I’m going to begin this column with a confession. Since coming to Stanford, I think that only a handful of days have gone by in which I haven’t talked to some member of my family. Okay, so from my standpoint that wasn’t a confession. It was more of a declaration of fact. Simply put, my family is important to me — yet I’ve traveled through my time at Stanford observing a range of complex attitudes that college students can have toward their families, particularly parents or parental units.

College is a time of renegotiating our relationships with our parents. To restate some old bildungsroman-esque truths, it is a time of pursuing independence, of discovering one’s identity away from home and also of establishing our position as adults even with the people with whom we can sometimes feel most like children. We all, I think, can feel a divide between our home selves and our school selves, between what we were and what we are becoming, and between what different groups of people perceive us to be. Our relationships with family, perhaps like nothing else, can bring this problem into sharper relief.

To return to the point: while at Stanford, I’ve noticed that my peers demonstrate two general viewpoints when talking about their parents. Some people, like me, freely admit to keeping in constant touch, sometimes to the point of excusing themselves from conversations to make phone calls home. Others shrug and shift their eyes as if to say, “Parents? Oh, I forgot, I haven’t talked to mine in about two weeks.” Likewise, when I travel home and attend so-called “grown-up” gatherings, the perspectives I encounter among the parents there follow the same mold. Families either appear well connected and well informed about each other’s lives or they sigh and say, “Little Jimmy’s fallen off the face of the earth since he went off to school. I just trust him to be safe.”

Total connection or total disconnection: these are the extremes that bound our rediscovered relationships with our parents, and it seems healthy to settle into a spot somewhere in between. This can be challenging, seeing as our society also circulates dual perceptions over what can characterize modern parent-child interactions. First of all, we have all heard about the growing trend of micromanaging parents, or members of the baby boomer generation-slash-economic elite who excessively invest in their children’s success to the extent of rendering said children incapable of making their own decisions. On the other hand, we have also all encountered assumptions of youthful independence through dismemberment — namely, that young people, after their stormy adolescent years, will naturally proceed to sever the last frayed ties of their filial relationships when they head off to college. According to this viewpoint, college begins a turbo leap into the adult dimension or represents the casting-off point when the ship sails for the western horizon: whichever analogy you prefer, the bottom line is “Bye-bye, mom and dad, I’m on my way.”

I’ll be blunt: I believe that neither approach demonstrates what a strong parent-child bond should be, even though I have seen both in action at Stanford. As college students, we should be neither paralyzed by our parents’ overinvestment in our lives nor so shortsighted that we fail to realize the benefits of sustaining a closer interactive relationship. Now, from a cynical point of view those benefits are simply material: for many of us, after all, it is our parents who foot our tuition bill. Yet it is also our parents who have, in large part, worked to provide us with the opportunities that we have. I think most Stanford students I have met realize this, but in the flurry of campus life, it can be easy to forget the larger context of our family structure and of why those relationships matter.

During a recent conversation I had with my mother, the topic of parent-child relationships came up. We began discussing the metaphysical concept that parents feel no “us-them” barrier with their children, and that children are similarly heedless of parental boundaries. In other words, among family, “What’s yours is mine.” This struck me as a central tenet of the parental-relations dilemma that college students can face. Many of us might have gone about our younger lives feeling no barrier between our parents and ourselves, in terms of resources or shared language or finance or even personal space. Now we find ourselves pressed to establish clear boundaries about our lives and the future directions that we would like to take. When these boundaries involve family members, we are not always sure of where to draw the line.

While at Stanford, like the rest of my peers, I have had to strike my own balance about how to involve my family in my life while also pursuing my own independence. Call it an adjustment period. Call it self-reinvention or realignment. I just feel fortunate that, even though the content and the context of our conversations might have changed since I left home, the dialogue has not stopped.

Rachel wants to know which of the two “Parent Trap” movies you preferred. Contact her at [email protected].