By A. Scott Walton
Attention: all parents waking up to the harsh realization that the party's over now that your collegiate offspring are returning home for the summer (or longer). You are not alone.
Just when you were accustomed to the quiet, the new hobbies or getting your sexy back, here they come. And, according to a new Washington Post report, your kids' neediness and proclivity to childish antics, messiness and outbursts may not have been cured by their months away at college.
It's an ordeal that requires a serious "reality check" according to the parenting consultant/author, Karen Levin Coburn, quoted in the piece.
There are new boundaries to set. And new priorities to establish.
The key to peaceful co-existence while the kids are home from college, Coburn suggests, is realizing how a secure sense of place is what many scholars on summer break truly seek.
“They expect their parents to be totally supportive of their changes — maybe the kid who used to only eat burgers has gone vegan, or cut off all her hair. But they really don’t want their parents to change at all,” she said. “They want things to be just as they were when they left.”
So maybe they're not ingrates invading their empty-nest space after all.
Maybe they just need a hug.
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