It’s graduation season – and your student is graduating! Congratulations!

Your student may move on to graduate school or begin a new career. They may be moving home or into their own apartment.

No matter where your student is headed, this is a milestone and you want to mark the occasion with an appropriate graduation gift. Whether it’s large or small, practical or sentimental, it’s sometimes difficult to come up with just the right ideas.

Special gifts should be personal, and you know your student best. We’re offering some suggestions to help you start your imagination flowing. Think about your student’s interests, needs, and personality and see where it takes you.

We’re listing a dozen ideas here, but then be sure to check out our list of ideas from previous years. All together, you’ve got nearly 50 ideas to get you started.

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Each year, as April rolls around, College Parent Central celebrates an anniversary. We are always pleased, and sometimes a little amazed, that we’re still here a year later.

This year we celebrate our fourteenth year. Happy Anniversary to us!

When we first launched on April 1st in 2009 we weren’t sure what to expect. It seemed somehow appropriate to choose April Fool’s Day. Launch something that seems like a good idea and see what happens. Who knows?

We recognized that college parents (and high school parents, too) needed information and support, and we hoped we could help provide some of that guidance. Now, as we celebrate our fourteenth year, we continue that belief, and parents continue to let us know they appreciate the information we provide.

Thank you to all of those who have given us feedback and support and who have shared our information with others! Word of mouth is still the best way to reach those who can use this information.

Our Mission

It is always a good idea, from time to time, to reflect on your roots. Each time we look back to the purpose that drove us to launch College Parent Central, we reaffirm that our basic principles haven’t changed.

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Campus visits can do a lot to help your student decide whether a school is right for them. As part of the admission process, most students try to visit the schools on their wish list to get a sense of the campus and students. It’s a good way to determine the best fit, but it can be time consuming and, depending on your student’s list, expensive.

Why, then, would anyone suggest that your student visit schools not on their wish list? Why bother visiting if you’re not interested?

Gathering information

One of the main reasons to visit any college campus is to gather information. If the school is on your student’s short list, they are hoping to learn whether that school feels right – academically, socially, financially. By visiting a school not on your student’s list, they can gather information that will help them learn about themselves and about the world of college in general. This information may help them put together, or hone, their actual list of schools.

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Your student is graduating! Congratulations!

Whether this graduation is from high school or college, it can be a bittersweet time for you as a parent. You’re proud and excited! But you also see your child growing up and taking an important next step in their life.

It can be an uncertain and nervous time for everyone.

Perhaps there will be a party. Probably there are gifts. Maybe a card or a letter. It feels as though this is one last opportunity to impart some wisdom – some life advice – to your student.

Really, you will continue to have opportunities to share your advice – some of it welcome and some perhaps less welcome – throughout your student’s life. But this is a moment. You want to get this one right.

We’ve suggested that one option might be to write your own commencement speech. What words would you like your student to hear? What would you tell them if you had the opportunity (challenge?) of writing the speech they would hear as they proudly sit in that cap and gown.

The wisdom you share with your student needs to be yours, of course, from your heart directly to the child you know so well. But it’s sometimes nice to have a little help getting started.

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We were honored to be able to spend some time talking with Jessica Lahey, author of The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed,  about her new book The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence. Jessica’s new book weaves together her personal story about addiction with a tremendous amount of information about topics such as brain development, drinking culture, substance use disorder, and ways both parents and schools can approach this sensitive topic. The book contains suggestions and scripts for conversations with your kids from pre-school through elementary, middle and high school as well as college. With this book, parents will be armed with the information they need to talk to their kids about alcohol and drugs.

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The year 2020 is finally in the rear-view mirror.  There’s still a pandemic, and there’s still a lot of turmoil in our world, but somehow we need to find hope in the new year.  2021 will be better. We need to believe that.

Somehow, it seems more difficult this year to think about New Year’s resolutions. We’ve all just been hanging on — trying to survive. That seems enough for this year. Survive the present, look to the future, believe things will get better — and don’t try to challenge yourself too much.

But it is a new year, after all, and that brings with it not just hope for a better year, but a challenge to make it a better year.

We’ve offered some New Year’s resolutions, or thoughts, each year since College Parent Central began. So this year, I’ve gone back to reread them, which was an interesting reflective exercise on its own. (Click on the year’s date if you’d like to see the full list for some extra inspiration.)  But I’ve selected just one resolution from each year to share here. The choice wasn’t always easy, but I tried to pull one thing that seems relevant to where we are today.

Take these as a start for your own reflections. You may be inspired to make some resolutions of your own, or you may just opt for survival this year. But I hope these provide a way for you to think about your college student (or almost college student) and about your parenting role in the new year.

Happy, Healthy, Safe New Year!

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