Holding It Together

Leaving homedoesn't mean your problems are solved.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on May 01, 2002 - last reviewed on August 30, 2004

It's too easy to fall into the trap of thinking today's college students are just a bunch of privileged brats who have it way too easy and merit little sympathy for their problems. I know, because I was close to falling in. I was saved pretty quickly, though.

First of all, my sons are not that long out of college and I know many kids who have indeed had it fairly easy but are thoughtful, concerned people. While I like to think I was such a perfect parent that my kids were spared home-grown pressures to compete and perform, and thus the psychic stresses and social-emotional deficits produced by such pressures, I do know that they had to prepare themselves for a world far different from the one I emerged into.

A constantly changing, anxiety-provoking, overstimulating and, yes, more highly competitive world. The world impinges on these kids in ways we never dreamed of, and it has from an early age.

More to the point, who says everyone is so privileged? Exactly what is the measure of privilege? Does sexual or physical abuse constitute privilege? What about parental neglect? Or its more insidious variant, parental unavailability? What about lots of family conflict, with or without divorce?

One psychologist told me of receiving a call from a daughter of privilege who had been a client in high school. Now a college freshman, she didn't like the food on campus. She prevailed on her parents to set her up in an apartment. All that was lacking was a letter from her psychologist authorizing a move off campus into an apartment where she could live with reference to her own needs exclusively. The psychologist refused.

Isn't a university supposed to gather people of different backgrounds? And isn't half the challenge learning to live with others and discovering how strange are the customs and rituals of the little tribe your family represents? Is it a privilege to live alone off campus? Or a sentence to loneliness and depression?

I interviewed dozens of people. From every single one I heard horror stories of abuse and neglect--or unavailability and its guilty consequence, overindulgence--that today's students had endured.

But here's what confused me. A lot of these kids seemed to do well enough in high school to get into some of the "best" colleges. Why, I wanted to know, would kids who seemed to be functioning well up until college have difficulties once they got on campus? Wouldn't they have developed resilience?

Not necessarily, said Marie van Tubbergen, a Master's level psychologist who is completing a predoctoral internship at the University of Massachusetts, where she works in the counseling and testing center. Sometimes they're just holding it together until college.

"I encounter this a lot among the traditional college students," she said. "My personal theory is that [in high school] students are able to tolerate an enormous amount of stress and family conflict because a) they have no choice about where to live, b) they have enormous external structure: school, family rules, etc., and c) there is some sort of cognitive set-up in which they believe that they just need to 'get out of the house' or 'on their own' or 'out of high school' and then they will be free of their problems.

"Students survive brutal family environments in high school with the presumption that if they can just live it out, it will be over. Then they get to college and after a couple of months or a couple of years they discover that a) they now do have choices about where they will live and who they will see, b) they have only their own resources to set/maintain a structure and routine to support them, and c) their problems did not magically go away even though the reasons for their problems are not now part of their daily life. This leads to the terrifying insight that their problems may never 'go away'."

Van Tubbergen told me that she constantly hears "heartbreaking stories of abuse, neglect and family conflict. These kids held it together in the belief that it would be over soon. Then they leave home and it isn't over. And there's nothing left to blame.

"They discover that if you leave the stimulus, it doesn't mean your problems are solved. And they experience sadness and rage. 'If it's over and I'm still unhappy, then it's just me.' Their family relationships have affected all the relationships they are in now."

But like every other professional on campus, van Tubbergen is enormously optimistic. Students, after all, are at college in order to learn and change. For the most part they are open to it. "Plus they get to practice new ways of being with their peers and professors. And they get to go home and practice their new stuff at home too," said van Tubbergen .