"I Miss You"

Liking your parents. This just never happened when I went to college...OK, never may be too strong a word. But even if you did like your parents, you definitely wanted to be away from them through most of the growing up part. Boy were we anxious to be away from our parents. This is not so for most of the current college bound generation. They actually like their parents and are open about it, they also are very comfortable expressing their feeling about missing their parents...I guess all those psych books paid off. I was asked in an interview today what I thought about all this? Well, it's a complicated dynamic to explain and yes, I often think it's a healthy response to a history of extreme authoritarian style parenting. But just because your teen or young adult is saying 'I don't think I can do it without you' doesn't mean the correct parental response is to swoop in and rescue. Yes, we have a group of young adults who can now correctly identify their feeling and express them, but parents be cautious, to another adult(even a young one) the helpful response is not to fix it.