I’ve made this call twice, in two very different keys. Once to a daughter who lived four buildings from her first class of the day. Once to two sons who each spent that first semester driving in, sitting through lectures, then driving home before dinner. Same worry on my end. Almost nothing else the same.
Three weeks in, you call. “How are your classes going?”
“Fine.” Maybe: “Busy.” You wait. Nothing else comes.
That question doesn’t work, and not because your student is hiding something. They’re not. They genuinely don’t have language yet for what’s wrong, because nothing dramatic has gone wrong. There’s no crisis to report. There’s only a quiet distance opening between them and a place nobody taught either of you how to read. And if your student is commuting rather than living there, that distance opens differently than most parenting advice seems to assume.
Try this instead of a question, before your next call.
Picture their actual day on that campus, start to finish. Not the syllabus version. The real one. When do they arrive. When do they leave. Now ask yourself: how much of that day happens outside a classroom?
If your student lives there, the honest answer is probably “plenty,” and that’s exactly what can fool you. A residential student can be surrounded by activity all semester and still be attached to none of it. Still be someone who eats alone, who’s walked past the same building forty times with no reason to ever walk in.
If your student commutes, and a large share of students at extended campuses and community colleges do — many of them the first in their family to attend at all — the honest answer is often close to zero. Arrive ten minutes before the first class. Leave the second the last one ends. A whole semester can pass inside a parking lot and a lecture hall, with the rest of the campus never entered once. That’s not a character flaw. Nothing about the day was built to include anything else, and the drive home pulls the moment class lets out.
So the question underneath your question has to bend around which of those is true. For the one living there, ask what they’ve walked into on purpose: a name they know, a door they’ve actually knocked on, not just a building they pass. For the one commuting, ask something smaller and stranger. Is there anything at all they’ve stayed for that the syllabus didn’t require?
Don’t ask how the classes are going. Ask about the twenty minutes on either side of them, and whether there’s ever anything in there at all.
See what comes back.