<p>We are a “no news is good news” family, with the only caveat that when travelling alone, we expect our kids to call and update us on safe arrivals.
I like the code idea, though. DD in college responds to e-mails, but I don’t think DS will when his time comes - I can see needing a response when you are forwarding important info.
We had gotten DD set up with her bills and other info going straight to her, so that she can be responsible, but that didn’t happen immediately when she went to college.</p>
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<p>I can identify with this. My youngest is gone for a month to COSMOS at UC Irvine. I’ve found that one way I can hear how things are going with her is to talk with her friends. She keeps THEM informed!</p>
<p>I guess I am in the minority, and don’t think getting a “cool mom” or something back is that difficult for a person to do</p>
<p>Are these the same kids who puruse facebook and post? </p>
<p>When it comes to family, seems some kids lack common courtesy and its all about them, with little regard for mom</p>
<p>How difficult is it for a person to hit reply and say, hope all is going well, love ya!!!</p>
<p>what if we just didn’t send in that check, or forward their mail, or whatever…we do it out of love and courtesy, we should expect nothing less</p>
<p>these young men are perfectly capable of caring about mom, and if one simple way to show it is to respond to an email they can suck it up and do it</p>
<p>in college you these days you need to check your email, its important for lots of reasons- info on classes, and people depend on it more and more for communicating enmasse and expect people to look</p>
<p>I would do what ASAP said, and put something in the email that mattered, fi they ignored it, ah well…</p>
<p>My D and I discussed how we would communicate, and she said, that on Sunday’s we would both sign on instant messenger to check in, and that she would indeed reply to my emails, even if its just a happy face</p>
<p>this is not helicopter parenting, this is courtesy, which we haven’t passed along to our kids I am guessing</p>
<p>as pointed out, if they can call and text and message and facebook and myspace and email friends, they can open mom’s email and say, send cookies</p>
<p>if my kid was not showing courtesy, I would at the next chance, not do something for them- send $, forward the mail, whatever, just for an extra day or two</p>
<p>Well, in truth, if my kids are having a great time and are absorbed in what they are doing, I’m not surprised at their lack of interest in checking in with me.</p>
<p>They know I’m safely at home – what’s to discuss?</p>
<p>In fact, my experience so far (kids away for the summer, not for college) indicates that the kids check in most often when they are feeling lonely, bored or ready to come home.</p>
<p>I am just eager to hear all the details of their time away, and it’s hard to be patient and wait until they are ready to tell me about what they’ve been up to.</p>
<p>Amen-- fendrock. And cangel about no news is good news.</p>
<p>cangel–</p>
<p>It sounds like your D is well on her way to adulthood. Was there a reason not to have the bills and other information that involved her go directly to her in the beginning? I am in the process of, and working with S, to set this up and would appreciate any observations you have.</p>
<p>Banking is already online. Single sum deposit by me to the account for each semester for everything, including tuition, room, board, food, transportation and books, effectively allows (requires) S to make the adult decisions regarding priorites and budgeting. </p>
<p>Does the school send her directly the statement of charges?</p>
<p>I have opened a dialogue with S by asking him to make a suggestion that allows for communication so I know he is alive and still in school yet keeps us from having the email “war.” I said that I want to avoid a situation where he dreads checking his computer emails. </p>
<p>We both agree that we do not want us to be in constant commuication. I acknowledged to him that I am having to adapt to not wanting (or getting) to know everything he is doing and thinking. He told me of friends whose parents use emails obstensively to convey information to their son or daughter, but really are bugging them to be able to keep tabs on them.</p>
<p>We also discussed that adults do not have to share the process of their decision making (outside of marriage). We laughed about how even after you get married, too much “family” can be an issue. What we want is two seperate lives, his and mine, and to want to and continue to have a joint life, but not one like when he was a dependent child.</p>
<p>By having all the information go directly to S, I think he and I can communicate when we want to share something and not have to get into the old “parent-child” arrangement where he owes me a description of his life.</p>
<p>My take on cookies (actually brownies) is that I send them (each summer to camp) because I wanted to and it made me feel good. Sure a short “thanks” was nice (on the occassions he wrote), but I got the pleasure from making and sending them. I once asked him if he’s like me to send them to him at college. The “yes” said all I needed to know.</p>
<p>Say it over and over again, they are adults and need to be independent.</p>
<p>I’m thinking back to the dark ages when I was in college…we never made a long distance call (emergency use only!) and, of course, we didn’t have the internet. I recall writing once or twice to my parents, and them to me. I wonder if they even cared that they didn’t hear from us?!</p>
<p>07DAD,
We set it up best as we could in the beginning - DD was only 17 when she left, so we had to be on her bank account, and she didn’t get a “real” credit card until this past Xmas - and we did that to allow her to build credit in her own name, not because she particularly needed another avenue of spending. But, she has a home bank account and a school bank account, and we never bothered changing her home bank account’s address, she checks online, and we get the actual paper. Her cell phone is a family plan, etc. Some things that we changed took a couple of months for the address changes to go through.
