Daughter has been very anxious and emotional lately because the pre-season training for college is around the corner. This California girl will first experience living in one of the coldest states, MN. She is scared to leave her 10-yr old dog, her grandparents, her one-year boyfriend. She is nervous about playing her sport in a college level all of a sudden. She worries she will not like the school even though she has visited overnight and loved it more than a year ago.
To make the transition easier, my husband and I will accompany her to MN and stay there for a month. We will watch her games and give her support in any ways when we are there. We will go back again in Oct for the family weekend. Then she will fly back to CA for six weeks due to the trimester system.
To me, her situation is very favorable for most people who have to go out of state for college. But her history of having anxiety disorder since young speaks otherwise. Does anyone have similar situation or know someone who has? Is there anything I need to pay attention to? Is there something that I should say or should not say? What should I anticipate to see when she is actually there all alone for her new chapter?
Please share what you know and any advice is much appreciated!
Do you need to stay for the month? What about a trip up for a game and a couple days a few weeks into the season? The first month of college is a time when everyone is looking for new friends and getting established on campus. The last thing you want to do is hinder that process, and you hanging around will do exactly that.
Is she at Carleton (thinking that due to the trimester comment)? I can’t imagine you staying in Northfield for a month. And she will be way too busy with classes and her sport to spend time with you anyway. You will likely add to her stress, honestly.
I would make sure she is very clear on how to seek help in campus if her anxiety flares up. You might consider looking for a referral for a psychologist or psychiatrist in town so she has someone local to see if she needs it. Then let her go to college. You hovering will not make this transition go more smoothly.
Remember that she is not “all alone” for her new chapter. She has her teammates, coach, roommates, professors, classmates, college res life team, and college health service. You can’t be your kid’s local support service through college – let those structures develop in her first semester.
@intparent Thank you for you suggestion. I already plan to look for some doctors and visit them to start a record for my daughter.
I am not staying in Northfield and will travel around nearby states. I will only be there for all games during the month and show up only if she needs us or anything. I will also use that opportunity to explore Minnesota for investment. My idea staying there for one month was more for convenience than for her to being with. It just so happened she is nervous and I see it as a good transition since I will be there if the she gets the anxiety attack.
I would not stay in the state or area. I would tell her you will be back for parents weekend and make sure she has the information on campus and local resources.
@intparent It is just a peace of mind for her if she knows I am around. At least for now whenever she worries, I bring up about staying there for a month, she will utter a sigh of relief. I am not the type of parent that let my kid cry and run away from problems. We sent her to a away summer camp for 5 weeks when she was ten. She called every night for a week begging us to take her home, no, we hung up on her. At the end of the camp, she refused to go home with us because she had too much fun.
Now she is more mature and she understands more of her problem. But the scary thing is, the more they think they know, the more they refuse to take care of it. They might hide it. I want to be able to pick up cues when I am physically there. Mom is most sensitive to their kids’ behavior. I know for sure being there is the best choice for my daughter.
I just need to know what and what not to say to her and what to pay attention to. I feel this is a very sensitive moment.
you WONT always be able to be there when she has her attacks.
She WILL, at some point, in the very near futuer, have to learn to get help / deal with her anxiety issues without you - in order to become a strong, self assured adult that you want her to be.
She will be LESS likely to have attacks IF she knows she has your support AND most importantly- feels from YOU the confidence that she IS ready for college. So, take a bunch of deep breathes, drop your helicopter mindset and start treating her as a capable, highly intelligent young adult, not as a helpless child.
Knowing, or even worse, finding out that "mommy"is hovering nearby, WAITING for her to have an attack, will NOT give her the confidence she needs to find in herself, especially if she thinks that her teammates and classmates might find out.
You are undermining her ability to grow up and learn to function without you.
Back off.
And get used to being a loving and supportive parent- from afar.
If you want to help her transition to being away at college and keeping her anxiety at bay, why not spend a week or two BEFORE college starts in the area. Explore and get comfortable with her new surroundings. But I will side with the other responders that say you should leave town as soon as school starts. Make plans and go back in a month or more. Spend a WEEKEND with her.
Just having you in town is a crutch that she will most likely make use of; because she can. Why else would you be there? Your being there is severely limiting her growth into an adulthood. Everyone is scared and anxious when they start college but you get thru it and form friendships that will last a lifetime. Don’t deprived her of that experience.
