Interested in becoming a successful college student? Here is some advice from Dr. Tracy Gottlieb, Dean of Freshman Studies and Special Academic Programs.
– This article can also be seen in the 2008 edition of Off to College
Whenever I hear the song Summertime, I cringe. While Lena Horne croons that the “livin’ is easy,” I find myself making flow charts to track the work and play schedules for our family.
I know that summer is supposed to be a time when life slows down, but every year I brace myself for the complications that come with the summertime.
Some observations from the front:
Armed with the reality that summertime living can be anything but easy, parents may wonder what they can do to prepare themselves and the family for the return of college students to the family fold for the long summer months.
The best advice is simply to be prepared for the changes, to communicate with all the children, to set some ground rules and to perfect the art of negotiation.
Talk to the younger children at home about having to share a room or a bathroom again. They will be resentful that what they now believe is “their” space is being taken up by a “foreigner,” a person who is quite different from the one who left home nine months ago. When my oldest, Annie, left for college, she magnanimously willed her third-floor nest to the next in line. Then, when she returned home in May, she spent the summer lamenting that she had given up this prime piece of family real estate. Her brother Daniel, heir to the space, hung strong and ignored her protestations.
Perhaps the smartest thing I did when my college-age students came home to roost was to sit them down and talk reality to them. This took the form of serious negotiation. I had to figure out first what was absolutely crucial for me and what could I give in on? In other words, was a curfew important? For the first few years, the answer was yes. Then, I found that I was losing so much sleep fretting over Daniel’s benign but persistent ignoring of his curfew that I decided to give it up and negotiate on more important items, like keeping the house clean and carrying their weight with other chores. I also liked to force attendance at a weekly family dinner, but after nine-months of eating out, they think of this as a gift not a duty.
Automobiles are always sensitive issues that can easily cause tension. When Annie left for college, Daniel didn’t have his license. By the time she came home in May, Dan had gotten his license and had begun to think of the third car as his own. If there are more licensed drivers than there are automobiles, a written schedule is the only way out. Map out all the times people need to get to work, buy groceries and attend church and then give the car to the child who volunteers to run all the carpools and do the grocery shopping (this is known as the wisdom of Solomon).
The best advice I can give, however, is to never let resentments fester. If the dirty towels on the hardwood floors are driving you crazy, invite your student for coffee and chat about your concerns. If your younger child is resentful of the prodigal child, sit them both down for a conversation (and feed them food while you talk. Food always facilitates negotiation!).
Remember, the adjustment to home is as hard for your child as it is for you. Your job as the adult in the equation is to look at the shifting family dynamics as an opportunity for family growth and a chance to break away from bad habits. And always cling to the knowledge that summertime is fleeting. It will be September again before you know it!
If you have any questions, feel free to contact Tracy Gottlieb, Dean of Freshman Studies and Special Academic Programs, at gottlitr@shu.edu
In the Gottlieb house, you’ve got to grab the opportunity for family bonding whenever you can. That’s why I always welcome the brouhaha of March Madness. We spend hours discussing our choices for the Gottlieb NCAA basketball pool (no money exchanged), hooting over the long-shots we choose, crowing when we call it accurately, watching television together, and vying for family bragging rights.
While other families assemble for intimate dinners or gather round the kitchen table for endless hours of friendly Monopoly games, just about the only thing the Gottliebs can agree on is that we all love college basketball. Annie reminisces that one of her clearest childhood memories is being awoken from a deep sleep to the hootin’ and hollerin’ by her parents, aunts and uncles that accompanied Seton Hall’s near victory (it’s the only way I can refer to it still, nearly 20 years later) in the NCAA tournament. When ESPN Classic replays the 1989 final game, my kids text messaged me to turn on the television. I sit down to watch the final minutes with the hope that maybe this time the ref’s whistle won’t blow!
I’ve always felt a little bit jealous that one of my best friends regularly has poignant family moments with her two children, a 15-year-old and a 21-year-old. They go out to dinner as a family. They take vacations together, bike ride and climb mountains together. Meanwhile, the Gottliebs are quibbling over whether anyone in their right mind would have picked Davidson over Georgetown in the NCAA second round.
