Posts from — January 2010

When your child leaves home for college, you worry about losing contact.  She will be living at college, and perhaps not returning home for several weeks or months, so you worry.  However, with some effort on your part, your communication with your student may become even more meaningful than when she was home.

This post is the fourth in a series of five posts that may give you food for thought about how you communicate with your college student.  Some of our suggestions may be common sense reminders, and some may be new ideas for you.  Obviously, communication skills are interrelated, so please consider all of these suggestions together.  Our first post concerned how you listen to your student, our second looked at nonverbal communication, and our third discussed perception checking.  In this post we consider how to ask the most helpful questions and how to apply some interviewing principles.  In our final post we’ll look at how to frame some of your messages so your student may be willing to listen.  We hope that thinking about how you listen and talk to your student may help you to keep all of your communication doors wide open.

A conversation is not an interview, and we don’t like conversations that begin to feel like interviews – or worse, interrogations.  However, those of us who have experienced well conducted interviews know that a good interview can feel like friendly conversation – and can elicit extremely helpful information.  Thinking about, and applying, a few basic principles of good interviewing may help you make your conversations with your student more productive.

We don’t want to suggest that you should strategize every exchange with your student – that’s obviously not the kind of communication that you want.  However, these principles may be most helpful when you need to have a serious or directed conversation with your student.

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When your college student began college you both had high hopes and expectations.  You knew that there would be challenges ahead, but you both did everything that you could to prepare.  Now your student seems to be struggling and having difficulty at college.  You may be feeling helpless and concerned for her.  Perhaps she hasn’t applied herself to studying, or perhaps she doesn’t understand what is required to succeed in college, or perhaps she has worked hard but is still unable to accomplish what she needs to do.

Whatever the reasons may be, your college student is now struggling and you want to know what you can do to help.  Obviously, every situation is different and every family dynamic is different, but here are some posts that may help you as you try to decide how you can help support your student as he works to improve his situation.

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The beginning of the new year brings a fresh start for many of us.  For many college students it brings winter break and then the start of a new semester or term.  If your student is in her first-year, the second semester is often a time of settling in now that the tumultuous first semester is over.  Your student may be anxious to head back to school to see her friends again – and also a little anxious about new classes beginning.  This is a fresh start.  If the first semester was a bit rocky at times, either personally, socially, or academically, this is a chance to start over again – with a lot of wisdom gathered during that first semester.

Here are a few posts that might be especially helpful at this time of the year.  Think about how you can help your students get off to a great start this semester.

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