Volume 27 · Number 1 · Fall 2009
Parents
Playing House
Apartment living can be good training for adulthood—for parents too.
There comes a day when students remove the training wheels from their dorm rooms, and they pedal off campus.
The menu options for off-campus living include fraternity and sorority houses, where students learn silly songs and at least two letters of a foreign language. Or they can join a housing cooperative that shares chores, meals and a strong faith in compost. These large-group living arrangements come with an established organizational structure, known as mob rule, for running the household. Students seeking greater freedom but smaller crowds move into off-campus rental housing, where they get to make their own household decisions, including bad ones — OK, whoppers — with no one to stop them and no one to save them. Living off campus is the only time they can decorate their home with a discarded sofa and a collection of empty beer cans and have friends stop by to say, “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
When college students live on campus, it’s so easy. No utilities to pay, no dinner to prepare, no toilets to scrub. The mundane details of daily existence are handled by housekeepers, cooks, groundskeepers and front desk attendants who stand by, ready to lend out ping pong paddles and a ball, should the need arise. Freed of the drudgery of domestic chores, kids living in residence halls can focus their energy on socializing and scholastics.
So naturally, they can’t wait to get the heck out. Too many rules. Eventually students discover that the university regulations they considered so oppressive are pretty much the same as the laws that govern the real world, except that off campus you’re allowed to own a crockpot. But playing house is a normal part of growing up, and kids who take on the additional responsibilities of apartment living learn things that have nothing to do with college and everything to do with adulthood. Just don’t expect the process to be pretty.
A few months after freshman year has begun, students begin sorting themselves into housing groups for the following year. As they search for living companions, they let friendships guide decisions that should be probably be based on which potential roommate is most likely to pay bills on time and least likely to barbecue indoors on a rainy day. Parents are expected to stand by, mouths closed, checkbooks open, while their kids make a series of potentially costly decisions based on data that has not yet been collected.
Once students settle into off-campus life, they’ll learn that there are two kinds of housemates: smokers who raise rottweilers, and slobs who leave toenail clippings on the bathroom floor. If your kids are lucky, they’ll find living companions who are merely untidy and who will bond for life with them over burritos and anthropology finals and midnight undie runs, roomies who will one day attend their 60th birthday party and share embarrassing stories about the time they once set a wok on fire while trying to stir fry. If your kids are unlucky, their housemates will start out as friends and end up in small claims court.
The potential sources of conflict in a shared household are endless: noise, overnight guests, clutter, money, romantic entanglements, food, cars, pets, dirty dishes and dirty laundry. Plus the other kind of dirty laundry. This is adult education at its finest. In fact, your kids never would have signed up for Apartment Living 101 if they had read the fine print. But now they’re stuck, probably for a year. So long as parents can resist the urge to intervene, college students are going to learn more than they ever wanted to know about resolving disputes and managing a household.
Hmm, parents, I sense an uncomfortable shifting in seats. OK, I’d like a show of dishpan hands from anyone who helped tidy their college student’s dirty apartment more than once during the school year. Oh, I see. And how many of you deliver meals-on-wheels, dropping by every month with a cooler full of your child’s favorite entrees, frozen into single servings and neatly labeled with the days of the week?
Well, cut it out! You’re making the rest of us parents look bad. Right now my kid is peering into an empty refrigerator, chewing on half a head of cabbage, with salad dressing dribbling down his chin. And frankly, I like to think of that as dinner, not inadequate parental support.
Here’s the deal: Parents aren’t roadies, and students aren’t rock stars (even if they do occasionally throw furniture off balconies). I know, I know, it’s important for our kids to do well in school, especially since globalization means that their physics homework could be done faster and cheaper by skilled offshore labor. And it’s true that handling domestic chores detracts from the time our kids have to spend on schoolwork. But more freedom means more responsibility. It’s a quid pro quo, which is Latin for “unspoken parental expectation.” We subsidize the off-campus shanty; the kids figure out how to cook, clean and live happily in a place with temperature swings unsuitable for the storage of vintage vinyl.
That’s right, squeamish parents, crummy living conditions are an essential part of the deal. Otherwise, students might confuse earning good grades with earning a living. Off-campus housing is oozing with all kinds of things, including the opportunity for college students to experience more modest surroundings. Living in the residence halls is the first step down from the comforts of home, but there are still several levels of Dante’s rentals to descend before graduates are ready to survive on an entry-level salary.
When the gravy train ends, students who have lived off campus will know a thing or two about the real world. One, life doesn’t come fully furnished. And two, Dumpster diving solves that problem. Any other concerns can be handled with a change of address. Roommate conflict? Move out. Romance matures? Move in. Apartment too far from campus? Move closer. Housemates went the whole year without cleaning? Move. Anywhere. The farther away from your security deposit, the better.
As I was helping our college sophomore change residences during lease season, I spotted an ominous gray guest towel hanging in the bathroom of his apartment. It looked vaguely familiar. It had been purple, I realized, when I first donated it to the college cause.
“That should probably be burned,” my son warned, walking up behind me. We stood staring at the towel for a few seconds, too cautious to approach.
“This towel hasn’t been washed since you moved in, has it?” I asked.
“Naw, don’t think so.”
“Even though you were sick with mono, it didn’t occur to you or any of your housemates that someone should wash the communal hand towel?”
“Guess not,” he replied.
“So now you’re moving out?”
“Problem solved.”
Robin DeRieux can be reached at rdderieux@yahoo.com.