Let kids learn the hard way

My mother lives 456.38 miles from my doorstep. Not bad when you are going Delta, even though there are no direct flights, but it's hell after six hours through the entire, flat, morbid Bluegrass State.\nNeedless to say, there aren't that many road trips from either party.\nParenting from a distance has been an adjustment for her. In high school, I was the child no parent wanted to deal with. I had serious alcohol problems, even worse boy problems and drinking-and-driving problems that landed me in one too many fender benders. Attempted control was my mother's middle name.\nMy parents thought that when I got shipped off (by choice mainly, I will admit) to a boarding school, I would grow up into the person I should have been all along. I don't think I did. Getting bucked off a horse in front of a state championship track meet because I was busy lighting a cigarette on the smoke-free campus was just one of the highlights of my Asheville School career.\nHowever, me going away at the age of sweet 16 allowed my mother and father to do what they couldn't have done otherwise: They got to know me from a distance, not as the terror lurking in the messy bedroom across the hall.\nSince I left before I would leave for good, my mother got the opportunity to distance herself from my horrific habits and for once just let me learn on my own with intense supervision from authority figures that were of no blood relation.\nAs I watch battles between various friends and parents, I realize that parents' roles in their children's college careers are not always defined. \nFor me, it is natural that we talk occasionally because we love each other, but at this point they have allowed me to become the person I am going to be, whether they like her or not. For others, I have noticed that parents have a much more active role that involves knowing what bars their child went to, what boy she stayed the night with and what times she should be in class or working.\nI understand that with any relationship, there will always be variations on the level of participation of the members. However, I think there gets to be a point in any 20-something's life when parents -- even ones that consider themselves friends with their children -- need to take a step back and let life take its course.\nIn the end, it will be the student that contracts the STD from sleeping around and has to live with it. It will be the student who can't land the dream job with P & G because of way too many C's in core classes. It will be the student who is forced to drop out of classes for a semester because of too much credit-card debt. \nAnd while no parents want these situations for their children, it often takes the person learning it on his own for them to truly understand it. That is the oldest parenting lesson in the book. Just ask Doctor Spock.\nThe learning process is an amazing psychological thing that involves action, not dictation -- a concept that many parents have yet to grasp, no matter how much they want to protect their children. The most important thing parents can do for children in college, I believe, is to let them grow as individuals.