When I dropped my son off at college for the first time last month, I was not sure whether to stay for the presentation to parents. But since the students were off getting their own welcome lecture, I figured why not.
Things began on an optimistic note about the adventure ahead but then quickly descended into worst-case scenarios. “Many of your kids will call wanting to come home,” one dean warned us.
Really? I looked around the auditorium wondering how many of our 18-year-olds were going to ask to leave. What was not to like? The bucolic campus? The delicious cafeteria food provided without any effort? The smorgasbord of classes in every topic imaginable? The freedom to make your own schedule and find new friends? The singing groups and theater troupes and sports teams you could join?
Don’t worry, the dean told us, “your kids will learn to self-soothe.”
The last time I heard the words “self-soothe” was when my children were infants. You had to leave them in a crib by themselves for a little while, veteran moms told me, and they will find their thumb or their pacifier and realize they don’t need you. Or at least they don’t need you at 3:30 a.m.
But apparently a lot of college kids haven’t learned this skill.
A new TikTok trend covered in The New York Times describes kids leaving for college and returning home just as quickly. One girl said that walking across campus “aggravated her health issues.” And she didn’t like going to a party, something she had never done before. “I’m not gonna force myself to be uncomfortable and unsafe, ’cause randos think I should be,” she wrote in the caption for the video. “I don’t care about the college experience. I just want my degree.”
In other videos, students describe mental health struggles, difficulty finding friends, more homework than they expected, and so on. Surveying some friends and acquaintances, I can say that this trend does not exist only online. A couple of kids are home every weekend, even if they haven’t dropped out, because of roommate issues. They can’t seem to set boundaries or ask for administrative intervention. Another young person was home within a month because of mental health problems. Another was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and his parents have gone to take care of him.
The transition to living away from family is not easy. Even if college is not quite the real world, you do have to accomplish some things on your own. One mom recently posted a video about her 17-year-old’s difficulty with making phone calls to get on the waitlist for a dorm. She told the girl to figure it out, and some commenters suggested she was being too harsh.
It is useful to separate what Gen Zers don’t like about the college experience from what they don’t like about adulthood. If they don’t like going to football games or people drinking too much or the homework or the debt they are going into, or even the excessive amounts of free time, then maybe the problem is college. Maybe they are at the wrong college. Or maybe they do just want the degree. In which case going to a community college while living at home is just fine. Even online school might work. And they may actually be in the camp of people who should spend some time questioning whether they need a degree at all. If they just want to earn a good living, there are other avenues.
But if what they don’t like about college is living on their own, being responsible for getting from Point A to Point B, making phone calls, getting up on time, living on a schedule, being forced to make some decisions without input from Mom and Dad, learning to get along with strangers, and cleaning up after yourself, then the college experience is not the problem. Independence is.
A recent chart posted by the Intergenerational Foundation showed that the percentage of young adults ages 25-29 living with a partner declined from 56% in 2009 to 29% in 2023. There was a roughly equivalent rise in the percentage living with parents, from 17% to 43%, during the same period. Whether this is the result of the cost of housing, helicopter parenting, kids getting used to a certain standard of living at home and not wanting to give anything up, or parents enforcing fewer restrictions on young adults, the results are not good for them or the rest of us.
Decades of research on mental health suggests that giving kids and then teens and then young adults increasing amounts of responsibility not only prepares them for life but improves their outlook. It builds confidence and enables them to “do hard things.” Whether that happens in college or outside of it, it’s time to let the kids find their own pacifiers.