Washington – In homes across the country, parents are eyeing bedrooms vacated by their newly minted college freshmen: Should they close the door and preserve them as a teenage time capsule, or drag in a Stairmaster and set up a home gym?
“We could use a guest room,” says Skipp Calvert, an Alexandria, Va., landscape designer whose youngest son, David, departed for Southern Methodist University in Dallas last month. “But it sends the wrong message.”
Ha! says professional organizer and author Barbara Hemphill, who has five grown children.
“Kids are supposed to find out how to live on their own. … Keeping their rooms forever isn’t always in their best interest.” This fall, there are an estimated 1.2 million empty beds in the childhood homes of college freshmen who moved to campus housing.
According to Student Monitor, a market research group, of the 1.8 million first-year students enrolled at the nation’s four-year colleges, about 67 percent live on campus. Some parents offer the coveted room-left-behind to a younger sibling, or set it up as a home office. But in many cases, they leave the basketball trophies and the CD towers intact, at least for a while, ready for when kids come home for vacations.
Dan Jones, director and chief psychologist at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., counsels parents as part of the university’s annual parent-orientation program. He says he is frequently asked if it’s OK to let a younger child move into a son or daughter’s room or to turn it into a computer room.
“The answer to all those questions is yes, but I recommend that they wait until after the first semester. The first semester the college student is adjusting to a major transition in their lives.
“Home is a haven for them. A lot of changes at home are probably not good.”
Jones often suggests waiting until Christmas break and discussing the change you want to make. “Just don’t surprise them. Give them time to get used to the idea. You dealt with the room the way it is all these years, you can wait four or five months.”
George Kuh, chancellor’s professor of higher education at Indiana University, says that between cellphones and e-mail, parents today have much more day-to-day communication with their college children than in decades past, when a weekly Sunday phone call was the norm.
“Students are much more connected to home psychologically than they were a generation or two ago. So the notion of doing something radical to the student’s room is almost blasphemous, if connections are remaining very strong.”
Professional organizer Hemphill, whose firm, Hemphill Productivity Institute, is based in North Carolina, says it is rude to dismantle a child’s room without communicating with them, but she urges parents to face the fact that their children are adults.
“Part of growing up and going to school is that children develop lives of their own,” says Hemphill, co-author with Maggie Bedrosian of “Love It or Lose It: Living Clutter Free Forever.”
She suggests turning a bedroom into a family space where the college student can hang out with friends when home on vacation.
