The Fine Art of Letting Go

Imagine tears, lots of tears. Imagine a trail of tears trickling across upstate New York. Judie Comerford and her husband, Michael, are in their minivan on a highway somewhere between Potsdam and their home in Buffalo. They've just bid farewell to their oldest child, Meghan, who's starting college. "I cried, and then I cried some more, and then I cried again," Judie recalls. "I didn't think it was possible for someone to cry for going on five hours." The Comerfords were so distraught that they failed to notice the speedometer hitting 92 miles an hour. "The next thing I knew, there were these flashing red lights," Judie says. They pulled over to the side, but the tears kept coming. The trooper asked, "Is there a problem here?" Judie couldn't speak. Michael was no help; he was bawling, too. Finally, Judie blurted out, "We just took my daughter to college. My life is over. She's my little girl."

The cop got it. "I have a little girl," he said. (Perhaps that's why the Comerfords escaped with only a $15 ticket.) Since that difficult day in 1993, Judie and Michael have said goodbye to three other kids—all now out of school and living successfully on their own. And each time, Judie, a 52-year-old medical receptionist, was inconsolable. With all the birds out of the nest, Judie can joke about her overly emotional goodbyes—and about the solace she still gets from talking to her kids on the phone "oh, about 40 times a week." She laughs. "And then there's text messaging, too."

Letting go. Are there two more painful words in the boomer-parent lexicon? One minute, there's an adorable, helpless bundle in your arms. Then, 18 years go by in a flash, filled with Mommy and Me classes, Gymboree, Little League, ballet, drama club, summer camp, traveling soccer teams, piano lessons, science competitions, SAT prep classes and college visits. The next thing you know, it's graduation. Most boomers don't want to be "helicopter parents," hovering so long that their offspring never get a chance to grow up. Well versed in the psychological literature, they know that letting go is a gradual process that should begin when toddlers take their first steps without a parental hand to steady them. And hovering is certainly not a new phenomenon; both Gen. Douglas MacArthur and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had mothers who moved to be near them when they went to college. But with cell phones and e-mail available 24/7, the temptation to check in is huge. Some boomer parents hang on, propelled by love (of course) and insecurity about how the world will treat their children. After years of supervising homework, they think nothing of editing the papers their college students have e-mailed them. A few even buy textbooks and follow the course syllabi. Later they're polishing student résumés and calling in favors to get summer internships. Alarmed by these intrusions into what should be a period of increasing independence, colleges around the country have set up parent-liaison offices to limit angry phone calls to professors and deans. Parent orientations, usually held alongside the student sessions, teach how to step aside.

Letting go is the final frontier for boomer parents, who've made child rearing a major focus of their adult lives. The 76,957,164 Americans born between 1946 and 1964 are the wealthiest and best-educated generation of parents in human history, and they've had unparalleled resources to aid them as they've raised an estimated 80 million children. Although there have been some economic ups and downs, unemployment has been generally low, and the rise of two-career families has meant more for all. While their incomes grew, boomers kept family sizes small, thanks to the availability of birth control and abortion. "In the old days, parents thought of kids like waffles," says William Damon, director of the Stanford University Center on Adolescence. "The first couple might not turn out just right, but you could always make more. Now many families have only one or two kids to work with, so they focus all their attention and energy on one or two and want them to do well." An explosion of child-development research stressing the importance of the early years reinforces boomers' determination to give their kids the best. They've carefully followed expert advice on everything from music that nurtures the developing brain in utero to gaming the college-admissions process.

By many standards, all that effort has paid off. More students than ever are entering college, and rates of teen pregnancy, crime and drug abuse are all down. And the recipients of that guidance certainly appear to be grateful. "Their connection to their parents is deep and strong," says Barbara Hofer, an associate professor of psychology at Middlebury College who studies the transition to college. "They say, 'My parents are my best friends.' People would have seen that as aberrant a generation ago, as pathological." Hofer and her student Elena Kennedy recently surveyed Middlebury freshmen and found that students and parents reported an average of 10.41 communications per week over cell phone, e-mail, Instant Messenger, dorm phone, text messaging and postal mail. Parents initiate most of this contact, Hofer found, but their children don't seem to mind; most students said they were satisfied with the amount of communication they had with their parents and 28 percent wanted even more with their fathers.

But that closeness is a double-edged sword. When admissions directors get together, sharing horror stories of overinvolved parents is one of their favorite pastimes. "There are cases where the parent tells the adviser that their son wants to be a doctor," says one Midwestern dean, "and these are the classes he wants to take, and then, when the parent leaves the room, the students say, 'I'm not sure I want to be a doctor at all. English and art are more interesting to me'."