PrintTHE FRESH PRINCE, august bard of a generation, once remarked that, “To you, all the kids across the land / there’s no need to argue / parents just don’t understand.” In the collective narrative of the American youth, those immortal words signify the universal frustration—and ingenuous disappointment—we encounter as we come of age under the overbearing tutelage of our parents. The popular version of this tale represents college as an idyllic, pastoral escape from parents—the place where we come into our own intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s a universal trope writ large in stories from Hamlet to Animal House, one embodied in the phrase “going off to school.”
Life on campus does offer significant freedom— to consider new ideas, meet new people, and explore new places without the fetters of house rules. But it doesn’t represent a clean break from home and family. Here at Columbia, most of us are financially supported by our parents—a powerful reminder that we’re not really all that independent. At home on vacation, we remain under their dominion, obeying (or willfully disobeying) their regulations. Even for those of us who pay our own way through school, or for those who spend vacations far from home, it’s difficult to escape the influence of the people who tended to our diaper rash or drove us to the orthodontist.
College students—not least Columbians—are faced with the eternal conundrum of searching for an adult identity, while still under the auspices of that looming parental penumbra. We want to cut our own trails through this wide, wooded world, yet we cannot—or will not— forge these pathways entirely alone. And so, we struggle to hew to a murky middle ground—to reconcile the fact that we are now, and will in future be, both our own men or women and also our parents’ children.
FROM THE QUIET, tree-lined streets of Park Slope to the Acropolis at Morningside, my trip to Columbia was a short one—just a hop on the F, transfer to the 2, jump on the local and you’re there. I never had to bother with the geography of New York, the vagaries of the subway, or the delivery-boy-with-a-death-wish pace of the city.
If you go to Columbia and you’re from the city, people always ask why you went to school in New York. We’re led to believe that going to college means journeying from home to find ourselves, that we lose something by choosing a school in our own backyard. Those of us who have made this choice have little more to offer our inquisitors than the predictably tautological retort “I wanted to stay close to home.”
I worried I’d stand out among friends from afar, that I’d remain stuck in adolescence while they basked in their newfound independence. But distance, it turned out, was not all that important. My life at Columbia was not much different from that of my friends.
Like almost everyone here, I’d never spent more than a few months away from my parents before college. I’m riddled with neuroses, so I was scared shitless about going off to school, even though Columbia is barely farther from my home than the high school to which I commuted every day for six years. The notion of being in even a vaguely unfamiliar setting disconcerted me, not to mention the prospect of having to hunt down the rascal in my dorm who would inevitably refuse to replace the toilet paper roll after finishing it. But I wasn’t really too bothered by the idea of being away from my parents.
That’s not too revolutionary—many students literally jump for joy the moment they can tap the trunk of the car to send their folks back whence they came—but back home, people liked to joke that once I went to college, my parents would never hear from me again.
I should note that my parents are good people. That is, in the sense of “they’se good people.” They’re real salt-of-the-earth, menschy types—predictably New York Jewish, but without the miserable pretensions of the Upper West Side or the garishness of Manhasset. And they were, as best I can see, quite good parents. Sure, my father—who, in his defense, is an artist— is sort of helplessly self-involved, but he played catch with me, took me to Mets games, and made an effort to teach me right from wrong—on the whole, a respectable achievement. And my mom, despite her hypersensitivity and obsession with political correctness, was dedicated to the point of derangement. Every single night, when my brother and I were in bed, she read to us. She went so far as to record these nightly readings, and, whenever she arrived at a word she thought we did not know, she would read the dictionary definition of the word onto the tape.
So my mother and father were giving, loving, caring—all that good stuff. But that never stopped any kid worth his salt from wanting to grab his parents around the neck and throttle them.
By the time I entered middle school, at the putatively not-juvenile-detention-center known as IS 234, I was battling and bickering with my parents every day. I can no longer remember the cause of these ancient quarrels, but I do remember the lesson I took from them—namely that my mom (and to an extent my dad) was a useless old fogey, whose brain, subjected to the toxic leaching of so many parenting books and the flower-child mothers on line at our local food cooperative, had shriveled into an unreasoning, hysterical, and ultimately worthless raisin.
The perfunctory Park Slope divorce, a phenomenon so common where I grew up that it was portrayed on the silver screen by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney in The Squid and the Whale, shed an expectedly harsh light on my parents (who did not, to their credit, schtup Billy Baldwin or Anna Paquin).
Witnessing a divorce—as a teenager—instills you with a deep-seated, even manic streak of self-righteousness. I had for years suspected that I was smarter than my parents, but watching them carry on like mercenary children was enough to demonstrate that I was also so much the wiser.
It was with this brilliantly juvenile arrogance that I arrived, laptop and backpack in tow, at Columbia.
THE IVY-COVERED WALLS of Columbia University evoke the proud legacy of centuries of bold men with bold ideas. Yet beyond its reputation as a center for scholarship and wisdom, Columbia is, inescapably, a place imbued with the inexperience—the innocent rawness— of youth.
Rooted in this collective inexperience is a visceral faith in the primacy of our own values, our own ideas. We may accept intellectually that in their decades on this earth, our parents have acquired a few lessons worth heeding, but it’s rare that newly arrived college students defer to parental judgment.
Besides, it’s only natural that college, with its breakneck pace of self-invention and reinvention, inculcates in students a deep-seated stubbornness, a hostility to the meddling opinions of parents. If we aspire to stand tall on our own two feet, we must have confidence in our own ability to respond to life’s trials and tribulations with choices we can call our own.
