Your experience as a uni student - relationship with family

[MyOtherProfile]

I've seen so many posts on here and on Facebook about heartbreak taking YP to uni. We just took our eldest too but while we miss them I'm not so emotional about it - I know they will be home mid term and again for Christmas. I don't feel like our family is "dissolving". Plus I still send a daily hello and get something back online so far.

It made me wonder what other people's experience was as a student. I wasn't very close to my parents but still came home mid term and every holiday, and as an adult once I had children we had much more involvement with our parents.

I'm going to attempt a poll but I'm wondering if any of us felt our family changed so significantly once we went to uni.

I didn't go to university, but did leave home for a job opportunity. No mobiles. Once a week calls. I was a bit difficult tbh, so I think they were fine with me being 100 miles away. They did visit some weekends.

Ds has gone to uni. I was just super proud of him and still am. He messages once or twice a week, mainly pictures of food which looks like incinerated roadkill., although getting recognisable now.

I haven't cried tbh. Should I? He is making his own way, as he must. I am always here, he knows that. Its tough sometimes as he is occasionally homesick, and much as I'd like to say ' come home darling' I say ' oh dear. Well, you'll be back soon! Message someone to go and do something'

I was desperate to leave home. Family life was dysfunctional. Parents did split soon after.

If I hadn't got to uni I'd had found some other way of leaving home. A job with accommodation, for example.

I wasn't brought to my uni city (4 hours away). A neighbour happened to be going there at the same time so me and my bags were put in his van and off we went. This was 1995 though and I was a pretty independent 17 year old.

I did stay with a relative for the first two years of uni and went home very often. I did not cope well with the first year of college, failed and had to repeat. After I moved out of there, I went home less as I was working weekends. I spoke to home maybe once a week.

It helped that we were raised to leave as we lived in a very rural area with not much work. I did not feel I had the option to give up and go home so I powered through. But looking back now, I do feel for my younger self. The first couple of years were very difficult.

@Beesandhoney123 I haven't cried either, and I would probably say the same kind of thing to my DC on the phone. Building resilience and all that.

I think my experience of going too uni in the early 90s is probably quite unusual in regards to family relationships. My father died about 2 weeks before I was due to go. So I went to his funeral and 2 days later me, mum and my 2 younger siblings were in a train with me and my belongings to go to my northern uni. We were all rather shell shocked. I spent my first year and my entire student loan (which was a top up to a small grant at that time) drinking to forget. I sent letters and called home regularly from a phone box of course. I was not emotionally close to my family in a usual way as we are all a bit stunted in that way and lacked the ability to be properly emotionally supportive - many diagnoses later it is clear there is a lot of ND in my family which explains a lot! I was incredibly immature but also pretty resilient or I thought I was, looking back I relied on losing myself in the local indie music scene and drinking too much. I really enjoyed my course. I made friends but am not really in touch with them now.

I have a DD a uni now a second year I know so much more about her life than I ever shared with my mum. My kids are much closer to me than I am to my mum. I was engaged in some risky behaviour that would have horrified her and I think 80/90s kids could live a much more unobserved life it is so different now. I really understand the phrase "the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there"