The Problem of Anxious Parents, Laid Bare in a Dorm Room

Like many mental health professionals and academics in the field of psychology, I was struck by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's latest report on the anxious, stressed state of American parents, a topic that hasn't typically gotten as much discussion in research circles as it has in pop culture. Ironically, the same day that several media outlets called upon me to discuss those findings, my husband and I were due to drive our son 400 miles away to begin his first year at college, and it just so happened that our youngest daughter that very same night needed a visit to the ER for a potentially broken ankle. I tried to squeeze in all the media spots I could, but at some point, as parenting and my job collided, my head swirling with a transition that had been 18 years in the making, along with the logistical difficulties of how to get my daughter the care she needed while making sure my son didn't miss his long-awaited move-in time—I had to make a difficult choice, take a breath, and step back. My work, which at that moment was supposed to involve spreading the word about stressed parents, needed to take a back seat to the duties I had as a stressed parent.

The irony was not lost on me.

Parents, Dr. Murthy warns, are in a state of stress so significant that it is affecting not only their own mental health but that of their children. Even if I don't count myself, I don't have to look very far to see it. And when it comes to parental pressures, social media, comparison culture, perfectionism, and consumerism, there are few places that exhibit this potentially toxic mix more so than Facebook groups devoted to decorating one's child's dorm room as they go away to college.

As a Mom of one of those "children" myself, I was first exposed to these groups this past spring—they are hard to escape once social media algorithms (or your friends with social media algorithms!) know that you have a graduating senior. Admittedly, I first thought they were satire... or artificial intelligence. In Facebook's "Dorm Room Mamas," for instance, which is hundreds of thousands of parents strong, pictures of rooms more beautiful than any I have ever lived in during my four-plus decades on this Earth are posted seemingly a mile a minute. “Dorm rooms” that bear no actual resemblance to dorm rooms abound — cinderblock walls disguised with velvet-tufted headboards, standard-issue institutional desks that are now covered in glass and white drapery, artfully arranged books that are not texts to be studied for midterms but rather props never to be opened, but instead photographed as decor. There are dorm room beds with nine different curated linens, every fluffy layer meant to disguise the drudgery of the boring, college-issued Twin XL.

On the one hand, it seems sweet. For parents with a knack for interior design, what better gift to give your kid than a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing nest as they undergo the biggest transition of their lives so far? But it doesn’t take long to detect something more insidious. After all, these spaces aren’t private love letters to their kids — these are carefully curated and photo-edited ideals posted for every other parent to see and live up to. For every parent who earnestly talks about their hopes for their child as they show off their décor, hoping to connect with others in their vulnerability, acknowledging that maybe the pain of letting go made them get a little too perfectionistic with the throw pillows, there are more who seem to not even involve the student at all — complaining about the limited space they themselves had to work with, or talking about the decorating process purely as one to live up to in terms of other parents, as if their kids were just part of the décor.

When we spend thousands of dollars creating the perfect room that we can show off for thousands of strangers, a room we won't even spend a night in, who are we really doing it for, and why?

The past several years of data have of course shown that adolescents and young adults appear to be growing more anxious as well. Might our well-meaning attempts to have our kids have the most beautiful, comfortable space actually be contributing to both parental and adolescent anxiety? By going out of our way to have our student’s dorm rooms be the prettiest and most luxurious, are we simultaneously stressing ourselves out with perfectionistic expectations and also — ironically — removing a little bit of the grittiness that can build resilience in our children? By perfectly curating our children’s experience, I believe we are creating a double-whammy of adding dozens of hours of extra work and hundreds of dollars in extra expense to a parenting role that is already beyond demanding, while ensuring that our kids are getting used to a standard that says that their environments always need to be optimized and as comfortable as possible. And this standard makes it even harder for our children to deal with discomfort.

I feel for any parent just hoping to have their child’s transition to college be as positive as possible: I’m there myself. And the community that can be built by groups of people, whether online or in person, going through the same heart-rending life transition can be a powerful healer and a profound experience. But groups devoted to showing off perfectly optimized spaces for a rite of passage that used to be defined by a very lack of luxury, just seem to raise the pressures for everyone. In fact, perfect environments aren’t always positive for the people growing accustomed to them, and the demands to attain those perfect environments are often a significant negative. I have a nagging suspicion that kids and parents would both be better off if we allowed ourselves to put our feet up and share a laugh about the formative experience of the dingy, bland dorm room — home to spiders, cinder blocks, and not a whole lot else. After all, a dorm room was never meant to be the main attraction in a photo. It's supposed to be the backdrop to the messy but beautiful growth that happens when newly hatched adults push themselves outside of their comfort zone, free to choose a path that isn't carefully choreographed by their parents.