The stories made my toes curl.
One set of parents left the entire college application process up to their son. He was 18 and would soon be on his own. It was time for him to take the reins, they reasoned. But he forgot to follow up with the task of selecting a residence and was therefore assigned to the absolute-worst, this-is-the-pits, no-one-wanted-it freshman dorm at the university. Unhappy from the outset, he quickly confirmed that he hated his hall and dropped out, never to return.
Another set of parents had been worried about their son's D in a high school math class. They tried to intervene, but he repeatedly reassured them that he could handle it, so they backed off. After all, they persuaded themselves, he was 18. All his other grades were on par for acceptance at the school of his dreams. But he failed math and was forced to attend a college he found humdrum, his enthusiasm for his future fading fast.
Both sets of parents still seemed to be in shock as they told me their stories. Possessed of twenty-twenty hindsight, they realized they had mistakenly believed a college myth: By virtue of being a senior in high school, their child was ready to act as an independent adult. On his own, he would march straight into an appropriate education and continue on to a good job.
Certainly 18-year-old students have responsibility for their own lives. Most of them have acquired skills for getting what they want.
The catch is that there is no magic to turning 18.
People mature at different speeds. There is great variability with regard to readiness. Some teens have already planned for the future; others may not even be aware that they need a plan, much less know how to make a good one and act on it. Some juniors wish they could move on already, whereas some seniors can't bear the thought of leaving high school. I've seen them in the hallways during their final semester, trembling like the Cowardly Lion about to face the Wizard. I myself stepped out nimbly from high school only to fall on my face later, tripped up by career immaturity in the transition from college to work.
Do not step aside yet, Mom and Dad. You are still needed—and for more than footing the bill.
Here are five suggestions for mentoring a student on the threshold of adult independence:
1. Be guided by your child's readiness. If she does not stride forward on her own, then do not rush her. Let her revert to a teenage version of taking baby steps while you metaphorically hold her hand. Sometimes a person may regress a bit before she's ready to move ahead.
2. Anyone signaling "I'm not ready" needs greater support. Consider hiring a professional. For example, a career counselor could work with your student to identify new experiences that might help her progress. (Some career counselors even offer tests that measure career readiness.)
3. Reassure your child that nobody knows exactly what she wants to do with her life when she's 18. As one of my psychologist friends says to her teenage clients, "Your first job is just exploration." And exploration can be fun!
4. Now is not the time to begin a downward spiral. There is simply too much at stake in the transition from high school. Don't bow out until you're persuaded—by good evidence—that your child is in fact ready to take over, with all that implies regarding skills with time management, organization, and decision making.
5. Like it or not, as a parent you are a primary influence. Your child needs to develop a plan for her future and will probably look to you for support and advice. Become career literate yourself. I've designed this blog for exactly that purpose and will do my best to make it worth your reading.
Somehow the idea has gotten around that once your child starts college, the best she can hope for is a trial-and-error approach to choosing a major and thereby stumbling into a career.
Of all the prevailing college myths, this one is the most likely to make me froth at the mouth. I guess I take it personally because it ignores the work of vocational psychologists. To my mind, our misplaced faith in trial-and-error is like prescribing bed rest and blood-letting for someone with strep throat, ignoring the proven benefits of penicillin.
Of course, trying random classes once she's in college might help her decide on a major. Or perhaps she'll simply join the throng taking six or more years to finish what was originally set up as a four-year degree. Certainly a willy-nilly search after your student enrolls is in the interests of the educational institution, only too happy to collect tuition checks for the rest of your lifetime.
Colleges offer from fifty to 120 majors; universities, from 100 to 200. A few institutions list as many as 300 possible majors. This abundance is surely a blessing, as it provides college students with boundless latitude to explore their options and find their passion.
But all those options can just as easily lead to confusion and dead ends.
As psychologist Rollo May wrote in The Courage to Create, unlimited possibilities are often more terrifying than energizing. “It is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing him out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, ‘The sky’s the limit.’ The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapable real limit is also the bottom of the ocean.”
Your student faces a double peril: She must paddle through a tight pass between modern-day versions of the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, avoiding the rocks of a prematurely-chosen major on one side and the whirlpool of indecision on the other, one that keeps her swirling through random classes on the off chance that one of them will push her out of the vortex.
A better approach begins with understanding your student's strengths, particularly her abilities and interests, before she even applies to college. You don't want to start too narrow, not when she's still a teenager. So start wide—but do what you can to make sure that even though your child will be at sea, she is headed toward her personal best part of the deep. From that smaller and more navigable body of water, she can then steer herself with growing assurance.
Here's a hypothetical example of this technique. Let's say that your student is interested in the broad realm of ideas and her strongest abilities are with numbers and creativity. College majors that would allow those talents to be put into play include economics, computer science, math, marketing, and statistics. She tries introductory courses in all five subjects. One by one, over her freshman and sophomore year, she rejects computer science, economics, and marketing. She discovers that she likes statistics best, with mathematics as a first alternate.
By the age of 20, when her interests have begun to stabilize, she has attained a positive sense of direction. At the end of her sophomore year, she's ready to declare a major in statistics. And she's put herself in a good position to specialize, having the requisite background to head toward careers as an actuary, astronomer, biostatistician, math teacher, or operations research analyst, all of which would require and reward her talents with numbers and creativity.
To recap: You can help your college-bound student develop a short list of possible majors. I'll show you how. Over the first two years, she can take courses from a carefully-selected but small number of subjects, intending to rule most of them out. That way, by the end of her sophomore year, she is more likely to have settled on a major that develops her talents and also leads to gainful employment.
With stronger up-front planning, you can save her time, your money, and everyone's stress, with an added advantage: Once she completes her coursework, she won't be camping on your couch!
