College life changes students’ relationships with their parents

So, what did you do this weekend?
It’s the cringe-inducing question that college kids face on a weekly basis from our parents.

And if you’re like me, you choose to answer with sweeping generalities like “I hung out with friends,” or if you’re like others, you take the more extreme route of telling blasphemous lies.

Maybe you don’t want your parents knowing you spent all of Saturday playing Super Smash Bros. with your roommates, or that you had soft-serve and Fruit Loops for dinner, or that you are still feeling the effects of that Four Loko.

In any case, some of us create filters of our college experience that allow us to tell our parents what they want to hear. Parents become alarmed when you tell them you’ve decided to take up a North Campus major, but it’s all good, because you’re pre-law, right?

But how many of us have considered how us moving away is a transitional phase for our parents and not just the monumental change in our own lives?

Why do we falsify our university experience when dealing with our parents?

Why is there an entire Andy Samberg skit dedicated to the hilarity of the fictitious “Damn It! My Mom’s on Facebook!” filter?

Besides the obvious repercussions of corrupting our perfectly innocent reputations, we want to maintain the assertions of independence we make when we visit home over school breaks and act like living under parental supervision is such a regression in our development as real adults.

But it’s ironic. In acting like we have come so far from being juvenile, we take on the very teenage characteristic of acting like we know everything.

Mom. Pops. Your tyranny of oppression is a real buzzkill on my newly discovered collegiate sensibilities. How dare you hinder my complete independence and maturity?

As a first-year, it was easy for me to think that coming to UCLA was a monumental change in my life only. I failed to realize that my parents were entering completely new territory as well.

College is an awkward stage for students who want to assert their independence while still relying on their parents to foot the bills. But for parents, it’s an entirely new way of approaching parenthood. How are they supposed to guide us when they can’t be present to enforce curfews or make us maintain our basic nutrition?

The responsibility has shifted from having direct control to a responsibility in establishing a relationship based on trust. But trust is a two-way street, and perhaps we should realize that college is not just a place for us to grow and change but the beginning of a new relationship with our parents.

As much as being able to write a paper on Aristotelian ethics makes us feel as though we are mature, we are still learning after all. Maybe I’ll finally concede to my mom’s attempts to be my friend on Facebook. Maybe.

Think you’re old enough to branch out on your own? E-mail Cody at [email protected].
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