Off to College…

Last week, I talked about how my parents helped me in primary school. This essay is a follow-up to that one. If the first essay is about having helpful parents in one’s life, the second is about what happens when it’s time for a child to strike out on their own.

Sometimes, they don’t do so well.

I don’t mean to scare any parents whose kids may be heading out to school, but I think that it’s worth mentioning my school experience.

For much of early years, my sole overriding goal was to get into Texas A&M University. This was something drilled into me for years by my parents. They regaled me of the glories of Aggieland and put a large amount of money into my college fund, so I went along with it. I didn’t want to displease them, and I didn’t have anything better to do.

Going to college, I was so certain what I wanted to do. I wanted to do a physics class. Why? Well, because I had some really good math and physics teachers during my last few years of high school. I thought my experience of physics in college would be identical to my experience of physics in high school. Though I did get some very good teachers in college, I found what they talked about bored me. A lot of it consisted highly abstract models of reality, equations that repeated themselves, and very little in the way of anything I found interesting.

So I drifted. I found it more difficult to pay attention in class or do anything. I changed my major from physics to history, thinking it was a lack of interest that caused my grades to suffer. However, I found myself suffering from the same exact problems over and over. I skipped classes, spent more time talking to friends on the Internet than working on school work, and the like. I felt I had lost my motivation, and I didn’t really know why.

As always, only hindsight provided me with the answer.

See, without a constraining force that prevents them from doing whatever they want, human beings tend to just fall apart. They’ll become less observant of good behavior and do bad things, even if they otherwise know what they’re doing is wrong. Therefore, they need some form of regulation to stay on the straight and narrow.

Now, there are two types of constraints that prevent a person from doing what they want: internal and external. Internal constraints are those that come from within a person to counter their appetites. These are the voice of conscience, discipline, and habit. These types of things are built up through character-building. External constraints, meanwhile, are those things that create a standard and punish those who do not conform it. Many times, this comes in the form of an authority figure: an employer, a police officer, a teacher, or a parent. In other cases, it could be through peer pressure; after all, you wouldn’t want to alienate your friends by acting out, right? Finally, the external force could be reality itself. What better way to teach you the folly of walking on the curb than Mistress Gravity?

When I was in college, I didn’t really have any of these constraining forces. During high school, I never built up any good studying habits nor did I ever have a steady job that would’ve taught me discipline, and I had no motivation to obtain those things at college. I had left my home, so, for the first time, I was away from my mom and dad for months at a times. I had no supervisor, no parental substitute while I was there. There were teachers, yes, but they didn’t care about me outside of their classes, so I was free to do whatever I wanted when I wasn’t in class. I didn’t have much in the way of friends at my college, so nobody could influence me like that either. I had a support network, but I didn’t use it because of my lack of motivation.

Eventually, my parents found out and became very angry with me for my lack of motivation and deception regarding how poor my situation was. They kicked my booty, and I was forced to learn self-discipline. I also reflected on my goals in life, realizing that I needed some other motivation than “get through college” if I wanted to actually get through college. Only after all of that and a lot of hard work was I able to graduate from Texas A&M.

I hope that my story informs parents of the difficulties they’ll face once their kids go off to college. College students must have discipline, motivation, and people who support them in order to succeed. Otherwise, they’ll backslide. The job of the parent is not to hover over them, but to equip them with these things.