Monthly Archives: April 2012

HAVE you found your usually tidy home strewn with wet towels and dirty dishes, and been unable to find the remote control this week?

Then you may have a student home for the holidays.

Yes, you tearfully waved them off to university and then yo-yoed between great sadness at your baby flying the nest and great joy at having your weekly grocery shop last longer than a day.

But now they are back, genuinely happy to see you and make the most of your great generosity.

If you have an undergraduate home for the holidays you’ll find them a different beast than the one you had back for Christmas – this one has Work to do.

Try not to question them too vigorously about why all their work appears to be due now, while they could/should have been studying all year. It’s a fact that universities’ assignment dates all come in around May because they should have been progressively learning throughout the year, ready for assessment at the end of the teaching year.

So they may not be willing to admit to you that they spent most of the year recovering from hangovers or watching back-to-back episodes of Keeping up with the Kardasians or Made in Chelsea, when perhaps they should have been in lectures or the library.

But hey, they’re young, they’re students, and you can be pretty confident that they don’t need reminding that they really need to get their head down and get studying while they are at home.

It’s always been a universal truth that students aged between 18 and 25 and in full-time education have the most time on their hands and the least worries, when you compare them with those who have to juggle work, paying a mortgage and childcare. But don’t think they have it easy these days. Those debts, already a whopping three and a half grand a year just for tuition fees, do make today’s students feel far more pressure than our generation did.

And they’re not daft, they know there’s more of them graduating than there were in our time, and fewer jobs to go around. They know if they fail that assignment, or worse still, the year, they may have the embarrassment of having to sit a module or even a whole year again, PAYING again, just to make it through the three years with a piece of paper that calls them a Graduate.

These days they are far less likely to scream “you don’t understand ANYTHING about me,” but now they have been out in the big wide world, and had to fend for themselves, you may actually be starting to believe it yourself.

They might, possibly, be panicking enough over Easter to tell you they can’t do anything but study; but it is important, mentally, that they have at least a day or two with no books and just relax. Take them for dinner, pay for a hairdresser/barber appointment, but just temporarily take their mind off the deadlines.

But once that’s done, leave them alone and don’t distract them. Be the exasperated parent you used to be and make them get to work. This may be tough, as you’ll want to spend as much time as possible with them because you know in a week or so they’ll be gone again. Back to the place you painfully have to hear them refer to as ‘home’.