www.womanthismonth.com 45 May 2013 | As Grades are good. Maybe your daughter or son has a clear idea of a future career; maybe not. But it would be surprising if university, perhaps abroad, was not one of the options on the table. This is where perceptions start to diverge. You see things one way, and your child might see them quite differently. You’re probably going through all those serious thoughts that parents think: the right choice, career prospects, and best university. Quietly, you might also be thinking about your baby flying the nest and worrying about whether she/he will cope and how you can keep her/him on the straight and narrow when she/he is thousands of miles away. Your children, on the other hand, might be dreaming of parties, bungee-jumping, escape at last! They’ll be looking at Facebook posts from friends, brothers or sisters already at university, and they’ll be desperate for the life they see — travel, fun, new friends. Photos of people in lectures and working on assignments don’t tend to show up on Facebook, but this is familiar territory. It’s the same as school, right? But quietly they might be thinking, “Will I cope? Will I be homesick? What if I’m not as smart as everyone tells me I am?” So at least you have some common ground, which is that you both have your secret fears. As any parent of teenagers knows, common ground is not always easy to maintain. In fact, it’s shifting all the time. And you’re the one who has to struggle to keep connected as your children’s opinions, tastes and emotional maturity rapidly evolves. So it makes sense to take the opportunity presented by the scary unknown and to do a bit of planning, hopefully at moments when you get an attentive audience. When theory really does count One useful approach to thinking about study abroad is to use the structure of Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ as the framework. He defined five levels of need. His theory states that if you don’t get past one level, it’s not easy to proceed to the next. The levels are: 1. Physiological: This is what you need to survive: food, shelter, warmth. In the case of your daughter, think about what clothes she will need. Will she eat the right things? What accommodation is most suitable? 2. Safety and security: Will she need a car (probably not if she’s living on campus)? What are the no-go areas where she’ll be living? Does she have self-defence training? Does she have anti-virus software on her laptop? Does she have travel insurance? Does she have contents insurance in case she loses her phone? Is she aware of the dos and don’ts of travelling alone? Does she have first-aid training or medical insurance? What about finding a clinic? 3. Love and belonging: She’ll probably know more about social media than you do, but one of the biggest problems in the first few months at university for many students is loneliness and isolation. Do you have a plan for regular contact? Do you have an application like Skype video? Has she thought about what kind of college societies she might join? Here’s a delicate one. Does she have any experience in interacting with the opposite gender? That’s a safety issue also — both physical and emotional. So a little bit of preparation about things that can happen and
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