She went abroad March to June, and set up all her address changes for her school accounts, now it seems to be taking months to change them back - all that sort of stuff.</p>
<p>I guess I see different sorts of communication, DD and I are also “good buddies”, and we communciate by e-mail 2-3 times a week about books, movies, funny things in the paper or on the news, things happening at home or school. So if something important comes up, like we are still tussling with the state over her state income tax (she’s not that independent, Dad did her tax return), I don’t worry about her ignoring the e-mail that says expect to get an important form through the mail re: your tax return.</p>
<p>Son, though, would not be interested in the buddy, newsy e-mails, and might ignore the ones that contain important info in the name of being “independent”, when it wouldn’t really reflect on his independence.</p>
<p>Mine are pretty chatty. they like to get my emails and calls and htey know that writing me is the best way to solicit my missives.</p>
<p>They both write quite a few emails that say: “Will write a really long email later!” Neither are good about sanil mail. I sent gourmet cookies which were returned to the (devastated) baker in a petrified state about 100 days later. My mother sent a desparately needed strainer which was returned 30 days later–and is now beautrfiully incorporated into her kitchen. Son has visitation rights but will never get custody, says mom.</p>
<p>I can’t complain. About a year after we were married, I found a whole stack of my letters to DH. Unopened. All that passion! Never read! Hah!</p>
<p>He’s the kindest man on earth–so no correlation between abstract communication and live behavior.</p>
<p>WashMom probably confusing herself with this issue. His leaving is the real hurt.</p>
<p>The phenomenon is not limited to your sons. My D doesn’t read hers, either. She will read those from certain people, and delete the rest. Unfortunately, I’m on the ‘delete’ list. The only important means of electronic communication to her are texting and IMing, so if I need to tell her something, I either IM or text her.</p>
<p>She doesn’t mind that I have her email password, so if she gets an important email and she needs someone else to read it, I just log on and read it.</p>
<p>My son is good at responding to my emails, even if it is short, sweet and to the point.
