Strategies on How to spend this summer at Home with your Parents

The Parent Trap: Spending a summer at home with the parents can be enough to drive anyone nuts.

One of life’s most unsettling (but enlightening) periods is the first month home after your freshman year in college. The pure freedom of school — freedom to make big decisions, stay out all night and make big mistakes — can make returning home a big drag. Especially once you realize home is exactly how you left it.

They say you can’t go home again. It’s true: you’ve changed, and your perspective will never be the same even when you go back to a familiar place. That’s what causes problems with the family.

You’ll realize things have changed the first time you go out with friends. Your mom will ask, “Where are you going?” or your dad will say, “When will you be home?”

I still cringe when I remember the first time my mom asked me those questions after I started college. I was used to setting my own schedule and her innocent queries sounded unbelievably intrusive.

In the old days teenagers just left home and never came back. They either got married or got jobs. But when average young adults started going off to college, a “boomerang” effect was born. Students left their parental nests seeking independence, only to return at the school year’s end.

Your parents will see you returning to their nest for the summer and they’ll plan to protect you and nurture you just like they did for your first 18 years. They don’t mean to squash your newfound independence, they’re just doing what they know.

Help them out. Let them be the best parents they can be — and by making some easy concessions, you’ll get your way in the end.

Always tell them where you are going and when you will be home. (Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but there’s a strategy here.) Tell them you are going to shoot pool, or to see a movie, or something else that’s relatively mundane. The more information you can give them, the better they’ll feel.

The next part is trickier: always tell them you will be out much later than you really expect. Your parents might object at first. They might try to give you a curfew. Patiently explain that you have tasted the pleasures of curfewless existence and can never go back again. If they persist, tell them you’ll call them if it gets late. Once you wake your parents three or four times, they’ll ask you to stop.

Meanwhile, return home each night before your estimated time of arrival. Your parents will see what a great job they did raising you and they’ll stop worrying so much. This is easiest if your parents believe you when you say you’ll be home at 2 a.m. and are pleased when you make it in at 1:15. Unfortunately, parents tend to clue in eventually. Then you’ll have to exaggerate the time you’ll return even more to keep them happy.

Sometimes this strategy doesn’t work. So there’s one emergency plan you should save for dire situations: spend every single minute with your parents. Follow them around the house. Go shopping with them. Watch television with them. Eat every scrap of food in the house. Pretty soon your parents will beg you to go out with your friends. They’ll probably even kick in a little cash.

There’s one important caveat: Be careful if your parents really enjoy spending time with you. My brother and sister — both college graduates — are still at home watching “Jeopardy” with my mom and shouting, “What is my butt, Alex?” at the screen. Okay, maybe it isn’t that bad, but it sure isn’t great.

Remember, school starts again in three short months. Quality time with the ‘rents is a gesture of kindness, and a little dependence can be nice once in a while — especially when your mom is as good a cook as mine.

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