Delaying the separation anxiety: Mom and Dad move to college

The latest trend in helicopter parenting has arrived.

Lori Osterberg and her husband recently moved from Denver to Portland, Ore., to live with their daughter while she attends college.

The couple considered moving just for the adventure, but ultimately decided their adventure would be to house and support their daughter as she pursues her degree.

“We’re calling it our gap year,” Osterberg said. “We’re here for now, with the possibility of extending throughout her college career. We’re taking it one year at a time.”

And Osterberg is not alone. Real estate firm Coldwell Banker first noticed the trend of “parent moves” in 2008 while compiling its annual College Home Price Comparison Index, which ranks average home prices in more than 300 college towns. Parents opt for rentals as well as purchasing new, primary residences. Second homes also are a popular option, appealing to parents not only as landing pads for themselves and their children, but also to avoid limited hotel availability for popular campus activities like college sporting events.

Knoxville, Tenn., real estate agent Regina Santore recently helped a family relocate from one side of the state to the other in order to be with their freshman daughter at the University of Tennessee.

“They felt very strongly they did not want their daughter living on campus,” Santore said. “They felt like she would have a better study environment if she were with them. She didn’t seem to have any problem with it.”

Traditionally, parents sending children off to college has represented an epic coming-of-age milestone. Families arrive on campus packed into SUV’s and rented trucks overflowing with furniture and other necessities. Colleges strategically separate parents from their students during orientation, encouraging the impending separation.

“When I was going to college in 1975 … my mother helped me unload into the dorm room, put a note on the door saying this is the way we wash our clothes,” Jonathan Gibralter told The Washington Post. “I didn’t find out until years later that she cried all the way home because she realized I was going to be independent.” Gibralter is president of Frostburg State University and regularly fields calls from parents attempting to resolve issues their children experience at the university, ranging from serious academic problems to mundane arguments with roommates.

While parents seem to think staying close to their children will help them, studies suggest it might make it harder for them to grow up.

A recent study in the journal Education + Training revealed separation during college can foster a healthy, natural step of growth in a young person. According to the study, parental over-involvement in college-age students’ lives actually inhibits natural maturing, causing children to linger in over-dependence on their parents.

“This is one of the first studies to empirically examine the antecedents and outcomes associated with over-parenting with young adults who are nearing the completion of their college degree,” wrote the study authors, two professors from California State University Fresno. “An important area for this research was identifying the potential work-related behavior of employees who were raised by helicopter parents.”

And not all students are overjoyed at the prospect of bringing mom and dad along for the ride.

“I was talking to this girl and asked how her parents were doing about her leaving,” Sheila Baker Gujral, an alumni interviewer for Georgetown University, said. “She said, ‘They don’t mind living on the East Coast or the West Coast, so I’m applying to those places.’ I was, like, ‘Do you mean to tell me they’re going to move wherever you go to school’ and she said, ‘Yeah.’ She didn't look entirely thrilled about it.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.