TO COLLEGE & BEYOND! - Task 1: I Can Do This!
College is not just about academic courses, a career search, and wild weekend parties. Yes, the goal is for your child to come out in four years with some kind of degree that affords them the ability to be a working member of society and support themselves financially. However, as with most things in life, the product of our efforts is not as life-changing as the process.
Arthur Chickering, back in 1969, identified 7 “vectors” or tasks a college-aged young adult must achieve to develop into a functioning adult. Surprisingly, getting a “B” average, declaring a major, and finding a paid internship with a potential future job offer are not on his list. Instead, his list is made up of psychological struggles and tasks every person needs to master in order to become a healthy, fully-functioning adult. What that means is, your child’s effort and work in college cannot merely be measured by grades on a transcript! Let’s take a look at the first vector, or task, that lies in front of your young adult.
Keep reading. . .
The first task your child will encounter is developing CONFIDENCE in their own COMPETENCE. Your child needs to gain the self-esteem and skills to manage life on his/her own. Chickering discusses three specific types of competencies:
Intellectual competence- the ability to understand, analyze, and synthesize information
Manual competence- the ability to physically accomplish tasks
Interpersonal competence- the ability to establish relationships with others.
Young adults build intellectual competence by challenging their brains to learn new things and then using what they have learned to change the way they think and act in the world. For most, that comes through college coursework, trade school, job training programs, or military service.
As parents, we have to remember that learning new things requires synthesizing. When someone first encounters new knowledge they compare it to what they already know. Then they decide to do one of three things: (1) if it agrees with what they already know and accept, they use it as confirmation and add it to their internal library of knowledge; (2) if it does not agree with what they already know they dismiss it and move on; or (3) they challenge what they already know and mentally struggle to decide which idea fits best with their own understanding of the world. Therefore, it is normal and healthy for young adults to confront previously held values; debate ideas; push against rules and expectations; explore alternate perspectives; be less accepting of your authority on matters; and widen their personal space of influence. Like most change, the pendulum naturally swings from one extreme to the other, before it settles somewhere in the middle.
Manual competence, for most parents, is a welcome milestone! Without someone to do for them, or assist them, they learn to do for themselves. Laundry, dishes, bed sheets, banking, cooking, navigating directions, internet connections, grocery shopping, cleaning (well, maybe!). . . they learn to do it all when they have to!
Once out of high school and the social groupings that they felt pigeon-holed in for the last six years, they also welcome the freedom to redefine themselves socially. They are now able to seek out diversity, finding new relationships through new communities-- their campus or dorm, classes, job, new neighborhood, clubs, volunteer experiences, church, or even, online. While some old friendships may remain as lifelong treasures, the ability to interact with unfamiliar and diverse people and forge new relationships is a life skill that will help them to maintain an ongoing social support system for years to come. This is how our children develop interpersonal competence.
As parents, it is important that we do not circumvent this process by judging their experimentation with new and different crowds or ideas. Steering them back toward familiarity, transmitting our own anxieties as they step out of their comfort zones, or criticizing their choices stunts their growth. We have spoken about, modeled, and instilled our values in them for the last eighteen years. It is now their time to seek and find their own ideas, opinions, and relationships.
Again, remember that change is a pendulum, and choices one semester may be very different from the next, but eventually, their roots will become grounded once again.
The next task is taming the roller coaster.
