The Identity Shift Nobody Warns Parents About

Your incoming college freshman is preparing for new classes, a new roommate, and life away from home.

But there is another major transition happening that families rarely talk about.

Both you and your child are going through an identity shift at the exact same time.

Your student is learning how to manage freedom, responsibilities, relationships, stress, loneliness, and decisions without the same support they had at home.

Meanwhile, you are moving from being the manager of their daily life to becoming the parent of an increasingly independent adult.

That shift can bring sadness, worry, conflict, hurt feelings, and confusion for both of you. It can even feel like something has gone wrong when this tension is actually a normal part of the transition.

In this episode, I talk about:

• Why the college transition affects parents as much as students
• The difference between being needed and staying connected
• Why your freshman may temporarily regress after leaving home
• How to prepare for homesickness, loneliness, and overwhelm
• When to check in and when anxiety may be driving your communication
• How to talk with your student before move-in
• Why being proactive is more effective than waiting for a crisis

I also share part of my own college story and explain why students need more than academic skills to successfully navigate their first year.

Your child has spent years learning how to be a student. They may not have been taught how to manage all the emotional, practical, and personal responsibilities that come with becoming an adult.

That is why I created The Resilient Launch, a high-touch coaching program for incoming college freshmen and their parents.

Students receive personalized support, practical tools, group coaching, and a plan built around their strengths, values, skills, and interests. Parents also receive guidance so they can stay connected without constantly reminding, rescuing, or managing.

Join The Resilient Launch Priority List here:

https://cheerful-writer-462.kit.com/8f5b8b99a3

Find my podcast
Email me:  ccoufal@cynthiacoufalcoaching.com
Text me:  785-380-2064
More information

