Family Expects This Woman To Delay College To Help With Her Sister's Baby

Starting college marks a new beginning; often somewhere far from home. And despite being scary sometimes, it can also be very exciting.

Redditor u/Abject_Panda_27 was looking forward to starting her college experience away from home. However, she was met with pressure from her family members, who weren’t happy about her leaving her single-mother twin sister. Their reactions made the OP wonder if she was a jerk for wanting to move out of state.

Starting college is a significant moment in one’s life as it’s often followed by a time of change and new exciting experiences. For one reason or another, quite a few students decide to seek education further from home, whether it’s a different state or a different country altogether. According to HireAHelper’s College Move Index, roughly 40% of students move for college; as many as one-fifth of them move out of state (at least that’s how many did in 2021).

Data suggests that the states that see the largest number of local students leaving are generally smaller and less populated; they typically have fewer colleges and universities for them to enroll in. The leading states when it comes to the highest share of students leaving for another state are the District of Columbia (where 85% of students leave), New Hampshire (53%), and Minnesota (51%).

States on the other end of the list with the majority of students staying to get their education locally include Utah (with 92% of students staying), Arizona and California (88%), and Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida (all roughly at 87%), among others. (Back in 2016, The New York Times covered student migration in great detail, sharing information about each state.)

The College Move Index also determined which schools in the country arguably had the strongest “pull” for students in the US. Among them, Harvard University took the lead, followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University, and Columbia University respectively.

There are numerous reasons for young individuals to move out of their parents' place, from getting accepted into their dream college far, far away to simply seeking a change of environment. But research suggests that those willing to take the plunge have to weigh quite a few significant factors, with or without college in the picture. Some of the main ones include the person’s resources, the state of the housing market, factors underlying leaving home to live with a partner or on their own, and opportunities offered by the new location.

The decision to move out of the parents’ home and leave the family can be met with varying reactions that depend on many factors, such as family dynamics or people’s attachment styles, just to name a couple. But quite often, it can become the cause of conflict among household members.

Psychotherapist and psychoanalyst F. Diane Barth suggested that things can get tense around the house right before the child leaves for college. In a piece for Psychology Today, she pointed out that when both the parents and the child feel sad and vulnerable about the upcoming separation, seemingly anything they say or do can provoke a fight.

She also referred to the idea that fighting with parents can be an adolescent’s way of differentiating themselves from them and practicing to put their ideas and thoughts into action. “So these difficult conflicts can be adaptive, even though they can also be draining,” Barth explained.

In the OP’s situation, the main cause of arguments in the family was seemingly leaving her twin sister and her little daughter. However, people in the comments suggested that the redditor shouldn’t hold herself back because of them and encouraged her to embark on the new journey of starting college.