What do you do if you find out your child is skipping most of their college courses?

[Anonymous]

Talk to your damn kid. Find out what's going on. If you're hacking into their iMessages (!!!) I take it you don't have a good relationship though.

[Anonymous]

I skipped many classes in college due to depression. I never told my parents. I'd talk to your kid

[Anonymous]

As a Freshman living with Juniors I had a fun first semester with a D and Bs. I lost my scholarship and turned around the second semester, but not enough to gain back the $. Talk to you DC and the college to re-enroll.

[Anonymous]

It's not optimal, but I will point out that "C's get degrees".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it depends on the kid's attitude and why they thought it was o.k. to skip their classes.

Lots of college classes these days are pretty much mandatory attendance. But some of the large lecture hall type classes are easy to skip out on. Sometimes the notes (and even the lecture itself) are also posted online, most of the quiz/test material comes straight from the book...so skipping a class is NBD if you have the study skills to do so.

Once you get that habit of skipping class it's a hard one to break and in the smaller classes it can feel like the walk of shame reappearing in a class after weeks of not being there.

I know because I did that as a freshman, myself. If my kid seemed genuinely regretful for blowing off his/her classes I would probably agree to give them a second chance.

I can relate. I crashed and burned my first semester. I still struggled second semester and decided, with my parents encouragement, to take a semester off. I worked two full time jobs for those 6 months and went back to school with a different head on my shoulders.

What I wish my parents had helped me understand going into that first year was exactly how much each class cost per day. Like if you skip you 10:00 class it’s like wasting $300. I just had no clue and I think that would’ve helped me get my priorities straight.

Talk to them and get a sense of what was going on. And then set a grade minimum. My friends call theirs “The Smith Family Scholarship.” If you fail to qualify for a semester you go on probation. If you can turn it around the scholarship ends.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I skipped many classes in college due to depression. I never told my parents. I'd talk to your kid

This was me too. In hindsight i suppered from depression and anxiety my whole life. I got by in HS because the family support. College was just too much for me. The anxiety associated with going to class and participating was too much. So I self medicated and became the ‘party girl’.

[Anonymous]

There's also aa kid who is used to getting mostly A's in high school without putting a lot of effort is going to find college very difficult at first. Add to it subpar professors who do little and expect a lot, is enough to intimidate an 18 year old.

[Anonymous]

It's possible the "bragging" was covering up for not doing well. , scared and desperate to safe face w/peers. Not a good thing but I'd rather, as adults, they were figuring it out in college. They aren't coming home. I provide the funds. It's their adult life now, for better or worse.

[Anonymous]

Can't believe few of you are addressing the fact that OP hacking into her child's private conversations. That is the issue here. I suspect a kid who has a parent with so little respect for boundaries is going to spend his/her first semester blowing off rules. I'm not saying its a good thing, I'm saying there's a larger picture here. I don't know how you can even have a conversation with your child about grades from this vantage point -- you certainly don't have the high ground here. This conversation won't go well.

And for those whoa re going to say well if the parent pays for college they can have total control over their child's life and read their messages and punish them if they don't go to class: (1) I don;t know how your child will ever be a competent adult if they are treated like a child in college, and (2) you better believe that as soon as your child has the means he or she will create as much distance as possible from you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We picked her up at winter break, enrolled in community college and made her get a job. After two years of that she completed her degree at our state school. No conversation was needed, it was this or nothing.

And she willingly went along with this??

Most kids that age would flip out and run off.

+1. My niece's parents did this to her and she's on year 5 or 6 of "taking classes" at the local community college.

better deal than year 5 or 6 somewhere expensive.

[Anonymous]

Find out why, see what you can do to help and tell them that they have one semester to get better grades or its to a state school or community college or take out loans and if the grades go up you'll pay back the loans.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Find out why, see what you can do to help and tell them that they have one semester to get better grades or its to a state school or community college or take out loans and if the grades go up you'll pay back the loans.

If it were my child, they would be brought back home and sent to community college or work until they were mature enough to return, if ever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We set a GPA requirement for our continued financial support. I would have a conversation with them and say they had one semester to turn things around; if grades weren't good enough after the next term I would stop paying.

What was the GPA requirement? Wouldn't a know-it-all kid just add easy classes, if not an easier major? Avoiding science labs, stats and university calc is an easy way to pump the GPA.

3.5, and while we had no restrictions on majors we would pay for we did require each DD to sit down with us and explain their plan for how their chosen major would lead to internships and either job or graduate school options. They were expected to either be on track to graduate with honors, participate in an undergraduate research project at least every other semester, or be in their university's co-op program.

Fully funding college for all the kids (they work to earn spending money and any fees associated with participation in 'Greek life') is a significant investment & sacrifice for us, so we were always clear that they needed to use the opportunity productively.

[Anonymous]

3.0 isn't that bad. My brother literally stopped going to class freshman year. 0.0 GPA. My parents pulled all funding, which I don't think he was expecting. He stayed around his college and got a job that summer in a factory (with no A/C in the South). After that summer he decided he did not want to spend the next 50 years working in a factory and wanted to go back to school. My parents told him to keep working for a year. He was so poor at one point that he ate PB&J until he couldn't afford PB anymore and then started shooting squirrels in his backyard for protein.
My parents were hardcore, and wanted him to REALLY want it. They knew that if they just paid for it, he wouldn't really be motivated.
After 1.5 years, he did go back to school and earned a degree in engineering. He went on to grad school for engineering.
My Dad has told me it was the hardest things he'd ever had to do to cut him off financially like that.

[Anonymous]

If I there were my kid, I might talk to him. Clearly there is an issue. We don't have the funds to cover a drawn out education, and if this is about depression, we don't want to punish or make things worse.

Talk. Stop spying.