4th kid a college soph., 3rd about to graduate. Never even thought of it. We did go to graduation for the first 2 and brought stuff home, but it was packed when we got there. I like spending time with my kids and helping them out whenever they need it, but moving in and out of college would be too inconvenient–interfering with younger sibs’ and parents’ school/work schedules-- and an extra, unnecessary expense. Didn’t help with move-ins, either. I never even thought that “all parents are doing this.” Kids had a few interesting, funny, character-building experiences as a result of having to figure it out on their own.
@saffysmum I apologize if you took my post as passive or aggressive. I meant it as neither and I sincerely meant if you have the money to spend and want to spend it that way and its important to you, then great! Please don’t read anything else into it than what I stated. I was just pointing out that there are substantial costs involved when your child goes to school across the country. Sure, I’d love to be there for a lot of things for my kid, but factoring in the expense our family chooses not to. No more nor less was intended with my comment. Don’t read more into it than that. But there are costs involved. I’m not saying your reasoning was faulty. Just pointing out that in addition to A) the student being able to do it alone and B) the family wanting to help and having that quality time with the child that there can also be C) substantial $ involved in doing so. 
I’m definitely not a passive aggressive type. If I had something to say, I’d say it.
My kids statrted boarding school at age 14. If 15 year olds can figure out how to pack up their room w/o mom, then a college student certainly can, too.
Didn’t see anything PA about the post…
Nope, never helped. Not even when moving out completely after graduation and going directly to new city to start work.
@brantly I understand the expense part. Our daughter’s school is roughly 2 hours from the nearest airport and we don’t live near a large city ourselves so no chance remotely of a direct flight or even cheap airfare for the most part. In this instance we decided that it was worth the expense since our bigger picture wasn’t just packing her up, it was more about the two of them.
Reading your original post I immediately wondered if the “need” was really more of a “want” and not a physical want but rather an emotional want of your daughter for you to be there. In the grand scheme of life 18 is still young.
Our daughter is a dyed-in-the-wool sentimentalist. She is excited to get on with her summer travel plans but will be sad to wrap up her first year at university. Packing up and leaving behind a year of your life is an emotional undertaking. No matter if your daughter is excited to come home, get on with a summer adventure, plan for next year etc. It is still an ending. It may be that she is wanting the emotional support she perceives the other students are going to have because “all the other parents are coming” and not you actually there schlepping boxes.
There isn’t an easy answer when your heart says one thing and life and its practical side say the opposite.
I think D is worried that there’s more to it than meets the eye. That so many parents are coming to help their kids, she is taking as a sign that it must be difficult. I take it as a sign that most of her friends are very affluent, and the expense of airfare, hotel, car rental, meals, etc. are not a big deal for them. I have already been there four times since June – summer orientation, fall drop-off, parents’ weekend, and sorority parents’ weekend.
Next year I will tell her in advance that H and I can travel there three times. She can decide how to distribute those trips. Drop-off, pick-up, and one other? Drop-off and two off-peak visits?
@brantly said
That’s what you should have led with! Three times? Yes, you have absolutely gone above and beyond parent requirements for this year! My three kids all went to college between 7 and 14 hours drive away. Somehow it was only my one son that needed help moving out at the end of the year. The other two either had a storage spot on campus or stuffed it in their car and drove it home. We visited them each once during the school year (not at all when they did their abroad Junior year) and they got a bonus visit senior year when they graduated. We did help all three move out senior year. The first two didn’t ask and it never occurred to us that they couldn’t do it themselves. BTW, all three had desk top computers!
@doschicos e-mails and internet forums are wonderful ways to stay connected with others but a major hindrance is you cannot see facial cues or hear vocal tone. It can be easy to perceive something where there is nothing especially when one does not have a personal relationship to draw context from. I offer my apologies for misinterpreting your post and hope you will accept them.
@walkinghome Four times if you include summer orientation.
