13-year-old who has yet to molt into a full-fledged, sarcastic, narcissistic, head-spinning teenager. The dinnertime possibilities are now endless, yet somehow disconcerting. I have the nagging feeling that we’re going to somehow screw it up.

And my Number 1 Reason Why Sending Your Kid to College is Weird and Unsettling: You never managed to work in your last-minute Dad Advice.

It may only be me, but one of the most frustrating things about being a dad is that there never seems to be a good time to impart your advice to a teenager. When they are younger, kids will usually just sit there and take your lecture because they don’t really have a choice. But teenagers will either simply zone out while inserting enough uninspired “Yessirs” to avoid complete and obvious contempt, or they will come right out and say, “Can we talk about this later?” which is a thinly veiled code for “Can we talk about this never?” For these reasons, I have kept many of my great man-of-the-world wisdoms unsaid due to this nagging problem of poor timing. But now, much to my horror, two of my kids have flown the coop and have quickly taken on that college-student air of “Oh, silly Dad. Don’t you realize that I’m in college now and that I know all of this stuff? You needn’t worry your poor hairless head about it.”

I may have missed my chance.

It is, in my view, one of humankind’s greatest ironies that a parent possesses the experience and knowledge necessary to dodge a great many of life’s pitfalls, is willing to share this with their children, but when they need it most, a child is mostly unwilling to accept ccept it. They must make their own mistakes, get stampeded by their own wildebeests, and be knocked silly by their own meteorites.

That’s OK, I guess. If they ever need to come home, we’ll have those old stuffed animals and Harry Potter books ready for them.