Sending a child off to college for the first time is always an anxious time for parents. If parents themselves went to college right after high school, then they have a clear idea of the kind of freedom and responsibility that their child, their now-young adult, will have. They can only trust that they raised their college student right, and that their young adult will resist getting into the more destructive patterns of behavior that tempt college students.
One of those destructive patterns at college campuses across the country is binge drinking. While most students make it through college without any long-term effects from occasionally having too much to drink, there is a segment of the population "college and non-college goers alike" that is vulnerable to developing addictions. That vulnerability also holds true for those who use the technological devices that have changed our lives over the past couple of decades.
In the olden days, parents only worried that their children were watching too much TV. Now they worry that they are online too much, or that they are playing video games too much. With today's social networking sites, such as Face Book, parents also have the worry that their youngsters are going online and chatting or playing computer games with people, that their children or the parents have never met face to face.
How realistic is this worry? For those of us who use the computer in our professions only as a tool to get our work done, it's hard to imagine that someone would opt to use all his or her free time sitting in a chair in front of a computer screen. But today's college students have grown up using computers for fun, and have grown up with the ever-evolving game systems. With all their friends online, when does their use of the computer and Internet cross the line over to addiction? When do the hours spent playing the latest video game become detrimental to a student's well being? It happens when those activities interfere with daily life. For college students, that means when the student is skipping classes and social activities, neglecting to do course work, and using up sleep time, to go online or play video games or both. When getting to the next level on a video came is more important, and more satisfying, than getting a paper written for College Composition, there's a problem. When going online to watch the latest YouTube videos takes the place of discussing assigned readings with fellow Western Civilization classmates, there's a problem.
One way to prevent these problems is to teach children and teenagers how to moderate their use of the Internet and of game systems before they go off to college. That can mean something as simple as setting time limits for computer and video game use, and allowing that use to come only after other work is done, and perhaps after the family has had supper together, too.
The more parents pattern good behaviors, the more students will, as they go off into college and into the larger world, see such responsible behavior as the way they should conduct their lives. And the more these good habits are ingrained, the less parents have to worry!
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