The crowd she hangs out with seems to get a lot of parental visits. They come for football games and just to hang out. It’s a sorority crowd. Not sure if that means anything.
She is very different from me. At that age I couldn’t wait to handle everything on my own.
I’m not sure it matters how many times you’ve already visited. I mean, it might be a factor in your own decision but if the question is whether you need to be there, it doesn’t matter.
And for some families, having a parent visit or tag along even once isn’t really an option.
I just can’t imagine the expense if you are flying out/driving at least a day. I haven’t paid less than $300 for a flight in years and hotels are each minimum $130/night, plus paying for all the meals for one selves and the dinners with the kid and their friends. Geez! That would blow it for the necessary family vacation. Not to mention that our kids would have thought it terribly excessive. I absolutely get it for parents that live within an hour or maybe two, but not a distance.
gouf78’s plan:
“Bedding? Very bulky. Let it go.
Appliances? Got storage? Maybe–it might be cheaper to re-buy than actually store over the summer. Microwaves, refrig etc.
Furniture?–If storing you can cram a lot of extras in.”
This sounds as though it would work well for people with the financial resources to manage it. The bedding could be donated to Goodwill.
We have never discarded bedding. The on-campus storage solution handled almost nothing for QMP due to the limit of 3 fairly small boxes. That was useful for textbooks that were being kept. At QMP’s school, for off-campus storage, you would need a friend with a SUV or pick-up truck that could handle the items, or else you would need to hire Two Men and a Truck, or equivalent, and they are not all that inexpensive.
I totally understand a situation where the daughter has to cope because the trip is just too expensive (in money or time). In this case, she should not be “guilting” the parents.
There were events at QMP’s university that I would have loved to attend (performances QMP was in, public invited, lots of parents were in the audiences), but tuition by itself did not leave any spare funds for us to travel to see them.
On the other hand, if one could go to help, I don’t really see the problem with that. Over time, I have observed that a number of parents on CC advocate not helping children, so that the children can become self-sufficient. I totally understand this, if the help is not something you would do for another adult. But if it is help that you would gladly offer to another adult, it does not seem to me that it would be wrong to offer the same help to a child. (I will let you know whether this works out in the long run. )
To me, it’s all about the distance and expense. Our two older kids now live just an hour and a half away and we’ve helped them move from apt to apt or loaned them a car. I think their packing experience helped because my older two are really good packers. #2 son helped me pack up #3 child and he was amazing. Actually, it’s not just the expense either. It’s the time. When you have a day’s travel each way, you are also most likely talking about taking time away from work. But, as with everything on CC, whatever works for each family.
@saffysmum Of course and no worries! I definitely meant no criticism whatsoever, just pointing out the cost factor. We’re all good!
Adding to the cost discussion, for me for one parent it would cost a minimum of $700 all in, most likely more.
It’s funny how kids do get affected by seeing their peers interaction with their families on this kind of stuff. As I mentioned, my kiddo went to boarding school, too, so this is really year 5 for living in a dorm. I’ve sent 3-4 care packages this year (which I found out isn’t cheap with postal costs and zones these days). Kiddo made a comment about roommate’s mom sending something every week (first time away from home and first time empty nester). Way to lay a guilt trip, kiddo. 
My daughter always packed and moved herself out. However, I fully understand why parents go down to help, and at my D’s school a lot of OOS parents do. The kids have to be out of the dorm at 9 or 10 am the day after their final exam. Exam week is very stressful, and if a kid is studying day and night for finals, there’s not a lot of time for packing and cleaning. If you have a late final (or one of those midnight projects), there’s not a lot of time between when that ends and 9 am to pack, clean, etc. It’s lots of stress on top of stress. A student who doesn’t have a car has additional issues if he or she needs to get something to summer storage, or to UPS to ship home if they’re flying. It’s hard to impose on other students for rides during exam week, as everyone is busy. So I know plenty of moms who go down for a day or two and are packing and cleaning, or running to storage, while the student is in the last final exam. And, from what I hear, they’re also sipping wine with other parents with whom they’ve become friendly. A win-win if the parent can afford to go down to help.