He is in London for the summer so email is the only (economical) way to communicate with him. He sends us a weekly update as to how things are going and asks us to let him know what’s going on around home, so, I guess I’m fortunate.</p>
<p>btw…I just invested in a microphone and voila, we can “talk” via computer if we choose to.</p>
<p>if there is info I want to communicate that doesn’t need a response back, I send text msg to phone. It’s amazing how much info I can get into 140 characters.</p>
<p>Son is a counselor at camp and has his phone, but service for calls is spotty (which doesn’t affect text msgs) and they aren’t supposed to be on the phone when they are working. </p>
<p>He can IM on the phone. I leave my AIM open at all times and once in a while I will get a msg from him. On the really rare times he calls, it’s because something is wrong: problem with phone, sick with fever and ear infection, where’s my Harry potter book. Never a good news phone call (when he’s at camp).</p>
<p>I have saved every postcard I got from my son at camp when he was little. The longest one (circa 1999) said “sorry I haven’t written, been busy, we had grilled cheese, send candy”. </p>
<p>I will save those cards forever. And I like saving the IMs too for sentimental purposes, some of them are priceless!</p>
<p>I’ve enjoyed the comments. For the record, John is still living at home (for the next 17 days anyway) so it’s not like we are trying long-distance communications. I don’t expect it to get any better when he moves out of state.</p>
<p>Apologies if this has been covered, as I have quickly skimmed the posts here.</p>
<p>Son doesn’t reply to email. Been there, done that.</p>
<p>My son told me to put the following in the subject line if the email is important to read: RTR (required to read). Okay, but that doesn’t tell me that he has, in fact, read it and/or taken whatever action I’m hoping he’ll take.</p>
<p>So I <em>saw</em> his RTR and <em>raised him one</em>: RTRR (required to read and respond). It works for us.</p>
<p>I don’t send many emails any more, now that I see it’s not his preferred method of his communication. (If I ever figure out what his preferred method of communication is, you’ll hear the hallelujahs on the other coast :D). But, if I see something interesting and forward it, I don’t put the RTR or RTRR on it.</p>
<p>If I need to know he’s seen it and/or acted, I put the RTRR in the subject line. Has been working for two years now.</p>
<p>IM is the best method with my kid, who has perfected the Cone of Silence. It’s just who he is. Even with IM, I’ve had to learn to use it judiciously and follow his style.</p>
<p>His style: no IM is more than one line long at a time. </p>
<p>Then, sometimes he’s “talkative” and we get a dialog going. Other times, not much from his end, but at least I know he’s alive. My primary use of IM with him is to have my IM window open when he’s away at school. Sometimes, he’ll come on to say something and there’s a lot more communication if he starts it than if I do.</p>
<p>My oldest son learned to respond the hard way.</p>
<p>Sophomore year, he developed a habit of blowing off both me and my H, nothing overtly nasty, just that any of our news or questions just wasn’t that important to him any more.</p>
<p>Around Thanksgiving, we asked him to check the balance in his various accounts (meal points, flex dollars, checking account) and get back to us so we could plan for the spring semester. He never responded, but we excused it to ourselves because he was taking 21 hours and had a grueling end of the semester with papers and finals. We mentioned it a couple of times over break and he basically blew us off with he’d get to it when he felt like it. </p>
<p>He went back to school in January never having given us a status report.</p>
<p>Mid January, I sent him a pleasant chatty email saying , among other things, that we were interpreting his failure to respond as an indication that he had adequate funds, and how proud I was of his independence and that he was on his own financially for the rest of the semester. I told him also that he had better check his credit card bill (for books) on-line and pay it because we wouldn’t. </p>
<p>At the beginning of February, I got a panicked phone call–his school card didn’t work, for some reason it had no meal or flex points on it, and his ATM account was really low.</p>
<p>I advised him to read all of his old emails, and to quickly find a job. He had to take some money out of the account he had been using to save for his travel to Israel in the summer to get him over the short term hump. He ended up reffing a lot of soccer games and doing a lot of bar mitzvah tutoring.</p>
<p>He learned to read emails from home and to give at least a short response.</p>
<p>I felt like the world’s meanest mom but wanted him to learn a lesson. A month or two in, had he needed $$$ we would have helped him out, because we knew he had learned a lesson, but he never asked. He never seemed angry or put out at all–I think that he felt it was a fair consequence.</p>
<p>Heh, letters from camp. The first year our first letter was “This place is insert bad word. Take me home.” We didn’t, but we did call. The next year, having sent him back to the same camp despite that letter, the first letter was “It’s ok this year.”</p>
<p>boysx3</p>
<p>You weren’t mean and it sounds like a lesson well learned by your son. Like I said, commuication has to be important to them or they won’t do it. BRAVO</p>
<p>that is my kind of mom, good for you</p>
<p>I told my husband about this thread, and he suggested putting things in the subject line like “You just received cash academic prize,” “Keira Knightly called and wants to get in touch with you,” etc.</p>
<p>I have found that for any email I send, whether family, friends or business, I always put the subject followed by " - Pls RSVP". This always works - but must be used sparingly to be effective. (I never heard of RTR before - don;t know if anyone in my circle has either.) S often responds with one-word responses but at least I know he read it.</p>