Preparing for your college student’s first trip home

 

coming home from collegeOnce you’ve sent your teen off to the Ivory Tower to fill his head with knowledge, your first thoughts are probably of when you’ll see him again. You may have to wait until a holiday like Thanksgiving or Christmas, when he’ll have some time off from school, and that can be a long wait for a parent who has spent the last eighteen years seeing a child every day. So you may be tempted to smother him with parental love from the moment you pick him up at the airport to the second he tears himself away from your grasp to go back to school. But while you’ve been missing him he’s no doubt grown accustomed to living his own life. It’s the way of things. However, he’s likely been a little homesick, and when he comes to visit he’ll be jonesing for some of his faves. So here are just a few tips to prepare your college student for their homecoming.

Make travel plans

The first thing you’ll want to do is make all the travel arrangements. If you leave it up to your student he might not make it home at all, so you should probably ask him to send you his schedule so that you can start looking for tickets that coincide with his time off from classes. As you probably know, booking early, especially for holiday travel, can provide you with the best prices. Your student, on the other hand, might wait until the last minute and end up without a ride. So it’s probably best to take on this task, at least the first time around. Later on he can learn to make his own travel arrangements, but with the stresses of his first semester (and his first time away from home) to deal with, you don’t want to pile too much on, especially if you’re keen on seeing him.

Make preparations for the homecoming

Once the arrangements have been made it’s time to start thinking about how you can make his first trip home special. A good place to start is by prepping his room, and that means removing the boxes of stuff you’ve been storing there in his absence. You could also do a deep clean (steam vac the carpet and the mattress, for example) and air out the room so the place smells fresh. Clean linens will complete the effort, and you could always add something extra like chocolates on the pillow just for fun. Of course, he’ll probably also crave favorite foods, so aside from the holiday cooking you might want to prepare a few dishes ahead of time, such as sealed bags of cookies or cakes that he can take back to school with him after his trip.

Give them some space

Finally, you should think about what he’ll want to do while he’s home. Your first inclination may be to schedule every minute of his visit with fun stuff, but keep in mind that he’s on a break from school. He probably wants to lounge around and sleep in for a change. In addition, many of his friends may be back in town for the holidays, as well, and he’ll probably want to see them while he has the chance. So you might want to waive his curfew and try not to hold him to more than one or two mandatory family functions (like Thanksgiving dinner, for example).

If only you could have convinced him to attend USC online rather than going in person, you would have had him home all the time. But as it is you’re going to have to settle for breadcrumbs, at least for a little while. And unless you want the entire time to be spent arguing, simply do your best to make him comfortable and accept the time he’s willing to give you and the family.

 

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