We’ve tried family dinners, but they aren’ particularly successful. Someone complains about the main course; someone else picks a fight; it all unravels rather quickly.
Family vacations also are a thing of the past. I’ve been able to rally the troops only twice in the last ten years – once for a family cruise to Bermuda that cost a fortune and once for an even more expensive five days in London (but Annie had to decline at the last minute because she got a new job so even that didn’t make it as a full family bonding experience). Thus, unless the destination is really alluring (read that expensive) I can’t get all three children together as a group.
So instead I’ve learned to cherish our moments gathered together around our television during March. It’s family bonding time at its best. The boys find great amusement in my unwavering loyalty to Big East teams (I managed once again to come up with an all-Big East Final Four); Annie crafts two grids – a sentimental favorites and the real one; Tom tracks the possibility of his winning electronically; Dan smugly sticks with the favorites.
I could lament the absence of traditional forms of family bonding, or I could celebrate the fact that we have found some common ground to continue our growth as a family. I choose to focus on the latter. As our children age, we need to meet them where they are. If that means listening to their choice of music when we are in the car together or watching their favorite television program with them, so be it.
As one of nine children, I am so used to being smothered by family that I always feel so sad when some one tells me they haven’t spoken to their brother in six months or they haven’t seen their sister in a few years.
My job as mother of my own small clan is to help my children forget all of the grudges and hurt feelings of their childhoods and form bonds and alliances that can carry them through to genuine adult friendships.
When I was a kid, my parents would drag us all together, kneel us down and say the Rosary as a family saying, “The family that prays together, stays together.”
The Gottlieb family ritual doesn’t ring with the same solemnity as that one, but I’m hoping that the effect will be the same. My fantasy is that years from now, my kids will come together as a family without their dad and me and wax nostalgic over the year that Mom had the audacity to pick the Hall as her Cinderalla team and win! (…I said this was my fantasy!)
Remember the good old days when your mother wanted to get you home for dinner so she stuck her head out the screen door and screamed your name at the top of her lungs? Yesterday, I was too lazy to get up from my sofa, walk up the stairs and rouse my husband from a nap, so I pulled out my cell phone and called our home number knowing that the ringing would wake him up.
Oh, my! Who could ever have envisioned how much technology would change our lives?
Our children are from another world. When my son was whining last week over how long it took to download an episode of his favorite TV program, Lost, that he had missed the night before, I waxed nostalgic about how we watched television as children, if we missed a program, we had to wait until the summer to see it as a rerun.
When I was delivering a lecture to my older son about the genesis of music videos in the 1960s, I cited the Monkees television show and the Beatles’ clip to promote Strawberry Fields Forever. Dan nonchalantly reported that he has been watching those old clips all the time on YouTube. Who knew? Sure enough, anyone interested in walking down Memory Lane (or Penny Lane, for that matter) can relive the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Monkees cavorting in full costume or the 18+ minutes of Arlo Guthrie singing “Alice’s Restaurant.” Every single recorded moment that I could think of, I found on YouTube.
YouTube, which facilitates the world-wide sharing of homemade and professional video clips, brings in literally billions of viewers. If it’s been taped, you can probably find it on YouTube.
If you can’t find it on YouTube, you can probably read about it on Wikipedia, the free online, reader-written encyclopedia. If you are not aware of Wikipedia, which has 9.25 million articles, you should be. Your children are using it every day to research subjects from Shakespeare to baseball statistics. It is the bane of faculty, who rail that Wikipedia articles are unreliable and lack academic credentials, but they seem to be fighting a losing battle. Wikipedia is indeed helpful in solving difficult crossword clues and putting a finger on an elusive fact, but we’re trying to teach our students more sophisticated and reliable advanced searching techniques!
Listen to this podcast episode welcoming you to Seton Hall!!
It’s hard to think about the summer when it’s 23 degrees outside, but students who want to make best use of those months need to be planning for their summer right now.
Internships are the proven pathway to a career. Students can take advantage of the long break during the summer months to gather experience that fills out and enhances a resume. Parents sometimes complain that students are paying tuition money for the privilege of working at non-paying internships, but, from a prepare-for-the-future perspective, there’s no better way to learn about the real world.