I received some excellent advice from seasoned parents before my “first Thanksgiving” as parents of a college student. Thought that I would return the favor, and would love to hear advice from others!
My Favorite: Your family is like a puzzle. When they leave, you wander around setting an extra place, miscounting food, and missing them terribly. Over time, you develop new routines. Maybe your youngest hangs out with you after school. Maybe dinner time morphs into a different type of conversation. Maybe you go for a walk before dinner. Basically, you reinvent the puzzle without their “piece”. Your DCK (designated college kid) is coming home and you are SO EXCITED!!! They arrive, and they are…out of sorts. They aren’t used to waiting for others. They use more swear words in front of the siblings. They get irritated when you ask them when they will be home. Remember… they knew they changed, but you were expected to stay the same. You, on the other hand, are supposed to understand completely that they are different, and be willing to change family systems immediately to adjust to their “differentness”. Their piece of the puzzle is no longer present, and their NEW piece does not fit. It is jarring. Be patient.
Teach them the concept of “code switching” in a nonjudgmental way. Code switching is basically the reason that your husband can tell if you are speaking on the phone to the doctor, your Mother, or a friend. We all talk differently to different people. They are entitled to talk differently (e.g. more argumentatively, with more obscenities) to their college friends. When they come home, they need to “code switch” to a style with less swearing, etc. Our daughter has now come home about 15 times from first college and then work out of state. We STILL have to remind her to code switch on the way home from the airport. Code switching is a valuable and vital skill.
Expect lots of “suggestions”. You have empowered them to have opinions, and see themselves as independent adults. Celebrate that. Be patient. (Funny aside: my brother gave my Mom laundry tips on his first trip home from college: “Mom, if you want that shirt not to wrinkle, take it out RIGHT AWAY when the dryer stops”. This is coming from a boy who had 18 years of laundry done perfectly at home before he left.
Give them space. They are already used to their independence. And don’t be offended when the kids want to run off to see HS friends – that first Thanksgiving home is a time when they often feel a need to reconnect with those old comfortable friends and compare notes on college etc. The fact that they want to spend time with their HS friendless doesn’t mean that they love you less.
But don’t allow them to be discourteous, run all over you etc. For example we didn’t set curfews but if they were going to be later than they planned we expected they would send us a text so we wouldn’t worry (basically same rules as HS but they may need to be reminded).
If you have a daughter and she attends a women’s college, expect her to swear like a sailor when she gets home! Don’t bat an eye. Just ask her to pass the stuffing, or whatever.
If your child goes to school in a different time zone, expect that she or he will have a hard time adjusting to the clock at home. If your child goes to school in the same time zone, expect that she or he will have a hard time adjusting to the clock at home. That is, during the short Thanksgiving break, child might be up half the night and asleep half the day.
It gets easier. The first trip home feels weird to everyone. But eventually, your family will develop a new college-kid-is-home routine. And shortly thereafter, the kid will graduate – or a sibling will go away to college – and the newly acquired patterns will change again!
Realize that it’s ok if they choose to be elsewhere for Thanksgiving. The logistics can be crazy for such a short visit.
D1 decided to spend her freshman Thanksgiving with relatives who live significantly closer to her college. While it was strange to phone her, it was nice that she got a chance to spend time with family.
She hasn’t decided yet what she’s doing this year.
I don’t recall either s using foul language. They wanted o go out with their friends and come in late, and were a little bothered by having to let us know if/when to expect them back, but did so.
Some kids might feel the need to show you how mature they have become, how worldly they have become, how much more they know ( than you ).By Sunday they will be exhausted and cranky. You will be disappointed you didn’t get to see them enough. They will feel frustrated that there were so many demands on their limited time home that they could not make everyone happy including themselves. They also might not be so anxious to go back.
So expect an argument. Any argument. It makes it easier for them to leave.
…And they will be home in a few weeks to do it all over again!
Thanks for the great tips! Although it’s our youngest child who’s in her first semester of college, we haven’t gone through this before since her two older brothers were too far away to come home. I will take all of the advice to heart.
Any curfew requirements that you may have imposed on your child while they were in HS will be gone. They are used to not having anyone around to tell them when to go back to the room or to bed. When my D, who never challenged curfew in HS, came home, she stayed out all night over the Thanksgiving break. I sat her down and told her that I wasn’t going to impost a curfew now but I did expect her to call me by midnight and let me know her plans. I told her that I was concerned both for her safety and because she has 3 younger brothers and I didn’t want them to think it was okay to stay out all night. Since my D is basically a good kid, the approach of enlisting her as an adult member of the family worked.
That first holiday home is a little odd. It was really odd for me since I hadn’t gone away to college. After that, we settled into a pattern.
Kiddo may refer to his/her dorm room as “home” – please don’t freak out too much. It’s not an insult or a rejection of your happy household – it’s just a shift in reference/context. I said this while excitedly explaining something about school and my mother’s jaw literally dropped. I was like “Whadeye say?”
the infamous “Turkey Drop” — for kiddos who are in a “long distance” relationship w/someone still in hometown or at another college. Thanksgiving is the time many of those romances end. Be kind if there’s a broken heart upstairs…
Ya can hate to see them go, but the best part is when they come home for the holidays it is so big - and super special. Gave me a reason to super duper clean the house, stock the fridge with favorites, and decorate like crazy, like special company was coming (but company that you look forward to having). Did as much as I could ahead of time giving me more time with them. We didn’t have any awkward thing to adjust to really, but ours had traveled a lot throughout high school so maybe we were already use to them being gone and “the return.” It is just so special to have everyone together and sweet to see them love being back in their big bed with clean sheets!
When my daughter came home her first Thanksgiving (first trip home since she started college) she wanted me to make her all of her favorite foods (not your typical Thanksgiving foods). My husband was confused that weekend as we ate traditional turkey leftovers alongside some of my daughter’s favorites even though they did not go together at all.
@kiddie My D has also requested all of her favorite foods. She’ll be home for a full week, so I’[ll make most of them BEFORE Thanksgiving. She also wants me to make a cake (I dabble in cake decorating). My older D just wanted homemade food, she didn’t care so much about her favorites.
D has a curfew at school-it’s a very generous one, but it exists, so I don’t actually expect her to push it here. Plus, she doesn’t drive, and isn’t 18, so for this year at least, I think it will be natural for her to understand that rules don’t just go out the window just because she’s in college now.
And no one swears in front of each other here. It’s H’s thing-he used to be “on the air” and learned to assume that “the mike is always hot” and uses cheesy words in place of swearing. Do I know D swears? Yes. Does she swear with us in the room? Never. Do I expect that to change? No.
D posted on FB the other day that she doesn’t get people who don’t miss their family and want to go home for a visit. She can’t wait. She’s already making plans to see friends, but mostly she wants to be around home. And that’s ok with me.
Both of mine wanted to come home and fit right back into the parent-child-family scheme. They wanted that balance of coddling and “telling.” If anything, DH and I expected more changes than we got. Eg, we were prepared for them to want to spend time with home friends and they did. But they also just wanted to hang here. Same with Christmas.
The surprise was they automatically did their own laundry. It was on the 2nd Thanksgiving home that we were treated to D1’s new breath of knowledge and opinions.
I can’t recall hearing either swear, haha. I’m the one with that occasional habit.