Both of my kids go to school on a different continent from us. D was at a school that had an on-campus storage service. They delivered boxes and then picked them up at her dorm. The next fall, they delivered them straight to her new dorm. When she moved off campus, she used a zipcar to transport everything. She did everything - packing, storage, etc herself all four years (we did help with the initial move-in freshman year.)
S is at a small college that does not provide any help. He did not have a car freshman year so we wondered how he would move his stuff to storage. Fortunately, we were nearby (3 hours) at D’s graduation when he had to move out, so we did drive up and help. But, after that, he bought a car and he was on his own. When he moved into a house, he did everything himself. Even put together the flat-pack furniture (incorrectly).
But, as a general rule, I don’t think most kids need help. They can learn to be resourceful. But it may be like “parents weekend” - my kids always felt a bit left out since their parents could attend. I think OP’s D just doesn’t want to feel like the odd one out.
This! We recently moved, and at one point D1 hinted at coming home to help us around the day of the move, even though she’d just been here for Christmas less than eight weeks earlier. And when she (along with D2) were here, we spent a whole day purging and doing other little things that would make move day easier on us. Of course, it would have only cost her a plane flight… no hotel, no meals out (unless we wanted to take her).
The thing that disappoints me about this thread are the generalizations that they should be able to do it themselves, and any parent who helps them is somehow enabling them. Many of us who have been around here a long time know there are plenty of parents here with kids who may need help for a variety of reasons that don’t apply to our lives, as @QuantMech points out. I can think of other reasons kids might appreciate some help - perhaps they have an extensive portfolio they don’t want to leave in storage; perhaps they have a large instrument that they must take home for the summer, which takes up checked bag space on a plane; perhaps a barely 19-year old with EF issues really does need to be walked through the process at least their freshman and sophomore years so they can perhaps try it on their own junior and senior years (or any of a number of learning difficulties that make learning such a skill more difficult). Some rural college towns don’t have the resources of storage pick up and drop off, and if you’re a freshman, you probably don’t have a lot of friends with cars on campus. The student will still need to figure out how to do it, but having a parent there (if it’s feasible and desirable) does not mean they are doomed to fail at life because they had help moving out/in freshman/sophomore/junior years. This is not a one-size fits all experience.
We did have plans to pick up D1 at the end of her freshman year (about 650+ miles away) with our car. Around March she learned about storage options in her college town and we decided she’d use them for the summer, but we went anyway. As it ends up, she contracted undiagnosed mono in April and a lot of things just were not a priority until she was feeling better and got through finals. I’m glad we were there to help her sort stuff out, just as, when I’ve had health issues, my kids have come home to help us. As it was, D relapsed with mono within 36 hours of getting home after freshman year (that’s when we discovered what she had three weeks earlier was mono - she got tested at home).
Every family on here has circumstances that other’s don’t, so why judge what some parents choose to do and what some parents don’t choose? There’s nothing redemptive in making things as hard as possible for our kids just so they’ll learn a lesson at every corner.
Well of course there are special circumstances.But I don’t see the OP indicating any. For example when I said that helping would never occur to me. It’s because D is a fully functioning adult without any special circumstances. In that case I am not making it “as hard as possible” . She CAN and COULD do it easily, she is not sick, not recovering from mono, and has been in trickier situations, so yes-let her learn another lesson around this corner.
Yes, I agree that special circumstances are different. If there are things that prevent a child from packing up on their own, then certainly parents should be there to help - that’s our job. Or if a parent simply wants to be there - no judgment. But OP did not indicate there were any special circumstances, nor are there any with my own child. So yes, I expect her to pack up, store what she doesn’t need for the summer and I will drive up and pick her up.
That’s all I need do for this particular child.