Campus Ministers Want Churches to Help Parents of College Students

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (GBHEM/FYI) – College students having trouble making the transition to adulthood increasingly rely on frequent cell phone calls and e-mails to their parents, a United Methodist campus ministers group says. So campus ministers are asking local churches to develop ministries that help parents and college freshmen adjust to this transition.

“I’ve had faculty members tell me they’ll be discussing a grade with a student, and the student will take out their cell phone and call their mother, then hand the cell phone to the professor,” said the Rev. Bill Campbell, co-chair of the United Methodist Campus Ministers Association (UMCMA) and a campus minister at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro.

“Campus ministers have seen a real change in the last few years of students not being ready to take on adult responsibilities when they get to college and parents struggling with how to deal with this, not knowing how much to help,” Campbell said.

The Rev. Luther Felder, assistant general secretary in the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry’s Campus Ministry Section, agrees that churches can help parents and college students.

"This is a very important rite of passage that offers local congregations a unique opportunity to reach out to parents and young adults who are struggling with this issue. Can you imagine a ceremony that takes place just before school starts, followed by care groups that help parents to talk about the grief they experience? This could reiterate what institutions are trying to do with students," said Felder. GBHEM sponsors the campus ministers’ group. UMCMA is an affiliate organization of GBHEM, working closely with the Division of Higher Education on campus ministry issues.

The trend has been noted nationally by university officials who call parents who cannot let students handle their own problems “helicopter parents” for their tendency to hover over their college-age offspring. Some parents try to intervene in problems with roommates, scheduling, dorm rooms, grade disputes, and other problems.

“As campus ministers, we try to treat the students as adults and have to assume that when they make a commitment, they will act as an adult,” Campbell said. Unfortunately, parents do not always support that treatment, Campbell said.

“I had a parent call to inform me that his daughter would not be going on a mission trip she had signed up for and wanted her deposit back. I told him she needed to talk to me, but I couldn’t refund the deposit,” Campbell said.

The group is urging local churches to help in several ways. First, they would like to see churches develop special Sunday School classes on parenting college students and ongoing ministries for parents, especially parents of first-year students. The coordinating committee of UMCMA made these recommendations during a meeting in Nashville July 25-29.

Annual conferences are encouraged to develop workshops on parenting of college students for parents and clergy. United Methodist campus ministers and chaplains offer themselves as consultants to annual conferences to develop a conference college-age parenting strategy.

UMCMA members also appeal to the general church boards and the United Methodist Publishing House to develop books and other resources for Christian parenting of college students and young adults.

An online poll of more than 400 college students conducted by Experience, Inc., a leading provider of career services to students and alumni, revealed the vast majority of students report their parents are moderately involved, while 25 percent of them responded that their parents were “overly involved to the point that their involvement was either annoying or embarrassing.” The data was gathered from students and parents who visited the site and filled out the survey, so it does not represent a random scientific sample.

Still, 38 percent of students said their parents had either physically attended meetings with academic advisers or called an adviser, and 31 percent said their parents had called professors to complain about a grade.

“Over-involved parenting hampers students’ transition into adulthood, their spiritual development and career preparation,” Campbell said. “As campus ministers, we have always sought to lead college students into a healthy adult spiritual development, but our opportunity to assist parents in healthy parenting roles is very limited.” That is why the association is asking churches to step in.

The UMCMA Coordinating Committee recommends books for parents of college students, including: The Launching Years: Strategies for Parenting From Senior Year to College Life by Laura S. Kastner and Jennifer Wyatt (Three Rivers Press); When Your Kid Goes to College: A Survival Guide by Carol Barkin(Harper Paperbacks); and Letting Go: A Parent’s Guide to Understanding the College Years by Karen L. Coburn and Madge L. Treegrer(HarperCollins).

Recommended readings for pastors, campus ministers and conference leaders, College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What to do About it by Richard Kadison and Theresa Foy DiGeronino (Jossey-Bass); and Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – And More Miserable Than Ever Before by Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D.(Free Press).