To the Parents Dropping Their Kids Off This Month: What I Wish Someone Had Told Mine

Dear Parents,

I was the kid who could not wait to leave. I had the extra-long sheets and the shower caddy and a whole speech about independence ready to go. And then my parents pulled out of the parking lot, and the door clicked shut, and the room got very, very quiet.

That first Friday night I sat on my bed and listened to people laughing somewhere down the hall, and I cried. I called my mom. I told her I hated it here and I wanted to come home. I ate dinner alone more times than I will admit to her even now. I woke up most mornings with a knot in my stomach, certain that everyone else had already found their people and I had somehow missed the sign-up sheet.

Here is what I did not know then, and what I want you to know now: almost every freshman feels exactly that. Even the loud ones. Even the ones whose move-in photos look like a party already started. Homesickness is not a sign your kid is weak or picked the wrong school. It is just what it feels like to love a home and then leave it.

Homesickness is loudest in an empty room.

It feeds on all that sudden quiet and unstructured time, the hours between classes when there is nothing to do but scroll and miss people. And the cruel little trick of it is that the thing everyone tells you to do, just get out there and make some friends, is the exact thing a homesick, nervous eighteen year old cannot make herself do. You cannot force yourself to knock on a stranger's door when you can barely make yourself leave your own.

Every RA and every counselor will tell your kid to join a club and put themselves out there. It is good advice. It is also, for the first couple of weeks, almost useless, because it asks the homesick kid to be brave on the exact days she has the least brave in her. If your kid is on the quieter side, please hear me: this is the part that is going to be hardest for them, and it is not a character flaw. It is just math. The outgoing kids get a head start.

What actually gets people through it is smaller than a grand act of courage. It is a reason to leave the room that does not require any.

For me, that reason turned out to be a little game.

A guy two doors down had left one of those paddle games out on his desk, the kind that sets up in ten seconds on any flat surface. I heard people in his room one night, and because there was a game happening and not a conversation I had to be clever in, I actually went in. I was terrible at it. It did not matter, because nobody was good at it. We played until one in the morning, and for the first time since move-in I forgot to feel homesick.

That was the turning point. Not because a game cured anything, it did not, I still missed home for weeks after. But it gave me somewhere to be that was not my empty room, and it handed me people before I had worked up the nerve to go find them. The girl I met leaning in that doorway is my best friend now. It started because neither of us had to be brave to pick up a paddle.

I did not want this to be only my story, so I asked the other editors what actually got them through their first month. The answers were almost boringly consistent.

One said, stay busy, because the busier I was the less time I had to sit and miss home. Another said the thing that helped was simply having a reason to keep her door open, so people passing by would stop. A third just repeated the four truest words on this campus, the ones every sophomore ends up saying to every freshman: it gets better. It does. It just does not feel like it will in week two.

You cannot fix this from home, and I promise you should not try to. Do not rescue your kid off the train the first hard week. Let them wobble a little. Wobbling is how they find their footing, and the kids whose parents drive up to save them the first weekend tend to have the hardest time of anyone.

But you are not powerless either. There is one small thing you can do, and it is not the thing most parents reach for.

Most parents send snacks and a gift card. I understand it, and your kid will not turn down either one. But a gift card cannot sit on a dorm floor and start a conversation. A box of snacks does not give a homesick kid a reason to prop her door open on a lonely Friday night. If you are going to send one thing that actually helps with the lonely part, send the thing that puts people in the room.

By October, the late-night crying calls slow down. By Thanksgiving, half of them are complaining they are too busy to come home for the whole break. The kid you are worried about right now is going to be okay. Better than okay.

You raised someone brave enough to do the single hardest thing there is, which is to walk into a building full of strangers and build a life inside it. Be proud of that, not only sad. And know that somewhere down their hall, there is a version of me, two years in, quietly rooting for them to open the door.

Warmly,
Maya

Maya Ellison, Opinion Editor, The Quad