When Your Kid Graduates From College
When I was a kid, my parents always made it very clear that I was going to college. You see, they were the first people in their families to become college educated. It was a clear path to upward mobility at that time and as native New Yorkers, they were able to go to City College for free. This education enabled them to rise to the middle class from their working class origins and shaped their expectations for me and my sister.
Imagine my distress when my youngest started to question the whole concept of going to college. It was too expensive, he said, and what was the point anyway? He could get work anyway and make good money. This caused me to question my own expectations of him and prejudices about “the right way” to do things. In the end I made my peace with it, reasoning that college isn’t for everybody and we all have to follow our own unique path, which often doesn’t include a 4-year college right after high school.
When we have children, we have both conscious and unconscious expectations and goals for them. In old fashioned, “traditional” families, there are rigid expectations of how children should behave and live their lives. Others just want their child to be set up for a successful adulthood, without preconceived notions of what that means for that individual. If a parent can limit their expectations and encourage and support their young adult child to follow their own interests and satisfaction towards the goal of self-support, the parent-child relationship will be better able to transition to a healthy adult relationship.
By encouraging students to question their preconceived notions and to reflect on their individual identity, college challenges students to think about their lives in a new way. It also takes the parent out of the picture and requires that the student develop a sense of personal agency and responsibility, with natural accountability outside of the parent-child relationship. In this way, it helps shift the responsibility for the child’s life from the parent to the child. For college educated parents, a college educated child becomes your peer, not just your child. It’s a rite of passage that you now share and can foster a stronger bond.
On the morning of my son’s graduation, there was an OpEd in the New York Times about the importance of rituals to give our lives meaning. In “This Is the Antidote to a Lonely Life of Screens”, Bruce Feller writes about how important rituals have been for human throughout history and how in modern society a lot of traditional opportunities for rituals have been lost. College graduations are one of the most important rituals we still have. They are meaningful as a personal experience, the joy of sharing a rite of passage. But they are also meaningful on a societal level, of the joy of all these bright faced young people and their future contributions to our society.