Doug's column on being a college parent
Sept. 9, 2007 12:00 AM
Oh, this is great . . .
Headline on the MSNBC Web site, Sept. 5: "Killer at college: Meningitis threatens students."
I try not to be a paranoid parent. I've tried hard for almost 18 years. Oh, sure, I've been known to pore over the WebMD Web site reading up on horrific tropical diseases when the Kid would start sniffling. And, yes, the Wife has rolled her eyes more than once in response to my medical judgment. But it's not completely because I'm paranoid.
Somebody out there really is trying to make me crazy.
September 5, you see, was the Kid's second day of college class. She spent a good part of that day at the University of Michigan student health services clinic, which treated her for wheezing, coughing and generally exhibiting all the symptoms of the sort of exotic tropical diseases that MSNBC convinced me were ravaging her immune systems.
I know that the MSNBC health reporter was just doing her job.
She found an unfortunate college freshman at Indiana University . . . a Big Ten school which, coincidentally, is just 328 miles, according to my research on Mapquest.com, from my Kid's school (another Big Ten college, please note!) at Ann Arbor, Mich.
The Hoosier student had contracted meningitis. She was a freshman. First time living in a dorm. And she exhibited symptoms that, OK, weren't exactly like those of my Kid, but were vaguely similar if you dwelled on them long enough. And dwell I did. Then two cases of the disease were discovered in Flagstaff, including one infecting a Northern Arizona University student. And, suddenly, I was in full-paranoid mode.
The fact that the circumstances that help promote the spread of the awful disease exactly mirrored those in which I had just plopped my kid did not help.
Dusty, dirty, claustrophobic dorm rooms? Check. Close proximity to hacking, wheezing strangers from all 50 states and over 60 foreign countries? Check. Heartless, uncaring parents who race away cross-country at the first opportunity to revel in their newfound status as empty nesters? Well, not exactly "check." But until I learned the kid had a sinus infection and had all the marvels of modern medical science at her disposal, I sorta felt that way.
At least I'm not the worst sort of insufferably oppressive, self-torturing parent. At least I'm not a "helicopter parent."
During a parent-orientation session on campus, a UM psychologist described modern moms and dads as people who hover over their kids' lives like helicopters, ready to swoop down and take charge of problem mitigation at the first sign of trouble. Rather like the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction who sweeps in to clean up John Travolta's bloody little messes.
This is not an unfair description of the current generation of parents of college freshmen.
During the question-and-answer period of parent orientation, one mother asked the psychologist if it would be too much for her to continue calling her son to remind him to eat lunch. He told her that, yes, any mother who would do such a thing to her 18-year-old son is an overbearing harridan. Not in precisely those words, of course. But something gently akin to it.
Another mom wanted to know if it would be OK for her to call her son each morning to make sure he got up on time for class.
What was truly amazing about this parent was that she lived in Spain. So, in order to call her son each morning before class, she not only would have to know his precise class schedule, but she would have had to calculate the time difference between Madrid and Ann Arbor each day. The UM shrink assured her that playing long-distance alarm clock to a near-adult is not a good thing.
So, the Kid is OK. Happily under the influence now of who-knows how many neo-Marxist professors, Ann Arbor anarchists and wild-eyed vegans.
And here I forgot to pack her a copy of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.
Argh. I'm a miserable dad
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