I think when they were younger it made my job easier. They were the first to be able to buckle their own seat belts. They were never afraid to be home alone after school in middle school. They never feared alienating friends in high school, so I never worried about the peer pressure. Now the hard part.
At 17 my daughter Maddy will be embarking on her first solo trip to Europe. She will be visiting our foreign exchange daughter Natalie who just returned home. Maddy will have to go through customs in Amsterdam, and get her connecting flight to Hamburg all on her own. Her cell phone won't work there and she'll have no way to contact me or Natalie if she misses her flight. Ugh, this is the kind of thing that makes me lose sleep. She needs to return to school for her senior year this fall with a list of colleges to which she'd like to apply. She's looking at colleges through out the U.S. including Arkansas, North Carolina and much more. Michigan has many good schools, certainly Ohio is full of them, but she has no doubts regarding her ability to live that far away, so why do I. While I envy her fearlessness, it creates anxiety for me.
At 20 my daughter Emily is preparing for a 6 month adventure in Botswana. She will travel alone to the University of Botswana to study. We recently went to the travel clinic to get the necessary shots. Talk about anxiety! Day time mosquitos have dengue something, night time mosquitos have malaria, mammals have rabies; yellow fever, typhoid, etc... She'll be the first woman to go from K-college and there are special concerns related to that. I know that this will be a wonderful experience for her and wish that I had been so brave at her age, heck wish that I was that brave at my age.
I guess this is a lesson on "you better watch what you wish for".
If you want her to have a phone you can rent a Piccell phone for a limited amount of time for what I would consider fairly reasonable. That's what we did for Davis, just so we could touch base when he when to Hungary last fall.
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