Daily News | Starting college is a transition for parents too. ‘I got in his bed and I just cried.’
added to the financial stress of paying for college to the nation’s political polarization. Families of color are also sending children to a new environment at a time of heightened unrest overIt is not just that goodbyes are harder after families spent more time together because of remote work and learning.national survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
for this major life transition, according to George James, a licensed marriage and family therapist and chief innovation officer at Council for Relationships, a Philadelphia mental health nonprofit. “There is a stress and anxiety about what that looks like as well, like our relationship with our other son and our relationship as a married couple and what’s next for me,” Santiago said.
Although her son’s father helps pay for college, she has been overwhelmed with stress: “How am I paying for four years of college?” Zaslow said. When she left him at college last August, she walked into his room at home. Her eyes swept over the stuffed animals they’d won on the Jersey Shore boardwalk, the collection of baseballs from all the games they went to, the Dr. Seuss books they read together. “I was looking at it and I was like, ‘My life is never going to be the same,’” she recalled. “I got in his bed and I just cried.”