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This post is from Grown and Flown.

by Marybeth Bock

When you send your first child off to college, a whole new parenting ballgame begins.

The act of physically walking away from them, whether it’s in a dorm lobby, an airport security area, or in your own driveway as they head down the street in an overloaded car, is a momentous metaphorical corner in your life – and in theirs.

For many of us, this parenting pivot is accompanied by tears and some deep feelings of loss. For some of us, it’s a huge exhale and a recognition of a gigantic parenting win. But for practically every parent, it’s a complicated mixture of joy, excitement, anxiety and forfeiture.

It also happens to be a major occasion in our parenting lives where there is a profusion of advice. Because compared to the first day of pre-school or Kindergarten, when you know you’ll see your precious child again in a matter of hours, the beginning of college is the mother of all Back to School handovers.

And because it’s full of big emotions, we all react in different ways. Many parents seek out advice from friends and family members, hoping to secure the best tips. Others simply want validation for the choices they and their child have made, and those desires often result in the dispensing of unsolicited opinions and declarations of how to do things the Right or the Wrong way.

If you’ve been busy preparing to send your child to college, you may have already begun to experience an avalanche of advice from well-meaning people. And chances are, that chunk of icy instruction will continue to snowball until you are buried up to your neck.

Advice for new college parents

So, while I can still see your frostily frustrated face, I will whisper just three little words to help you weather this storm:

You do you.

Because there will be parents telling you to text your kid a little encouragement every night that first week after drop off. And others counseling you to ignore them entirely for a week and let them adjust.

You do you.

And someone will advise you to send them off with every single textbook already purchased. And others will warn you to wait and see what their professors say.

You do you.

And there will be friends telling you to forbid them from taking a gaming system to college. And others will tell you it’s the best stress relief they can have.

You do you.

To read the rest of the article, click here.