April 2003

Parent to parent: Asking about friends

By Mom Marion

No matter how earnestly my daughter tells me about her classes and her reading, I have only to look back to my own college experience to know that academics -- lectures, books and papers -- while challenging and rewarding, are only one part of the life of a college student.

If I really want to know what my daughter is feeling and learning, I also need to pay attention to the people in her world.

When she was in high school, this was easy, because I knew many of her friends and acquaintances. After she started college on the East Coast, names and stories still reached me but often after long delay.

During my daughter's freshman year, for example, she mentioned that one young man in her residence hall had terrible roommates, dope smokers, who harassed him and his girlfriend. Finally, he told police about the drugs. After that, others in the hall were angry at him.

I didn't hear anything else about the same young man until a year later, when he turned out to be living next to my daughter in the Quiet Dorm. Students had continued to reject him, even though some believed he did the right thing. My daughter reported that he was a changed person. No longer the gregarious young man who gabbed with strangers on the street corner, he had chosen to live alone. She and her roommate celebrated his birthday with him because nobody else did.

A year later my daughter told me he made Phi Beta Kappa, a prestigious honor society, and she sent him a congratulatory e-mail. I know his situation still tugs at her heart.

I don't always remember the names of my daughter's friends and acquaintances. But I do ask, for example, "What happened to the guy who turned his roommates in for smoking dope two years ago?" She knows then that I'm asking about rejection and popularity, timing and choices, friendship and morality -- all those complicated issues that young people struggle with during the first crucial years of independence.

She can tell me a lot, or she can tell me a little.

The important part is, she knows that I care.

Newspaper columnist Marion Franck is the mother of a college junior and high-school senior. She has worked with UC Davis students as a lecturer.

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