Facebook groups for parents of college students on the rise
Jenny Tananbaum was at home in New Jersey one Saturday morning last September when she noticed a flurry of activity in the Facebook group she had joined for parents of students at American University in Washington, D.C., where her son was a freshman. Fire alarms were sounding in the dorms, according to posts from anxious parents.
Tananbaum messaged her son. “You okay?”
No response.
“I hope you’re outside,” she nudged.
More than 30 minutes ticked by before Tananbaum knew her son was fine; he just hadn’t been checking his phone. “When he wrote back, he said: ‘I’m on the quad where I’m supposed to be,’ ” she said. “He was like, ‘You can stop now.’ ”
The fire was real, but Tananbaum is skeptical about whether there was much point in getting sucked into the drama unfolding post by post, from the firetrucks’ arrival to the moment students were permitted back into the dorms.
“When I went to college, we had a lot of fire alarms in my dorm, and my parents didn’t know about them and I was fine and they were fine,” she said.
Tananbaum sees the Facebook group as a “curse and a blessing”: useful for advice for move-in day and for local recommendations, like when her son injured a finger and needed an orthopedist.
It’s also reassuring to read a range of emotions, she said, on whether parents miss their children terribly or worry because they’re homesick. “It’s nice to know that whatever you or your kids are feeling, someone else is feeling the same way,” Tananbaum said.
Still, it sometimes feels as if she’s getting too much information. “These groups make it very easy for parents to get involved,” she said. “I think, ‘Do we really need to know any of this?’ ”
Whether they are an inevitable sign of hyperconnected times or something closer to next-level helicopter parenting, Facebook groups for parents of college students are on the rise. So far in 2019, more than 200,000 people have joined university parent groups on Facebook in the United States, a 50 percent jump from this time last year, according to Leonard Lam, a company spokesman.
The groups, usually created by a parent and without university involvement, are a gathering spot for the parents or guardians of a particular school’s students. There are also groups arranged by class year, student major or other interests, like “Parents of College Athletes,” “Moms of an ‘Only Child’ Away at College” and “It’s All Greek to Me! Parents of College Greeks.”
Elin Hilderbrand, the novelist, joined the University of South Carolina’s parent Facebook group last year, after her son enrolled. “I had to Google ‘DS’ and ‘DD,’ ” Hilderbrand said. “I thought it was a Southern thing.” (DS is shorthand for darling son, DD is darling daughter.)
From her home in Nantucket, Mass. — also the setting for several of her beachy romance novels — Hilderbrand was transfixed by posts about the intense world of sorority rush at the university, where first-year female students arrive a week before the school year begins to advance through elimination rounds in hopes of a bid.
“I’m fascinated by sorority rush. It sounds brutal …. The girls seem to have it much harder?” Hilderbrand posted.
Responses poured in, and Hilderbrand couldn’t stop reading. “There were literally hundreds of stories about the way the girls have to get up at 6 in the morning and get their hose on,” she said. “There were mothers on there who were completely heartbroken — ‘My daughter was a legacy and she didn’t get in and her best friend and her roommate got in.’ Every comment was a novel, and it was breaking my heart.”