Time to Sever the Electronic Tether

In 1990 when I was the director of Cornell University’s first Parents’ Program, I owned one of those big, clunky mobile phones. It was quite a novelty among my friends and family. I bought it as a safety device to use when traveling alone by car. It didn’t work everywhere, or even very well.

At the time, working with college parents at Cornell, the big concern for most parents was staying in touch with their college students. It was largely still the “analog age” before e-mail and cell phones. By the summer of 2000 when Don’t Tell Me What to do, Just Send Money was first published, about 30% of new college students were heading off to campus with their own cell phone.

By 2004, 90% had cell phones and this fall it’s clear that virtually every college student in America will come to college with a cell phone, and many will be carrying along a personal computer and an iPod as well. This capacity for continuous and constant electronic connectivity has changed not only the landscape of campus life; it has ushered in a dramatic shift in the way parents and students communicate with one another.

Can you even imagine a scenario in which you could not contact your child 24/7 via cell phone or e-mail? And why would I even suggest that you might want to sever this electronic tether?

While I concede that the idea of cutting off electronic communication with your college student is not likely to happen, I am going to argue that using these tools more sparingly and  thoughtfully can help you reverse a troubling trend.

At a 2006 meeting of the American Psychological Association, research findings conducted through a National Science Foundation grant studying communication between parents and college students were presented. The findings were surprising and disturbing.

While students surveyed before they left for college reported that they expected to communicate with their parents 3.3 times a week via cell phone or e-mail, in reality, after their first semester at school, they were communicating 10.4 times per week and many were not satisfied with that level of connection—theywanted more contact. Parents initiated much, but not all, of the contact.

This study mirrors many others with similar findings, as well as countless anecdotal reports from faculty and staff that detail the dramatic rise in parent-student connection during the college years.

So, why is this a troubling trend? Of course, it’s not the electronic device itself that is the problem; it’s the quality of the relationship between parents and college students that it facilitates that is the cause for serious concern.

Here’s why:

• The college years are widely acknowledged to be a crucial time in the development of late adolescents. Crucial because this is the time in which emerging adults forge a unique identity, become capable of independence, and transfer their intimate attachment from parents to peers.
• In order to accomplish these tasks, students need to, in essence, “fire” their parents and learn to reconnect to them in new and more equal adult ways.
• Students need to learn to manage decision making and rely solely on their own judgment when facing the consequences of their choices.
• Perpetual access to parents means that students do not experiment with managing their own emotions and thereby struggle to attain the measure of autonomy necessary for building intimate relationships with their peers.
• Repeated and continual connection to parents at this stage of development inhibits the possibilities for dealing with challenges, facing new experiences and finding real happiness that comes through a search for meaning and purpose that entails personal struggle and reflection.

Here is a scene that plays out on virtually every college campus in the country today: Class is dismissed and students rush out of buildings and immediately flip open their cell phones. More often than not, they are calling Mom or Dad for the second or third time that same day.

Now imagine an alternate scenario: Class is dismissed and students rush out of buildings. One student walks across the quad thinking about what he or she has just learned in anthropology class. Two other students are engaged in a lively debate about the theories just presented in their economics class. Three other students are talking about their work on a service learning project.

In the first scene, the cell phone as electronic umbilical cord shatters the opportunity for intellectual reflection that might otherwise engage this student’s mind. It also removes the student from face-to-face social interaction that might open up new ideas and experiences. When Mom and Dad are perpetually in your pocket and constantly available, a student never has to figure out what to do without input or reassurance from parents.This facilitates a permanent state of dependency and robs the student of the satisfaction that comes from contemplating ideas and workingout solutions independently.

You may remember the college days of yore when there was a pay phone at the end of the hall in the dormitory and students lined up on Sunday night to make the obligatory call home. As a student, you were expected to manage your life on campus and most parents took a pretty “hands off” approach during the college years and beyond.

The assumption was that college was the “on ramp” to full adulthood and parents didn’t need or want to be involved in that journey. But we wanted to be different kinds of parents and we are! For the most part, involvement has been a positive trend in contemporary parenting but the nature of that involvement needs to change when children become college students and legal adults.

Now is the time to use your connections to your college student to encourageindependence, problem-solving and healthy risk-taking. While you may not be able to sever the electronic tether, you can use it more thoughtfully to support your DU student.

Here are some tips to begin this process:

• Continue to express trust in your student’s ability to handle his or her own problems and challenges.
• Begin the process of weaning yourselves from daily phone or e-mail contact. Talk to your student about checking in once or twice a week. Let your student know that you expect him or her to manage life on campus but that you’re happy to help problem solve if an issue seems overwhelming.
• Resist the temptation to “take care of things” for them.
• Be honest with yourself. Do you find your child’s growing independence frightening or unsettling? If so, it’s probably about your need to be needed. Get that need met elsewhere so that your child can grow into the independent adult you’ve worked so hard to nurture.