After 12th please send your child away from home – preferably a hostel

If you have a child in 12th std, who will go to college this year, please do him/her a favor and send him/her out of the home. Preferably to a hostel. Preferably to a different city.

By making your child stay at home after 12th, you’re just holding him/her back. The only reason to keep them home is if you cannot afford a hostel.

The greatest increase in maturity, exposure, worldliness, and in general the skills needed to make it in the real world, happen when the child starts staying away from the parents. The values and culture of the parents are important for the child when the child is a child, but at the age of 17, it is time to let them experience what other people think like, that there can be thought processes that are different from their parents’ but are equally valid.

I would like to state here strongly that there is huge value in staying away from home. Trust me. Or don’t – instead take the word of Child Psychiatrist Dr. Bhooshan Shukla, who recently said this:

One sincere advice to students finishing their 12th std from Pune.

If you think you are any good, think beyond Pune. get out of this city and parental home and explore world.

Getting ALL of your educatuon in one city, entire life in one locality with same bunch of friends is a serious HANDICAP.

Globalization will chew you up, spit out the bones and you wont even know it, happily sipping coffee at Vaishali and eating Sabudana wada.

Wake up and run away….save your youth and your life.

Source

I’ve been preaching this to my friends/family for the last 15 years, and have heard a number of excuses from them as to why they don’t want to send their child away from home. Here is a sampler of those, and why I believe they’re wrong:

“But the hostels are so dirty!”

It’s the parents who’re often more squeamish than the children about such things. In any case, children adjust pretty quickly, especially when everybody else around them is in the same situation. And, let them go through a little hardship, a little inconvenience. It builds character.

And if you really, really want your child to be a 5-star-and-AC-only kind of a person, then go ahead the set them up with a posh apartment near college – you’ll find enough other children in a similar situation who’d be willing to share the rent. That’s still better than staying at home. (Although, I would still say that staying in a hostel is far better.)

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“What will s/he eat? The food there is so bad!”

Are you kidding me?! You’ll withhold important personal growth from your child because s/he is too delicate to eat the same kind of food that millions of other kids eat? Please raise more resilient children.

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“It’s so much cheaper if s/he stays at home”

It’s so much cheaper if s/he doesn’t get an education, but you don’t want that, right? Like I said right in the beginning, if you really can’t afford it financially, then staying at home is perfectly acceptable. But in many cases, this is not true. And the “so much cheaper” argument is simply a different way of saying that you don’t really see how much value is added by staying away from home.

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“If it was a boy, I would consider it. But for a girl in a big city, I don’t know…”

Instead of protecting your daughter from the outside world and keeping her safely ensconced at home, you’re better off teaching her the basics of how to take care of herself, avoid shady situations, shady places, shady friends, and to take good decisions.

Also, most parents won’t say this to me directly, but I know that in some cases, clearly there is a concern that the newfound freedom will allow the girl to indulge in “inappropriate” behavior. The answer to this is:

1. Accept the fact that times have changed, and this generation’s values are going to be very different from yours’. Trying to impose your values on your child will actually cause more problems than the “inappropriate” behavior itself will cause.
2. Trust your daughter. You’ve taught her values for 17 years, and you have to hope that they’ve taken root. It is now out of your hands. If she’s gotten the right values, sending her to live by herself isn’t going to cause any problems. And if she has not, then keeping her at home isn’t really going to prevent the problems.

And, by the way, your child is almost guaranteed to have a girlfriend/boyfriend, whether you know about it or not, whether you like it or not, and whether s/he ultimately goes in for an arranged marriage or not. Just accept this fact, and things will be easier for everyone concerned.

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And the worst mistake (which I’ve seen parents make) is to choose a not-so-good college near home, instead of a good college that’s away from home. That’s a double whammy – denying the child good formal education (academics & reputation & connections of a good college), and good informal education (staying away from homw).

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Side note: If your child is considering engineering, and is confused about which branch/college, this older article I wrote might help