Let her know that you have confidence in her and that she can find resources on campus that can help her - that she just should’t be afraid to seek them out. Let her know that, like most new experiences in life where we stretch and grow, there will be ups and downs. She will have great days and not so great days. She might make mistakes, but they won’t be insurmountable and anything is fixable. Tell her to be patient with herself and kind to herself. Remind her to take care of her physical as well as mental health - we all manage better when we get enough sleep, eat well, and exercise. Let her know people on campus want her to succeed and are there to help her do so but they aren’t mind readers so seek them out. Tell her that people like to help others and to feel needed - RAs, professors, support staff, counseling folk. Tell her that Carleton would not have accepted her if they didn’t feel she was perfectly capable of handling it - they are vested in student success. Carleton is a warm, supportive place. Remind her that you/your family love her, support her, are proud of her no matter what but don’t want to smother her and want her to develop the adulting skills she is definitely capable of. Before she steps foot on campus, sit down together and review the resources and outlets for help available to her and how she can initiate any contact she might need with those resources so that she feels confident and empowered to use what is out there. Then, as others have suggested, pull back on the extended proximity you have currently envisioned.
If she winds up coming to you with problems or issues or anxiety, be there to listen, be a sounding board, remind her of the resources available and remind her of steps she can take on her own. You can help her break those steps down into concrete action items if needed. Don’t step in and try to solve them for her.
One thing I’ll repeat - be there to listen rather than solve. It’s one thing I’ve had to really learn with my own kids - when they call, they don’t always want you to give advice or try to solve things for them. Often, they are just wanting to vent.
And what happens the day after you leave? What if final exams are even more stressful than those first few games, or she has a falling out with her roommate, or she gets a Dear Jane letter from the boyfriend? Will you tell her to hop on a plane so you can assess her anxiety level? There’s really no reason to believe that the first month of college will be any more fraught with anxiety producing circumstances than any other time.
As the mother of a young college grad with an anxiety disorder and depression, I second the responses you’ve gotten. And I have to ask whether your D’s therapist is on board with this plan, because I can’t imagine any therapist would think this is a sound idea.
My D had a bout of depression while away at college. When things got really scary for her one evening, she asked the RA to arrange for her to be transported to the local hospital, which evaluated her, determined she was not in imminent danger, and sent her back to her dorm. The next day she called me to tell the tale and called her shrink back home to thrash it all out. She handled the experience without parental involvement, and I’m sure she gained confidence in her ability to cope with adversity. If you stay home, your D can Skype or Facetime with you on a regular basis to discuss any issues she is having. If she has an anxiety attack, her proper recourse as a young adult college student is to seek help from her school’s health services, not run into her mother’s arms.
If she is on a sports team it will be her teammates who will make her transition easy. You being their for a month is going to be a crutch for her. The thing she needs to understand is every college freshmen will be finding their way in that first year. She has teammates so she is already ahead of the curve. I will also add that you yourself will be dying of boredom after that first week. I would scale back that month into a week and monitor how things go.
I agree with MommaJ. I cannot believe a reputable therapist (which she is seeing, right? Because she has an anxiety disorder) would think this a good plan.
So what happens when it is Saturday night and the kids in the dorm are all going out for a movie, she’s a little nervous, and spends the evening with you? You are hindering her development to push through her anxiety, find a new friend, and socialize.
As a side note, her nervousness about the cold isn’t going to be anything you will witness in the first month. It’s going to be perfectly pleasant.
She needs to have a therapist lined up in her new town and maybe even some introductory phone calls. I could see you being there to help facilitate “interviewing” various therapists, or to help chauffeur (I am not familiar with Northfield so I don’t know if it is walkable). But I would do that a week before school starts, not after.
I’d help her develop a plan for staying healthy (i.e., local therapist, access to meds, self awareness, etc.), a plan for developing and accessing resources if she is not healthy, and a plan for staying in touch with you so that you can be tuned in.
Your plan may reinforce her anxiety by making her feel like she can’t do it alone and is likely to fall apart as ND that there’s a lot to be worried about.
Coaches tend to be good at looking out for their kids, and they see them daily. If you’re really worried about eyes on the ground and your D is okay with it, this might be the person who can pay attention for you.
It’s a big transition and scary for anyone, but doing it on her own you be very empowering.
Please listen to the advice above. I cannot imagine any college student wanting or needing parents to stay an entire month in the area just waiting for the child to have a melt down or episode. Show more confidence in your child!
You want the best for your child. So let her “struggle” a little. For all you know, she may settle in quite nicely with minimal homesickness. Also, when she does have a problem, feel lonely, or struggles, she may be able to handle it very will without you. At the very least, give her the chance to do this on her own. A major goal of parenting is independence from the parents.
