Considering Your Child’s Contribution
You need to think about how much you want your child to contribute to the financial aspects of her education. If you are going to handle the whole tuition cost, make sure that you nonetheless provide parameters that will eventually help your child achieve financial independence. One of the biggest mistakes a parent can make is to do everything for a child, and then throw her out of the nest without any experience of financial responsibility. That is a sure way to maintain a dependent child for a lot longer than you would ever expect. You need to start treating your college-age child as a maturing young adult, even if you are going to take care of most of her needs during school.
Should Your Child Get a Job?
There are many compelling reasons for not expecting a child to pay for school or hold a job during college. An education has value, and some children are unable to balance schoolwork and employment. You do not want to diminish your child’s ability to concentrate on learning. Colleges typically assume that students concentrate most, if not all, their energies on their class work and on building a rewarding extracurricular life. On the other hand, all schools assume that there will be some student contribution to tuition costs. This contribution is usually assumed to come from seasonal and summer employment. This is not a bad thing: You definitely want your children to understand how much work goes into earning a dollar. And you want to give them an object lesson that they do not want to be limited to the types of jobs available to people without an education. Keep in mind that many children do succeed in putting themselves through college. Juggling work and school is highly stressful, but it builds character. There is a downside to this, however: Some children who carry too heavy a burden of responsibility at too young an age may later need to cut loose to make up for the fun they think they might have missed.
