“They overrun every corner of the country, arriving in broken-down cars. They’re sleep-deprived, hungry and burned out, bearing laundry bags instead of gifts. Yes, the holidays are here, and we college students are going home. Holiday breaks are usually the first extended periods of time that families spend together since saying goodbye at dorms in the late summer.”
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They overrun every corner of the country, arriving in broken-down cars. They’re sleep-deprived, hungry and burned out, bearing laundry bags instead of gifts.

Yes, the holidays are here, and we college students are going home.

Holiday breaks are usually the first extended periods of time that families spend together since saying goodbye at dorms in the late summer.

It’s challenging for parents to come to terms with an empty nest, but it can be even trickier when the student comes home for the holidays with a tattoo or a piercing.

College students will have adopted new characteristics, which may cause people who thought they knew them to realize that they don’t. This alteration might confuse friends and family at first because they won’t know who they’re dealing with. But maybe students just want to confuse the people they never liked, and still don’t.

Students might be more liberal and have new ideas that frighten their conservative counterparts.

They may often bait their parents with newly learned, but not fully understood pieces of philosophy and social consciousness in heated debates at the dinner table.

Also, students tend to come home stronger and more self-assured as their high school insecurities fall away; however, they also feel misplaced and misguided.

Feeling out of place at home is a right of passage.

Even though students have a place where they can do their laundry for free and eat something with nutritional value, that idea of home is gone for good.

They’ll step in the door, but home will no longer be the way they knew it.

This is a period of transition for everyone. College students are accustomed to new freedoms and new responsibilities, and while coming home can be a relief, it also can lead to new power struggles with parents wanting to treat their young adults as children.

There’s bound to be some tension about rules and what needs to be done.

Students are used to coming and going without reporting to anyone in the dorms. This calls for a sense of balance if they want their parents to recognize and respect that they have changed.

When students return home, they’re going to have to renegotiate relationships, expectations and curfews during the weeks between semesters.

As students decide who they are and how they want to live their lives, they make choices about their majors and careers, religion and values, sexual preference and intimate partners.

When they return home, these loaded issues leap onto the nicely decorated table, and parents come face-to-face with the essence of letting go.

Coming home is a bittersweet sentiment unlike any other.

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