Last week, my 11th-grade son and I flew to Atlanta, drove 406 miles on Southeastern highways in a black-on-black Nissan Rogue, stayed in three different 3-star hotels, and toured four universities in three days.
The food was mediocre, the car drove like a thrift store ten-speed, and the 40,000 steps I took through quads, bookstores, and food courts resurrected my plantar fasciitis.
It was one of the best trips of my life.
This was, of course, due solely to the fact that I got to spend 12 hours per day for three straight days with a person I helped to create, now towers over me at 6’3”, and who—soon enough—will be leaving home.
Let’s be honest - these college tours, like so many modern family rituals, arose as much for mom and dad as for our rising juniors and seniors. Sure, they help us get a feel for potential campuses and “demonstrate interest” to admissions offices. But the journeys themselves are really a last-ditch chance to cling to our parental relevance and see who our students have become in the eye-blink since we held their tiny hands and walked them into pre-school.
I read a scary statistic the other day on Facebook: By the time our children leave for college, we have already spent 90-95% of the time that we will ever spend with them. Granted, it was an intentionally provocative ‘Did You Know?’ meme meant to scare the reader, like “Did you know the average human has thousands of mites living in their nostrils?”
As disgusting as I find the idea of microscopic arachnids burrowing in my boogers, I’m much more threatened by the fleeting nature of family time. If I know nothing else, I’m sure that I matter to my children. And they’re 90+% done with me? Well, screw that, I’m kidnapping my son, and we’re going to go look at some SEC football stadiums!
Bruce Feiler, author of The New York Times bestseller A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us, describes ritual as “a tool to navigate destabilizing life transitions, combat loneliness, and restore human connection.” And when it comes to the spectrum of evolved coping practices, cruising highways with your child, eating Zaxby’s drive-through three times in 72 hours, and walking willowy quads sure beats bloodletting, widow burning, or Balinese tooth filing.1
So it’s no wonder that—for those of us lucky enough to afford them—college visits have become an American rite of passage.
The best thing about the road trip with your kid is that they pretty much have to engage with you, and the trek provides ample conversational material. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, I could ask non-threatening questions, like:
“Could you see yourself going to school there?”
“Does Greek life sound interesting to you?”
“What was up with that New Jersey mom’s outfit?”
From there, we’d soon be discussing more personal topics. If things got quiet for too long, I would roll down both windows, forcing him to ask, “Did you fart again?”
To which I would reply, “No comment.”
Speaking of staying quiet, I tried desperately not to opine on how much nicer the facilities are today than when I went to school, point out the absurdity of one library having two different Starbucks, or mention that my generation’s idea of dorm room decoration was storing our album collections in old plastic milk crates.
However, we did talk about how the application game has changed: grade inflation, vanishingly small admission rates, and bloated—though optional!—average SAT/ACT scores mean that, past a certain point, college admissions is an exercise in randomness.
We also discussed the incredible life experiences waiting for him. After learning of the professional soccer internships available at one sports management program, he asked with delight, “Can you imagine if I got to work for Man City or Barça? That would be amazing.”
“Absolutely!” I replied, remembering Fitzgerald’s words about youth’s felicity and encouraging him to imagine a radiant future.
The whole experience reminded me of something legendary newspaper humorist Dave Barry told me during an interview when I asked him for advice about my teenagers’ college search. He said:
“You’re going to go out and rent a car and drive all over the United States and visit 17 colleges, all of which are going to blur together into one mass college experience. And then your kid is going to pick one, and it’s going to be great.”
I think he was saying, at least partly, that we feel obligated to make these trips, lest we deprive our children. But after spending these few days with my son, I understand what Dave really meant. We’re not making these trips because we have to—we’re doing them because we get to. Campus exploration provides little more than a plausible pretext to duct-tape our kids into the passenger seat of a crappy rented SUV and force them to indulge our immense, mostly inexpressible love.
Dave also meant that, after all the pressure to find the perfect school, we have to trust that everything will be okay. I think he’s right. I know that, wherever my son ends up, he is almost certainly going to do great.
I’ll probably be okay too, but I’m already making plans for Parents Weekend.
THE END
Check out my interview with Dave Barry and my conversation with Bruce Feiler.
“It is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future—flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only pre-figurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
I acknowledge and embrace my cultural bias.
Thanks for writing this Paul. I am about dozen years ahead of you. This brought back great memories from when we did this with our two daughters. Make sure you enjoy lots of tailgates and games with your son in the years ahead. Cheers