Alex Boger, CC ’11, remarks that the independence of college life has changed the way he approaches his mother and father. Now, in arguments with his parents, he feels “like my own person ... I can tell them how they are wrong, [and] in what ways I think they are wrong.”
For most students, stepping out from beneath their parents’ roofs means—for the first time—a chance not only to challenge the beliefs on which they were raised, but also to construct new ones. The experience of Mia Neustein, BC ’11, well illustrates how the time and distance college gives us from our parents provides an opportunity for evolution. Neustein, raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in San Diego, remembers high school as a time of chafing against her father’s strictures: “One time, he caught me watching ... a DVD ... on Shabbat, and we just didn’t talk to each other for two weeks.” In close quarters, Neustein—as do many—saw defiance itself as the essential act of identity.
But here in Morningside, with the luxury of space to make her own path, Neustein’s righteous rage gave way to a desire to explore Judaism for herself. A few weeks into the first semester, Neustein began attending services— but with a Reform congregation. She’s made her own choice, and her father has slowly accepted that she is “not as religious as he wants” her to be. This year, he helped Neustein study the Torah portion she had volunteered to read on Yom Kippur, even though he knew she’d be reading in front of men.
GETTING ALONG WITH YOUR PARENTS when you’re on campus is no mean feat. But the true test of will is maintaining a harmonious relationship when you’re home for vacation. Corey Perez, CC ’10, bemoans the fact that “returning home means returning to the rules imposed by my mother ... I have to explain my comings and goings.” After all, at school, 09 IN FOCUS It’s difficult to escape the influence of the people who tended to our diaper rash or drove us to the orthodontist. he’s free to “come and go as I please.”
College students used to late nights spent partying, messy dorm rooms, and dangerously greasy diets find it difficult enough to come back to curfews and dishwashing duty. Even more unsettling is the feeling that vacation winds back the clock, somehow resurrecting our high school selves. At school we take pride in organizing our own schedules, pursuing our own interests, and synthesizing our own opinions. Yet semester after semester, we’re presented with parents who have not effaced from their minds the memory of us as children, and the discomfiting realization that we haven’t quite vanquished our adolescent selves either.
Philip Crandall, CC ’12, grappled with this cognitive dissonance over winter break. Crandall says that his “life at college is so radically different to how it was before” that he found himself “struggling ... to reconcile two almost totally different modes of being.” It’s tempting to lay most of the blame for this return to juvenility on doting or controlling parents, but it is often students themselves who revisit old patterns or habits. “I didn’t actively monitor my behavior,” says Crandall. “But I felt like the moment I landed, I automatically slipped back.”
For me, being in my house eviscerates my will to shoulder any responsibility. While I manage my affairs here at Columbia, at home, if it weren’t for my parents, I’d die of starvation and neglect within the span of a few weeks. I just can’t seem to get up the energy to open the fridge, let alone trudge to the supermarket for groceries. My mom indulges my constant requests for homemade baked goods, particularly her delicious babka, and cooks my lunch and dinner. When she’s out, or if I’m looking for a change of pace, I take the one-block trip to see my dad, who is more than happy to make his famous cappuccinos and whip up pasta, steaks, or tuna sandwiches.
It’s great to be spoiled on vacation, but it never ceases to confound me that I spend a semester at college as more-or-less an adult and then find myself a kid again after a few weeks at home. When the babka is long gone, I’m left to wonder where exactly I fall on this whole continuum of adulthood.
I FANCY MYSELF an old soul and I’ve always paid lip service to the notion that I have much to learn from my parents. But in practice, I never really looked to them for guidance.
It’s been only recently that I’ve given serious thought to the value of my parents’ advice. Over winter break, my girlfriend of nearly two years broke up with me. I felt like shit, lost my appetite, and couldn’t sleep.
Normally I’d talk through such matters with friends, but most of mine had shipped out by then, so I just carried on incessantly to my mother. It turns out she’s pretty wise for a crazy old lady.
Though we were in the same house, she sent me an e-mail elucidating her take on the situation, and reminding me to eat. Then, as afterthought, she sent a second, writing simply “Raf: What I forgot to mention is that this is just the next step in your life. We don’t always get warning about when that next step will take place. It is part of your story. Love, Mom.” I had no real response, so I just replied by begrudgingly agreeing to eat something.
My mother’s insight astounded me, mostly because I’d never before considered asking her opinion on a serious, personal subject. I had, accidentally, stumbled upon a lesson Mark Twain once—perhaps apocryphally—described: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
AT COLLEGE, we find that reaching adulthood requires us to discover what it means to be adult children. That seems a contradiction in terms, but it isn’t. We’ll carve out lives as adults, but we’ll still be our parents’ children. Perhaps the lesson, then, is that adulthood is not a binary state of being. We can be autonomous and still rely on family in times of need, we can hold onto our beliefs and still keep open minds, and we can make our own choices and still remember that our parents have lifetimes’ wisdom to share.
We might even have some tips of our own. Adam Metzger, CC ‘12, says that since he moved out, his parents have “developed a new appreciation for me ... I am now another adult in the house and am part of the decision-making.” And, he’s reminded that, “if I ever need them, they will be there.”
The road to this balance is tricky to navigate, but it’s out there—just return to the sage words of the once-Fresh Prince. In a newer, crappier song, he again spoke to a generation, promising “We can make it if we try.” Don’t understand that? Ask your parents.