I’ve spent the last three weeks looking at colleges with my 17-year old daughter and let me tell you, it’s a great experience.

A lot of folks have heard me talk about this in fear and trepidation. And yes, it had elements of all of that, but it also showed me how grown-up my daughter is. If and when you get to do this with your daughter or son…keep an open mind! I had some opinions that were all about me and not my daughter. She taught me what was important to her by passionately explaining what she liked and disliked about every school we visited. What was most amazing to me was that what I thought was important was not important to her. She had a whole different set of ideas about what she wanted in a college.

College costs a lot of money today but I believe it’s the greatest gift we can give our children. But the bigger gift is letting them have their say in the decision-making process by not trying to make the decision for them. Cutting the cord–or at least letting the cord stretch a little–is a great thing to do and it’s very empowering to both parent and child. Help your child in this very important activity but more importantly, let them be a major player.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 10:35 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.