A Perennial Favorite of Parents
The Drop Off
Sometimes it’s important to review older posts and bring them current for new readers of Custom College Visits blogs. The book Letting Go has been a perennial favorite for parents of high school and college students. Here’s Janice’s post from a few years ago:
I have been reading the book, Letting Go, by Karen Levin Coburn and Madge Lawrence Treeger. The book is a great source of information for parents who will be sending their children off to college as well as for those that have a child in the first years of college.
Freshman year is a rite of passage
I came across a section of the book yesterday that I thought particularly poignant and wanted to share it with readers of the Custom College Visits blog.
The authors write, For parents too, the freshman year is a rite of passage, a passage to a new relationship with their sons and daughters. They conclude this chapter of their book with the following excerpt from The Harvard Parents Handbook:
The Harvard Parents Handbook
“For parents, the freedom freshmen enjoy can be hard to accept. So can recognizing how little you can now appropriately and directly do to shape the daily round of your sons or daughters experiences or his or her lifestyle choices, curricular, or career plans young person is setting out on his or her own lives course.
Don’t try to hold the course you set and have been sailing together for seventeen years. It is very hard to sail a ship with two pilots. Come along, by all means. But keep in mind that is a new voyage, someone else’s voyage. This way college can be the shared and happy embarkation it ought to be.”
Follow us on Facebook
