The summer before your student heads off to college is an interesting, exciting, and stressful time — both for your soon-to-be college student and for you.  It is a time of beginnings and endings, of leavings and goodbyes, of new adventures,  of things to do, people to see, decisions to be made, and time to be spent dreaming and reflecting.  It all adds up to a good bit of tension and stress.

For many college students and their families, the stress comes, in part, from the unknown — or from the imagined.  As parents, we wonder what our students are thinking and planning.  Students may wonder what lies ahead, but not be sure what kinds of things they need to be thinking about — or how to plan.  We’ve written an earlier post about students’ goals and action plans which may help give some students direction.

Sometimes it’s all about asking the right questions.  We’d like to suggest eight possible questions for parents to ask their college bound students over the course of the summer.  We have some additional, more practically oriented questions in earlier posts, but these questions are more reflective.  Of course, we don’t recommend that you sit your student down and hit him with a barrage of questions.  And most parents may not want or need to ask all of these questions.  But consider weaving some of these into your summer conversations as a way to help your student reflect on some key issues, think about how to be in control of his college experience, and as a vehicle for you to get to know your student in a new way.

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