Living away from home
For most new students, attending Iowa will mean living on their own for the first time. If you ask first-year students what they look forward to most about going to college, a significant percentage will say, “The freedom! I get to do what I want, whenever I want (without Mom and Dad telling me what to do).”

While this sense of freedom is exciting to new students, it can also be viewed with some anxiety as the beginning of their first semester approaches.

Handling newfound freedom
It doesn’t take more than a few weeks of college life before students realize that they’re fully responsible for managing their daily affairs. You won’t be there to ensure that they attend class, eat well, get enough sleep and exercise, and finish their course assignments on time.

These things are now their responsibility, and while they may not have thought too much about this before starting college, they now find that they have decisions to make every day:

• Should I go to class or catch up on sleep?
• Should I read the chapters for the psychology quiz next week or watch my soap operas and leave the reading for another day?
• Should I go to a movie with friends or start the rhetoric paper that’s due at the end of the week?

Struggling to find balance
As new students adjust to taking control of their daily lives, it's common for them to struggle to find the balance between their academic lives and their lives outside of the classroom.

• With the unstructured nature of college life, it’s easy for students spend huge chunks of time socializing with their new friends; watching TV and movies; playing video games, cards, or a pickup game of basketball; or just spending hours talking, forgetting that they are here for another purpose!

Success in college often boils down to how students handle the responsibility of being in charge of their own decisions.

While even the most mature first-year students will make decisions they later regret (“I shouldn’t have stayed up watching that movie, but we were having so much fun…I barely stayed awake in class the next day.”), managing the transition to college life means making more good decisions than poor ones. 

Advice for parents
Here are some ways you can help:

• Explain that the main difference between high school and college is the degree of personal responsibility that students have for making decisions and accepting their consequences.

• Do your best to avoid lecturing about poor choices; admonishments are easily tuned out, especially when empathy and support were sought.

• Offer continual support and advice to keep the lines of communication open.

• Mistakes are excellent teachers! Help your student learn from mistakes by focusing on what caused the problem in the first place, and what needs to change in the future.
  • For example, if there is disappointment over a midterm exam grade, what specific actions led to this outcome?
  • If given a second chance to go back and change something about your student’s approach to the exam, what would he or she do differently?
  • Are there any campus resources or individuals who can help?

• Resist the urge to intervene and solve problems that might arise from poor decision making. Although this might make things easier in the short-term, students gain far more maturity and self-confidence by getting their needs met on their own through the appropriate University channels. 

• Staying focused on long-term goals can help students make good choices. In many cases, young people don’t always see the connection between the decisions they make today (skipping class, for example) and the ramifications of those decisions (a poor grade in a course) in the months and years to come.