5 Healthy Ways to Let Go When Your Child Leaves for College

The older I get, the more younger moms ask me for advice. I get it- my girls are phenomenal people. But anything good in or from my life is all because of Jesus. If you’re looking for professional answers, guaranteed next steps, or theological profundity, you will not find that here. As I got ready to send my oldest daughter off to college, I felt the walls crashing down. The inside of my mind and emotions felt like footage of an earthquake toppling buildings. No defense mechanism or method of preparedness, no prayers, no matter how powerful, could shield me from the reality of separating from her. This is the farthest apart we have ever been for the longest amount of time in her entire life. As I flew my daughter thousands of miles from our small hometown, I read this…“It takes trust to let go, to cease striving.” (“What Grows in Weary Lands,” by Tish Harrison Warren.)How Do You Let Go When Your Child Leaves for College?You let go when your child leaves for college by trusting the foundation God has built, giving them room to grow, honoring your emotions, staying connected in healthy ways, and clinging to Christ for your own strength. My friends checked in on me, encouraged me, and reminded me that I was strong. Any strength I appear to have is infused from the Holy Spirit. If you know God, you know He meets us where we are at. He is faithful to uphold his promise that if we seek Him with all our hearts, we will find Him. In Him, we find comfort and refuge when things get hard and feel heavy. I found Him, and that comfort and refuge throughout my daily quiet time as the days with my daughter grew shorter, and I began praying pieces of particular verses from the Book of Psalms.May the meditation of my heart, the words from my mouth, and all my thoughts be pleasing to you, my Rock, Redeemer, Salvation, Savior, and Refuge, in whom I find protection, a safe place where no enemy can find me. All victory and honor, glory and grace, are yours, my Sun and my Shield, in whom I trust at all times, and pour my heart out to. You withhold no good thing from those who do what is right.This prayer kept me from unraveling completely as my girl said goodbye to her friends, extended family, best friend, sister, then her dad and me. He upheld me with just enough strength to collapse into Him as my insides folded like a house of cards. I felt the crumbling coming a week before that flight lifted off the ground, the back of her sweet curly head craned to look out the window as if she was still five years old on her first plane ride. We shared a highlighter on the flight there, my oldest daughter and I, marking our books – she adding notes to a Dickens classic to her photographic memory, and I in my struggle to pay attention to what I was reading about Psalm 46:1. “Be still and know that I am God: I will be exalted about the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” These five healthy ways to let go when your child leaves for college come from 47 years of life, 18 years of motherhood, two daughters I love deeply, and the daily practice of leaning on Jesus for survival. The pain and difficulty of the moment I am writing this in testify to that supernatural leaning. The way we walk through hard things can be a badge of thriving, or it can take us out at the knees. I learned a lot about resilience as I walked through letting her go. The word popped up everywhere, from the book I picked up on the plane, to my daily quiet time, throughout informative sessions for parents, and even the university president’s welcome to the incoming freshman class of 2030.I’m not a theologian, but getting things right is important to me. Instead of searching for Scriptures on this topic, I paid attention to the ones God gave me as I dropped off my girl this week, across the country, and went back home. These are simply the Scriptures that popped up in the pages of the devotional book I ripped the travel dates out of to take with me on the journey. The only reason I’m writing this summary at all is due to a canceled flight. Letting go of a college child does not mean loving them less. It means trusting that the same God who helped you raise them will continue to lead, protect, comfort, and grow them when you are no longer close enough to manage every moment.Photo Credit: ©Unsplash/Peter Amende