On Parenting
By Sarah B. Ignatius | November 6
Photo courtesy of iStock
When the college president stood before my husband and me, and hundreds of other parents assembled in the chapel after dropping our freshmen off, he told us we shouldn’t text our sons and daughters but use e-mail instead. And that we should wait before responding if they texted us. I understood.
“What the world needs is problem-solvers,” he had said to drive his point home.
That makes sense, I thought as I sat there. My husband has been on a campaign to foster independence since our son was 6 and we first started arguing over whether he was too young to ride the public bus alone. My husband swears he was taking public transportation in New York City himself by that age. And I went nearly 3,000 miles away for college in California at 17, calling home collect from a pay phone in the hall. And here we were, feeling grief-stricken that our only child was leaving us for college, hoping he wouldn’t hear it in our voices.