Transcript

  Parents, I am sure some of you are preparing for your child to move into the dorm or an apartment as they get ready to go to their first year of college. And you're planning and buying the stuff and looking at Pinterest and picking out all the fun stuff And you're, you're planning for that part of it. You're not planning for the identity shift that you're going to have and that they're going to have. And really, both parent and your child are gonna get blindsided by grief, conflict, and disconnection because you don't have a name for it, which they can be misread as something that's going wrong or s- instead of something that's expected. So today, I'm gonna talk to you about how to recognize the identity shift on both sides before it happens so that you can navigate it as a normal transition instead of a crisis. And so for those of you who don't know me, I'm Cynthia Kofel, and I am the founder of The Resilient Launch and the Anxiety Maze Na- Navigator, and the podcast, The Teen Anxiety Maze. And this transition in life fits so perfectly in my anxiety space because a lot of the troubles that kids have when they go to college and problems that they have with their parents are because of anxious thoughts. Now, not necessarily that everyone has anxiety, but we all have anxious thoughts about what that looks like for them and also for you. And so I work with graduating seniors and incoming college freshmen in my new program, The Resilient Launch, and I help them navigate that transition to college so that they can launch ready and successful and confident, and their family doesn't have to be the one keeping it all together. They have some other adult that can help them with some of that so that you can just maintain your parent-child relationship with them, which I love so much. You know, for parents, everyone talks about that empty nest. Now, I know some of you, if this is your first child going off to college and you have other kids at home, this isn't necessarily empty nest, but it does... It will cause a difference in your family and the dynamics of how things go. And so when people talk about empty nest or, you know, when the kids start leaving the nest, they talk about it as an emotional event, you know, people crying, being sad, missing people, but it's actually an i- an identity event, so that you're actually changing who you are, and they're changing who they are. And what is really, I think, difficult about this particular transition is that you're both transitioning at the same time, so it really can cause a lot of, a lot of discomfort and disconnection and, like, problems, and some of it feels like something's wrong or something is not going the way it should, and actually all of this is normal. So I wanna talk about that. For your child, think about they have been told what to do and how to do it for their entire life so far, whether they're 17, 18, or 19 years old, going off into this first out-of-home experience. This is a completely different world. Now, you're not making that same identity shift because you have been the organizer of all of the things that have been going on for the last mostly 18 years. And so your role is changing in a way where you aren't the sole person organizing everything all the time, and hopefully your child has been doing some of that while they were at home. That's what I teach people to do. But even if they haven't, you know, you've been the manager of everything, and now you're not. And so that's how your identity is changing. And when neither of you understands this transition, and you don't have any words to talk about it, it can make it really just feel like failure and rejection and a lot of conflict, and I wanna help that not happen for you. So I definitely wanna talk about A little bit about my experience, though I feel like my experience when my daughter went to college is a little different than the one I'm talking about, because I actually moved out of our home. I was the one that moved out when my daughter was getting... just starting her junior year of high school. I was getting divorced, and I moved to a friend's house that was a few blocks away from where she lived with her dad. And so our identity shifts started happening then, because for me, I wasn't the person who was living with her every single day. She did come visit a lot, and we did spend a lot of time together, but my identity was already changing at that point, and she was m- maybe becoming more independent during that time, too, because she had to, because there was a lot of chaos and upheaval in her life. And so when it came time for her to go to college a couple years later, and I had moved to a different town, we had already experienced some of that identity shift ahead of time. But I still remember when she went away to college, there was a lot of phone calls and a lot of me talking her off ledges, um, so much about different things, and that was a normal experience, though as a parent it feels scary. Like, "Oh my gosh, she's not gonna stay in school. She's, you know, gonna get out of there because of all these different things that are happening." And her main, uh, issues, she's an extrovert and, you know, doesn't get too worked up about new experiences or new towns or new whatever, so that part wasn't really the problem. But, um, she'd never had a roommate before, uh, that was just another person, and her roommate was having her boyfriend come over every single night and sleeping on the floor. So that was really awkward for Haley to get up, and here's this guy there all the time. Um, and that also could have been a safety issue, but it, it wasn't. This boy was very nice, but it was just awkward for her to have this boy in her room all the time when she didn't... Uh, that wasn't something she wanted. And so she would complain to me about that a lot, and we had to talk about boundaries and how do you talk to people about what you want and don't want. She also was having a lot of difficulty with her dad at the time, because he had a hard time letting her go. And then there was a lot of fighting there, and, um- And sadness because he wasn't super excited about her being there, I think, and so he wasn't being nice to her about some of the things, so that was upsetting to her. Later, I mean, we didn't talk about this at the time, but as we've talked about her anxiety, and which she was diagnosed with anxiety while she was in college, but she said that she would... She had a fear of her friends dying, and she said, "I would just, like, not sleep at night because I was so worried about my friends dying or something bad happening to my friends," or it was, like, her friends getting kidnapped or, like, just all that kind of stuff. And she said, you know, it was really hard for her to function in school because she wasn't sleeping because she was thinking about a lot of things. And one of the interesting things I remember her calling me about that was so funny, and I probably caused this problem, was she set her alarm for 2:00 AM on different days because she didn't want to... 'Cause they had a shared public bathroom on her hall, at the end of her hall, and she didn't like being in there when other people were in there, so she would go to the bathroom in the middle of the night because she didn't wanna go during the day when other people were in there. And I remember I've had a bathroom phobia for a really long time, and I probably, you know, role modeled a bathroom phobia, and then she also maybe had it. She certainly doesn't have it now. It's so interesting that she got out of it. I still struggle with mine. Mine's better, but I still don't like public bathrooms or, you know, people knowing anything about me going to the bathroom. So, um, you know, that was interesting and f- and I... something I didn't expect for her to call about or have problems with. And of course, that disrupts your sleep when you're doing that, and so, you know, there's a lot of things that we don't think about ahead of time But here's... I wanted to give you some steps and ways to deal with this identity shift for both you and your child, because it's so important to have, to have s- a, like a framework or something to think about in this identity shift for both of you. So, like try to identify what your identity shift is gonna be, uh, before they even go. Like start thinking about it now, like so it doesn't blindside you for sure. But there's a lot of things that are gonna be different about your life because your child's not there, and it isn't just missing them and being sad. It's stuff like if you had a lot of connections with school parents because of activities or sports or something, and you don't have other children going through the same thing, you're gonna be missing the social aspect of going to school or going to activities. And if, if you were the, the sole manager of your child's schedule and everything that they ever did, you know, you're gonna like have all this free time where you're like, "Well, what do I do? And I don't even know what to do because my whole life has been about scheduling this, this child." And you and your partner, if you have a partner at home or even somebody that you're co-parenting with that doesn't live in your home, that relationship shifts because probably a lot of times our relationship is a lot about the child and their schedule and what they're doing, and we won't have that same connection anymore, and that's something that we need to think about, and we need to separate being needed by our child versus staying connected to our child. So think about how often you are checking in with your child, with texting or calling or, or whatever, and make sure that, is this a check-in that's going to be helpful and supportive to your child, or is this just a way to help your own discomfort? And if it's for your discomfort, then you need to let it be, and maybe talk to your child ahead of time about what your expectations are about communication, because young people are not that excited to be, um, being connected with their parents, at least usually. I mean, you may get a lot of extra calls because of them needing a lot of help, uh, but you might just not hear from them, and it might just be because they're ready to not be connected with you so much, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's actually very normal, and it doesn't mean anything about you. If this season feels harder than you expected for you or for them, it's not because something is wrong. It's because you're both becoming someone new at the same time. I would love to help you with this. I have the Resilient Launch program coming up, so I would work with your incoming freshman for three sessions individually. I'd find out their strengths, their values, their interests, their skills, and we would come up with a s- specific plan for how they would deal with emotional situations, time management, budgeting their money, creating boundaries with roommates, whatever kinds of things they were needing to do. And then the rest of the sessions are group sessions with other kids across the United States who are also freshmen in college, and they can talk to each other as well as me, hear what each other's situations are. We would work together, and I'm even thinking about throwing in some body doubling co-working sessions where when it's time to study for midterms, I could be right there with them working on my own things, and body doubling has really been helpful for my ADHD clients. So if you are interested in this, I have a priority list that if you wanna be the first person or first people to know about this program opening, you wanna get on this list because you will be the first people to know about it, so you can sign up 'cause there's not very many spots. And at some point, I will be o- opening it up to a lot more people. So if you wanna make sure that your child gets a spot, you wanna be on this priority list. I'll talk to you soon