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<\/a>These days, in an effort to help students develop more individual self-reliance, some colleges have developed \u201cParting Ceremonies,\u201d designed to establish a decisive separation from their parents.\u00a0At Morehouse College, the ceremony ends with the incoming freshmen marching through the campus gates, which then swing closed, shutting all parents outside. Other educational institutions have created formal \u201chit the road\u201d departure rituals designed to hustle parents off campus and encourage students to start organizing their own lives. College counseling centers advise students to limit the time they spend thinking of home or talking with family and to combat unproductive feelings of homesickness by getting involved in new activities and making new friends.<\/p>\n
Yet to the consternation of many, it is hard to break young people of their desire to \u201ccall home\u201d-or actually return there. A recent study found that college students at Middlebury and University of Michigan were in touch with their parents an average of 13 times each week. One New York Times columnist lamented that this \u201calarmingly frequent\u201d contact \u201csignificantly reduces independence.\u201d\u00a0 Others have described the cell phone as \u201cthe world\u2019s longest umbilical cord,\u201d inhibiting the ability of young people to stand on their own two feet.<\/p>\n
According to social media expert Sherry Turkle, Director of MIT\u2019s Initiative on Technology and Self, many young people today grow up \u201cwith the idea that they don\u2019t have to separate from their parents,\u201d a process that 20th century psychologists saw as an essential part of maturation. \u201cSomething has become the norm that was [once] considered pathological.\u201d<\/p>\n A look back at the history of homesickness, however, suggests that earlier generations had just as difficult a time leaving home as do modern Americans. But in the nineteenth century, homesickness was not seen as a symptom of poor adjustment or psychological imbalance. It was considered a serious medical condition that might strike any person who was separated from home and family. According to physicians of the era, symptoms of acute homesickness, then called nostalgia, included loss of appetite, \u201cmental dejection,\u201d\u00a0 \u201dirregular action of the bowels,\u201d hysterical weeping, \u201cthrobbing of the temporal arteries,\u201d \u201cincontinence,\u201d \u201ccerebral derangement,\u201d and sometimes even death. Since love of home and mother were considered signs of a virtuous character, no shame was attached to being diagnosed with this potentially fatal condition.\u00a0 The only known cure was to send the sufferer home.<\/p>\n Of course, this was not always possible. For example, soldiers who went off to war could not be sent home when they came down with a bout of nostalgia. So military officials often prohibited army bands from playing \u201cHome, Sweet Home,\u201d for fear it might touch off an epidemic of homesickness in the ranks. Despite such precautions, during the Civil War doctors diagnosed 5000 Union soldiers with serious clinical cases of nostalgia, and determined that 74 men had died from it.<\/p>\n Perhaps it is true that many young Americans today are too dependent on their parents. But a look back at the history of homesickness suggests that, long before e-mail and the cell phone, earlier generations also had a hard time leaving home and parents behind. Then, however, instead of blaming parents for not sufficiently preparing their children for independence, traditional American culture encouraged such interdependence between the generations.<\/p>\n![\"In](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/files\/2014\/08\/1906-homesick-letter.jpg\")
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