Worried about Freshers’ Week? You’re better off not knowing...

MANY parents will have waved off their young people to university for the first, second, third or more time in the past week or so.

With Freshers’ Week in full swing, many will be hoping their little treasures don’t overdo it, but often it’s better not to know what they’re actually getting up to. Turning a slightly blind eye as a parent is an underrated virtue.

You can go mad fretting about the risks and dangers and working out how you can have a little peek at their lives via social media. This is usually pointless, as they are much better at it than the olds and will ensure nothing incriminating can be accessed by you.

This summer my 20-year-old flew off to America for three months after her second year at university, blithely announcing at the airport departures that she wouldn’t stay in touch much via electronic devices. She wanted some freedom, she said. It wasn’t as if we were in endless contact while she was away at university and I wasn’t able to stalk her on social media as she didn’t add me. Except to Facebook, which is for old people, as all young people know. Getting over my initial disappointment (I was dying to know what the four-star golf club she was working at looked like and what rooms they gave the servants), I agreed this was a good idea.

After shedding a quick tear driving back down the congested M4, I have to admit I was soon too caught up in life, work, my two other teenagers and the cat to worry too much when I heard next to nothing from her. No news is usually good news, she’s sensible (I think) and even the USA is only a flight away.

It was only when she came home and went out with friends in Cardiff until the small hours that I began worrying again.

All those months I’d had to let go and assume all was well as she crossed America with a backpack, I hadn’t really worried.

But as soon as she was back home, the mother instinct kicked in. At 4am when I hadn’t heard her key in the door after a night out in Cardiff, I was worried.

It’s not so much a case of “out of sight, out of mind” as the fact that noone can worry night and day whether or not someone on another continent has come in on time and alive.

But you can worry if they are in the same town and staying in the same house.

Maybe it’s a good thing she went to university in another city or I would have been going mad during Freshers’ Week, which is less of a week and more like two weeks of near-endless partying and craziness.

It’s no use suggesting to your fresher that they can always pretend to be drinking shorts while nursing a neat tonic water – they are bound to overdo it at some point. And it’s always easier to hear about it afterwards, when they are safe and recovered, than know about it in all the ghastly detail at the time.

Sadly, their own social media may be a lifetime reminder of the nights they may prefer to forget, even if they manage to keep their parents from seeing the evidence in all its glory.

So as my second prepares to head off on a gap year and my third begins her third year at university, I need to remember what I did before I had children. Their younger brother has just started sixth form, which gives me two years to get things organised and get a life, but I know how fast two years can go. Watching me flick through brochures for evening classes dropped through the door from a local college, the oldest wonders whether I’ll need to plan ahead at all. Packing a few last essentials before she heads off for what will be her third “Freshers’ Week”, she points out she may return just as her younger brother is leaving.

We’ve seen our neighbour’s son leave and return, plus a wife and child.

I’m not sure I am too keen on this just yet, much as I love my children and their company.

“Have you looked at the prospectuses for post-grad study?” I ask. It turns out that she has. “Could I still go to Freshers’ Week as a postgrad though?” she wonders.

If she does, by that time, we may have worked out whether or not it saves money to buy the Freshers’ Week wristband. Three years in and we’re still not sure.