01 Apr A Constant Presence

I sat on the couch with my glass of wine. I was beat. Although it was a Sunday, I’d spent most of the day at work, welcoming the incoming summer study abroad students to their Paris program and helping out at their first orientation session, before seeing them off for their group dinner. So it was with a touch of wariness that I answered my cellphone, which was indicating an unknown American number. On the first day of a new program, anything can happen.

“Yes, hi, this is Jared’s mother. Is this Emily with the study abroad program?”

It was. To what did I owe the pleasure of this Sunday evening call?

“I’m getting worried. I texted Jared a couple hours ago and I haven’t heard back from him.”

“Well, he-“

“He texted me earlier saying he’d made it to Paris okay, and then I texted him back, and he never responded.”

“I just-”

“And he normally gets back to me very quickly. And now he’s in a foreign country, and I haven’t heard back and so naturally I wanted to make sure everything was all right, so I called-”

I managed to break in, and told her that I’d seen her son that afternoon, that he was fine, that he’d left with the group and was currently having dinner with the program coordinator and the other students. She remained unconvinced. I finally got her off the phone, reassuring her that I’d call the professor who was with the group and have him tell Jared to get in touch with her.

“Thanks very much. I was just getting very nervous. I’m sure you understand.”

I didn’t understand. But I called the professor anyway, who passed the message on to a presumably embarrassed Jared.

Or maybe he wasn’t embarrassed. Maybe this has just become the norm. During my three years with the program, we received countless messages and phone calls from parents.  Among the more memorable:

-A mother who asked me to let her know when her son picked up his mail, so she could make sure he was getting the care packages she was sending.

– A concerned parent who wrote when the swine flu outbreak was making headlines wanting to verify that nobody from Mexico would be on the program with his daughter (Mexico being the presumed origin of the outbreak).

-A set of parents who wanted to request a specific hotel for their daughter. They had recently seen the movie Taken, and were afraid she’d be kidnapped and sold into the underground sex trade.

I considered this degree of parental involvement a negative development. How can anyone discover what independence means if they are never truly on their own? And if all of these questions and phone calls and check-ins were indicative of the students’ relationships with their parents as a whole, the consequences of these interactions would extend well beyond their time overseas. You can’t learn to have faith in your own judgment if you’re not allowed to make decisions on your own.

Of course, plenty of students did not have parents hovering over them their entire time; the people contacting us regarding their children were in the minority. But they were a growing minority. And they were transmitting their (generally unfounded) fears to their children.  One student decided that her apartment was unsafe after a conversation with her mother (who was in the US, and had never seen the apartment). But her daughter had told her it was a 20-minute subway ride to the campus, and this concerned Mom. Anything could happen on the subway! I don’t know what nightmare scenarios she spun, but her daughter was convinced, and spent a good deal of time trying to convince the housing coordinator that she should be able to back out of her lease and housing contract due to the danger of her lodgings.

Her mother had, of course, had her child’s best interests in mind, but these good intentions were misguided. She was not helping by hovering over every element in her daughter’s life. None of these over-protective parents were doing their children any favors.

The student was not allowed to back out of her lease. The apartment was located in the 4^th arrondissement, in one of the trendiest and most expensive neighborhoods in Paris. About halfway through the program, I asked her how the apartment was working out.

“Ohmigod, it’s AMAZING,” she said. “And it’s the best location! It’s near everything!”

Emily Seftel Copyright(c) 2013 All Rights Reserved