This time of transition is stressful for all parents. Anxieties about post-secondary education are real, but lurking beneath them is the greater anxiety about the fact that your child will soon be on his or her own.

Below are tips for parents of first year students:

• Be prepared. During the last few weeks before they leave home, students often try to spend as much time as possible with their home friends.
• You might want to look into how your child will do their banking, and how or if you will send them money.
• One of the mistakes that parents of university students sometimes make is assuming ownership for a student’s problem, issue or situation and trying to fix it for the student. This may be as basic as changing the student’s meal plan, but this is something that students really need to learn to do for themselves.
• Do not ask them during their first year what they are going to do after graduation. They have enough difficulty selecting classes and they feel enormous pressure to make that lifelong decision even before they have proved their academic capability.



Adapted from: 
Trent University, Disability Services Office: www.trentu.ca/disabilityservices.