Through the years, our three daughters have largely made parenting easy, but my wife and I were not prepared for the challenges of parenting from 800 miles away. While we have never been helicopter parents, we have always been a part of our girls’ lives. We knew their teachers. We knew their spiritual mentors. We knew their schedules and their whereabouts. And we always sought to have the home where their friends wanted to hang out so we would know each of them too.
Now, everything has changed with our eldest daughter Hannah, a sophomore at USC. We know almost nothing!
From time to time, we spy on her by looking at the “Find my iPhone” app on our mobile devices. We see that she is in this building and then that building. Often we have no idea what kind of building it is. We don’t know who she is with. We don’t know what she is doing. The days of knowing every one of her friends and their parents is long gone. And all this can be very disconcerting!
During the recent hurricane we noticed that in the worse part of the storm her location had changed from the Baptist Collegiate Ministry to her rental house. Knowing she didn’t have a car, we wondered how she got from one place to another in the storm. We texted and were shocked with the reply describing how she had ridden her bicycle across campus and downtown Columbia right through the wind and the rain! Oh my.
Despite the anxiety that comes from our not really knowing what’s going on most of the time, Hannah has impressed us with her maturity and commitment to education, leadership and spiritual growth. That is soothing balm to her parents' worried hearts. USC has been a perfect fit for our daughter. She has found the best and closest friends she has ever known. She has found a home with the Baptist Collegiate Ministry. Her intellectual curiosity has grown. She has fallen in love with writing for the school newspaper.
So, what have we learned from all of this long distance parenting?
First, we have learned to trust our daughter. For 18 years, you try to point them in the right direction. At some point you have to let the arrow fly and trust its path will be true. Kids absorb more than parents sometimes realize. Given the chance, they will usually prove to be worthy of our trust.
Second, we have learned to trust the university. We weren’t the first parents to send a kid to the University of South Carolina. The school knows how to create safe environments for students to thrive academically and socially. The university has done much to bolster our confidence in institutions of higher education.
Finally, we have learned the value of having plenty of frequent flyer miles! 800 miles isn’t so far in a jet plane. We miss our daughter but know that she is only a flight away.