Intentional community

The room had so much nervous energy. A hundred parents perched on rows and rows of stackable chairs waiting for the keys to this new universe ... university. 

"What are you feeling? Just shout it out." 

I have to admit, I was skeptical. A college orientation for parents? 

I expected the mustachioed man from the insurance commercials to emerge and gently tell us how we could avoid the mistakes of all parents who came before us.

Instead we met Candy, who introduced herself as the director of student engagement at the school of a-very-long-name within the university that also has an acronym I couldn't for the life of me remember, and had asked us this question earnestly. She smiled sweetly as she waited for an answer. 

"Come on, you won't surprise me."

A voice in the crowd ventured a guess. 

"Excitement."

I winced and lifted my eyes to the ceiling fixing my gaze on the row of inset lights overhead. 

I dialed back my sarcasm enough to admit that "excitement" was perhaps the most hopeful and measured of responses. But this person, I thought, was probably being as candid as a middle school photographer. Hoping that with some authoritative suggestion they might substitute the truth with some toothy grin.

The remainder of the gathering must have sensed this, too, because the room erupted in the naming of a range of emotions that seemed more accurate if painfully so: "Anxiety." "Fear." "Loneliness." "Joy!"  "Jealousy."

I felt it all. But mostly I felt terrified.

The dean didn't need to tell us what we all suspected: that we, the undersigned of the next crop of first-year students, were on the cusp of beginning our lives as the proud new parents of a bouncing adult; and this two-day, 17-part symposium, was cleverly designed to give us the basics tools to more effectively let go. 

But oh, no. Lest you think this was the pep talk of all pep talks; the magical string of words that would halt the helicopter parents' rotating blade. This speech and all the speeches that followed were intended to give us the framework by which we could helicopter from a safe, more secure distance. 

Knowledge, it turns out, is the key to that trust and the cornerstone of every big thing we endeavor to build. Well, knowledge and the ability to find resources online.

Candy, knew what we were thinking, even before we all thought it. 

"Your child got here. That means they are capable of great things. But that doesn't mean they will make this enormous transition alone, and we don't expect them to."

Then Candy ran down a list of first-year hardships that ranged from the conflicts that may arise when one is dropped into a room the size of a walk-in closet with two strangers; to the amount of deflation, the ego may suffer just before Christmas when the first grades of their college careers come calling. 

The honeymoon will be over. 

"The most important thing you can do to support them now is to understand how we are here for them find solutions. Because one day they will call you with a problem, and we know that you can absolutely help. But we don't want you to call us, we want you to encourage them to take the initiative. They will listen. We know this because we have evidence that parents still have an enormous influence on their student's decisions."

Somehow, those words gave me the key I had been searching for. That this method wasn't madness, it was intentional and important.

Knowledge really does feel empowering.