What Parents Really Think When Their Kid Goes to University
The last box was a plastic tub filled with command hooks, a first-aid kit, and a set of screwdrivers I was pretty sure she’d never use. We wedged it between a mini-fridge and a stack of storage cubes, and then there was nothing left to carry. My daughter stood in the middle of her new dorm room, holding a rollout mesh laundry basket like she wasn’t sure if she should put it in the closet or just wear it.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s everything.”
We stood there for a second. The room had that new-carpet-and-dust smell. Her roommate hadn’t arrived yet, so the other side of the room was empty, just a bare mattress and a corkboard with no pins in it. My wife was checking the window locks and muttering about the fire escape route. I was trying to figure out the right thing to say, something that would be both a send-off and a reassurance, but my brain kept landing on logistics.
“Did you eat lunch?” is what I finally said.
She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. We went to the dining hall, where the three of us sat at a long table and watched families around us having the same conversation. There’s a particular energy in a university dining hall on move-in day. Everyone is slightly too loud, slightly too cheerful, all of us trying to make normal conversation while a timer is counting down in our heads.
When we walked back to the car, I hugged her goodbye and told her to call us when she got her schedule sorted. She said, “I will,” and then she walked away before any of us could get weepy. My wife and I got in the car and sat in silence for a full five minutes before either of us spoke.
Now, a few months later, people keep asking me what I think about university. I think they expect a chapter-and-verse opinion about the cost, the value, the changing landscape of higher education. And I do have thoughts about all that. But what you think about university shifts a little when you’re the parent standing in the parking lot.
I was a first-generation university student myself. I remember the confusion of it—not the academics, but the unwritten rules. I didn’t know what office hours were for. I didn’t know you were supposed to talk to professors. I didn’t know that asking for help wasn’t the same as admitting you were failing. I learned a lot of that the hard way.
We tried to do things differently with our daughter, but not in a big, structured way. We didn’t have a “college preparedness plan.” We just tried to normalize the parts that had tripped me up. In the months before she left, at dinner, we’d talk about things like how to read a syllabus or what to do if you can’t find a classroom. Once, my wife asked her, “What’s one thing you’re nervous about?” and she said she was worried about not making friends in her classes. We didn’t give her a pep talk. We just told her that most people in the first week are looking for friends, and that sitting in the same seat next to the same person every day until one of you says something is a legitimate strategy.
Those conversations didn’t require any special expertise. They just required us to remember that university is a confusing environment, not just intellectually but socially. For an eighteen-year-old, the first month is full of moments that feel huge—finding the right bus, figuring out which dining hall is less crowded, deciding whether to knock on your neighbor’s open door. None of that is in the course catalogue.
What’s been harder to prepare for is how it feels from the outside.
The first few weeks, she called a lot. Then the calls became texts. Then the texts became shorter. That’s not a complaint. It’s just the natural rhythm. But there was a stretch around mid-October where I realized I had no idea what her daily life actually looked like. I knew she was taking a sociology class. I knew she’d joined a club that watched movies. But I didn’t know what her cafeteria looked like or who she sat with or whether she was sleeping enough.
We went to visit her for a parent weekend, and it was strange to see her in her environment. She gave us a tour of the campus like she was a docent. She pointed out the building where she had a class, the library where she studied, the coffee shop where she liked to go between lectures. She seemed more confident than I’d ever seen her. She seemed like herself, but a slightly different version.
We took her to lunch off campus, and for the first time in months, we had a real conversation. She talked about a paper she was writing and how she’d gone to office hours for the first time because she didn’t understand the assignment. She said the professor sat and explained the readings for twenty minutes and then asked her what she thought. She said, “I didn’t know they’d actually want to hear my opinion.”
That felt like a win. Not because anything was solved, but because she told us about it. She didn’t have to. She could have just said, “school is fine,” which, for the record, is what she says when she’s on the phone with her grandmother.
I’ve read all the articles about how university is becoming a bad deal, how the cost isn’t worth the return, how there are better paths. I don’t disagree with all of it. The cost genuinely worries me. We’ll be paying off her loans for a while, and that’s a real burden that sits in the back of my mind more than I expected it would. But when I try to sum up what I actually think about university, I keep landing on something less tidy.
I think university is a place where you can learn how to do things you didn’t know you needed to learn. I’m not talking about courses. I mean the small skills—how to share a room with a stranger who has different habits, how to manage time when no one is managing it for you, how to ask for help, how to feel lonely and still get through the day, how to find your way back to your own confidence.
At the same time, it’s not magic. My daughter still texts us saying she’s overwhelmed. She still gets sad on Sundays. She still doesn’t know what she wants to major in, and she’s not worried about it, which somehow worries me more. The other night, she called to say she was looking at apartments for next year with a couple of friends, and I spent the whole call thinking about security deposits.
There’s a moment on the drive home from a visit—the car is quiet, the road is long—where you just sit with the fact that there’s a version of your child’s life that doesn’t include you. That’s a lot to adjust to. It doesn’t have to be sad. Sometimes it’s a relief. But it’s real.
So what do I think about university? I think it’s a strange, expensive, necessary experiment. I think it’s not the only path, but it’s the one she chose. I think it’s working for her so far, at least in the ways that matter. I think I’m still figuring out what my role is from a hundred miles away.
Mostly, I think about how, when we dropped her off, I told her to make sure she ate lunch. And now, when she calls, that’s still the thing I check. She always says she did. I don’t know if that’s true. But I’m learning to be okay with not knowing, which is probably the bigger lesson.
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