Do you or she have a Plan B? What happens if (when?) she becomes anxious? Calling and having you fly out every single time probably isn’t a good solution. But, just giving her phone numbers of doctors also seems inadequate. She needs skills to handle tough situations. Teach those to her.(or if she had a therapist now, the therapist can teach/suggest the appropriate skills)
I would leave when the other parents leave. That will give your daughter the opportunity (and forces her) to meet all the other freshmen who are on the exact same situation. Spending a few days BEFORE freshman orientation traveling together exploring the area may work better. I find being familiar with the area makes me more comfortable and boosts my confidence level.
I can’t speak to your child’s case specifically, but the worries she’s expressing seem pretty typical to me. I think it may be how she handles the feelings associated with those worries that is giving you a lot of stress.
As an anxious person (by nature, not a clinical diagnosis), I recognize when my worries “infect” my kids with worry, and I step back, be quiet, and let them do their thing. The results are usually pretty good-they find that they are, in fact, capable of dealing with most of the worries that come their way. You staying there waiting for the other shoe to drop may actually be another source of worry for her, rather than a re-assurance.
If I were in your shoes, I’d leave at the expected time, and let her know that I’m a quick flight away if she needs me, and that it’s ok to be worried about all the changes, and just take it one day at a time. If she can focus on being present in the moment and enjoying the experience, it may help to lower the significance of all the stuff she’s worried about.
I went back and looked at other threads you participated in to refresh my memory. One was a thread about the feelings that you had if your child were to quit an activity prematurely. Another was a thread about obnoxious comments made to your d by another student and the choice to let them bother versus chalk it up to ignorant idiot you’ll never see again. I say this in a loving fashion - I might suggest you are too enmeshed. (I am too! So I get it!) I wonder if your idea of staying for the month is to assuage how (understandably) upsetting it is to you when she has a panic attack, and so you’re hoping you can prevent it at all. I would really run your plan by your D’s therapist and I think you’ve gotten great suggestions above.
I would definitely contact a therapist in town. Student health centers can often have long waiting times to get an appointment.
PG is right. The weather will be pleasant the first month. But don’t forget the Halloween Blizzard of 1991 which dropped 28 inches of snow on the school.
Agree with all the advice about setting up with a doctor/psych in town, meeting with health services and other applicable offices on campus. As the parent of a kid with anxiety disorder, I understand the calming technique of assuring her you will be in the area, so that her anxiety is controllable now, when everything is a giant unknown. Once she is on campus, and the unknown becomes known, she will need to use her own coping mechanisms. You being available in the region is a temporary coping mechanism, and as others have said, you can’t be there forever, so she needs to be able to use the tools she has used in the past to move forward. Right now, the promise of your availability is helping her cope with the tremendous unknown out there, and pulling it out from her now would be very difficult for her. But, perhaps start to sprinkle your assurances with statements about you being flexible, and you may be in and out of the area in the period after she moves in. And, remind her about other times when she was anxious in advance, but thrived once she was there. Once she is on campus and settled, and starts the routine of pre-season practices and bonding with her team – leave, give her the space to connect with this new stage, maybe stay be in the region for a week, then take off.
As the parent of a kid who is an athlete, I also understand (I’m preparing to be an absolute mess) about the challenges of separating from the student. I’m dropping off a D3 freshman athlete for fall preseason, and to prepare, I try to visualize what it will be like to just drive away, and not be there the next day, and day after, not be able to watch the scrimmages etc, not be able to see how the kid is doing, or the dynamic among the team and coaches. I’ve always been there, and now I’m not. This is going to be a huge adjustment for me, and I need to work on preparing myself to separate. But my job is to launch the kid, not fly along side him. And that is really hard.
Agree, a month doesn’t ease the transition, it extends it.
And as a parent, just when she needs to study, has a chance for a study group, some club activity, or to join dorm kids for some fun that would be a positive step, you’re giving her the chance to hang with you, instead. Sometimes, we need to think in the longer view, what makes more sense over a longer run. You can still be “there” to pick her up…but from afar. Texting, skype, phone.
Personally, in addn to setting up her counseling support, I’d be focused on making this time, right now, lower stress about starting college. Help her learn to breathe and trust herself.
OP, we are in EXACTLY your same shoes. Our daughter was diagnosed with anxiety just over a year ago. She had to call 911 to get help for her schizophrenic brother when we were out of town, and the trauma put her into a tailspin. She had such a severe panic disorder in February that she ended up in the ER.
She has an excellent therapist and is doing much better, but we know college next month will be a big transition. Her school is 500 miles from home. My husband and I will drive her out and stay for two days to get her settled. We’ll make sure there are supports in place, and she will video conference with her therapist as needed.
We believe it’s best that she start living as independently NOW, while there ARE a lot of supportive people around her. Hovering around her will be counterproductive.