The UniversityParent Guide to Supporting Your Student’s Freshman Year is packed with practical advice and insightful reflections. Chapters unfold organically, season by season, taking you from summer as you pack and plan, through the challenges and transitions of autumn, and on into spring. Our expert contributors answer your questions – even the ones you didn’t know you How can I help my student make a budget and stick to it? Should parents attend orientation? What can we expect on move-in day? How does academic advising work? Is it too soon to start planning for study abroad or apply for internships? What are some tips for talking about health and safety with my student? How can I be supportive while encouraging my student’s independence? For ten years, UniversityParent has been proud to support family relationships during this important time of transition. We connect with parents all across the country through our engaging eNews and via the rich resources of our website, , and have published more than two million parent handbooks with hundreds of university partners. The Guide is the product of this experience. There is no cookie-cutter approach to parenting a college student, but parents share universal concerns, questions, and joys. With room throughout for adding your own notes, the UniversityParent Guide to Supporting Your Student’s Freshman Year can be personalized and turned to again and again, during your student’s first year of college and beyond.
Our friends at UniversityParent have taken the wisdom of many writers, parents and experts and compiled the UniversityParent Guide to Supporting your Student’s Freshman Year: Packed with practical advice and insightful reflections for college parents.
This is just the kind of playbook we could use when we are getting ready to send our kids to college. The guide is a chronological road map (think What to Expect When You Are Expecting for 18 year olds, there is even a chapter entitled “What to Expect at Orientation”) that will help any parent through both the profound and the mundane. The guide looks at how our relationship with our kids evolves as they leave home and how to help them if they need us in this new phase. But this is a book full of “how to” that will help parents with everything from a move-in day checklist through the search of off-campus housing for sophomore year.
Studies consistently show that students with engaged parents have far better college outcomes than those that don’t or than those with overly involved parents. There is a delicate balance between acting as a coach and acting in place of the student.
Although the Guide was edited by UniversityParent’s Diane Schwemm, every section is authored by a different expert, many of them with decades of experience in higher education. The sections on health, budgeting or campus safety are all written by experts in their field. Most of the entries are short, no longer than a blog post, and get right to the points that parents need to know.
As our kids leave for college we don’t want to pepper them with an unending string of questions. It is time for them to manage their housing options, health forms, academic planning and extra-curricular activities on their own. Yet staying uninformed does not seem like a great option either.
This Guide helps parents of high school seniors, and frankly juniors, to understand a bit more about transitioning to college while leaving it to our kids to manage most things on their own. The book contains invaluable information on helping your kids to remain physically and psychologically healthy, including sections on health insurance, vaccines, health care privacy rules and dorm first-aid kits. Yet it cautions parents about warning signs of trouble and how they can help their kids who are ill or in need of counseling.
Here is the resource to answer all the questions you don’t want to pose to your kid and don’t know who to call in order to ask. It is compiled by parents and experts who know just how we feel. -via Grown and Flown's blog
