KANSAN.COM / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 2010 / NEWS
13A
COMMUNICATION
Technology dominates campuses
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
CHICAGO — Nineteen-year-old Taylor Matichak calls her mom several times a day, in between the flurry of text messages she send one another discussing academics, social life or just daily chit-chat. Though the sophomore at the University of Missouri spends most of the year more than 300 miles from her family's Plainfield, Ill., home, the distance seems to evaporate with technology.
"I like it because we can stay close," said the teen, who says she initiates most of the calls and texts. It's profoundly different from the college days of her mother, 52-year-old Debbie Maticak, who remembers waiting in long lines at her dormitory pay phone to make the obligatory Sunday collect call home.
Keeping in touch with parents was more expensive and time-consuming when she attended the University of Denver three decades ago. But as college students prepare to descend on campuses in the coming weeks, many are finding that with the ease of cell phones, unlimited text message plans, e-mail, Facebook and Skype, they can have near-constant access to mom and dad.
"It's changed the experience of being away at college," said James Boyle, president of College Parents of America, based in Arlington, Va. "A generation ago, when your parents said goodbye and drove away, many (students) didn't see their parents again until Thanksgiving."
But some experts fear this communication shift could hamper the independence of older teens at a time when they traditionally come into their own.
"Sometimes these students are not being as autonomous or self-sufficient as they should be," said Barbara Hofer, psychology professor at Middlebury College in Vermont and co-author of the book "The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up," which is being released this month.
"Staying close is different than being dependent," she said.
Her 2008 study of students at Middlebury and the University of Michigan found that students on average contacted their parents 13 times a week, mainly via cell phone calls and e-mails, though text messaging and Skype seem to be growing in popularity.
This is a marked shift from the students' parents who reported calling home about once a week when in college.
Much of the change stems from the rising use of technology among all age groups. A Pew Research Center survey this year found 40 percent of adults use the internet, e-mail or instant messaging, up from 32 percent in 2009. Seventy-two percent of adults this year reported sending or receiving text messages compared to 65 percent last year.
these electronic conversations entered "regulatory" territory: Parents reminding their student about assignments, making course schedule decisions, monitoring posts on Facebook or telling the child how to handle basic conundrums of life, from questions about washing machine settings to trouble with professors.
Hofer said problems arise when
The immediacy of today's technology can also chip away at self-
reliance, Hofer said. While past generations would call home on the weekend and review the events of the week, students are now able to call or text for feedback in the midst of a crisis. Hofer found that students often go straight to their parents rather than figuring out solutions or handling the emotional fallout on their own, as they would have been forced to do in previous years.
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