It’s tough to find a college matching your child’s unique needs, especially when you can’t trust them to leave the house. An online college education is sounding good right now.
World wide, parents make daily sacrifices to better the odds that their kids will enjoy a productive education and future success. Parents as a community, want to believe that the influence they instill in their children, will be the foundation for which these kids will make appropriate decisions effecting how their lives will evolve.
Here we are now the “Ostrich Generation!” An entire generation focused on putting our heads in the ground when it comes to our kids. We don’t remember our own “rites of passage” from our youth. The same challenges involving sex, drugs and alcohol.
Ultimately, all kids will be faced with social scenarios whereby they must make appropriate choices. There are no exceptions to the influence of the “tri fecta ,’ when a child evolves into a young adult.The least likely offenders are often those kids we label as innocent, balanced and endearing. The studious, the religious, and the athletic kids who value their healthy philosophies of eating and exercise.
With the fast paced Internet moving us into the great unknown things may be changing. Children are now able to hit each other up via blackberry, twitter, facebook, myspace, or of course the old fashioned cell phone. Once a night with the family spent over Monopoly was the norm, now it is an outlier. Today a family night together for dinner is in fact a rarity. Thus the Ostrich Generation continues.
Enter my studious, athletic and popular seventeen year old. My daughter, my pride,…my dilemma. I have on numerous occasions shared with my youth the dangers of life’s “rites of passage,” and the values of making appropriate choices. Trust, is key,… and a value I have instilled as key to integrity.
The trust for my daughter is lost. It seems like a day cooking brownies and innocent fun turned into a pot laden confection that is now on the wrong side of the law. Under this haze the car ride home may have seemed prudent but only moved the right of passage from something unwise to something with the possibility of becoming downright deadly. For the last 17 years I have given my daughter trust and support to make her own decisions and now I find myself trying to grasp the fact that her upcoming decisions for university, love and jobs may be too advanced for her. I have my head out of the sand and I am looking squarely into the future.
You can follow the “Ostrich Pandemic” discussion and more at www.collegematchingservice.com. Find articles about preparing for college and the parental experience that is the transition from child to college graduate who can make their own decisions, hopefully. Visit College Matching Service now to read the response from the brownie chef.