Homesickness isn’t really about ‘home’

(CNN) — There was nothing but excitement for Keila Pena-Hernandez when she first stepped onto the grounds of the University of Missouri.

New school. New city. A new phase of her life. “It’s just like wow, wow, wow! I was just excited that I’m in new surroundings,” she said.

By the third week, the novelty of her new surroundings had worn off. The then 27-year-old health informatics doctoral student from Puerto Rico found herself lying on her bed after classes with the lights turned off and gazing out the window into the sky. All she could think of were the faces of friends and family.

“I started feeling homesick,” she recalled. “This is nice, but this is not really home. The gym is awesome, but I didn’t know anyone here.”

This month, as thousands of freshmen and graduate students flock to colleges to begin a new academic year, many will be leaving home, some for the first time.

As routines are replaced with new social and academic pressures, and home by a dormitory full of strangers, homesickness — the longing ache for the familiar, friends or grandma’s cooking — sets in. Pena-Hernandez knows all about that; she’s felt it since she left home in 2004.

Homesickness is nothing new. It is mentioned in the Bible’s Old Testament book of Exodus and Homer’s “Odyssey,” and happens to just about anyone away from home — athletes and actors alike. (”Twilight” star Robert Pattinson reportedly told a U.K. magazine he misses home badly.)

Even so, only lately has there emerged a clearer sense of what homesickness is — a distinct adjustment disorder with identifiable symptoms — and what causes it.

In a paper co-written by Chris Thurber and Edward Walton published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, homesickness is defined as “distress and functional impairment caused by an actual or anticipated separation from home and attachment objects such as parents.”

Those who suffer from the condition feel some form of anxiety, sadness and nervousness, and most distinctly, obsessive preoccupation with thoughts of home, Thurber said.

Pena-Hernandez craved the tropical fruits of Puerto Rico and the cool sea breeze.

“Lakes or rivers in the Midwest do not compare to the Caribbean Sea,” she said.

Also troubling was the sense that her loved ones had moved on without her.

“A lot of my friends got married, had children and I’m not part of that because I’m not physically there, so you feel like you’re losing out.”

Yet despite the way it’s coined, homesickness isn’t necessarily about home. And neither is it exactly an illness, experts said.

Instead, it stems from our instinctive need for love, protection and security — feelings and qualities usually associated with home, said Josh Klapow, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Alabama’s School of Public Health. When these qualities aren’t present in a new environment, we begin to long for them — and hence home.

“You’re not literally just missing your house. You’re missing what’s normal, what is routine, the larger sense of social space, because those are the things that help us survive,” Klapow said.

He offered another way of approaching homesickness: It’s merely an emotion that comes in waves. “Very few emotions stay with you all the time, they come and they go,” he said. But when it strikes, both children and adults often get caught off guard by it, he added.

“They think something’s terribly wrong. But it’s normal and adaptive to feel homesick for some period of time. It’s just your emotions and mind telling you you’re out of your element.”

That homesickness is a spontaneous emotion also means both adults and children will feel its effects, Thurber said.

“If you look at an 8-year-old boy or girl at summer camp, and an 18-year-old university freshman, you would see very similar symptoms,” he said. “The same would be true for a 28-year-old going to medical school in a different country.”

Thurber said he has observed few differences in the length and intensity of homesickness between males and females.

While the cloud often lifts after a few weeks, “the distress and level of impairment among some homesick persons can become extreme,” according to Thurber’s report published in 2007.

In his study of homesickness among children, about 9 percent have it so bad that “it is associated with strong feelings of anxiety and depression, maybe even clinically significant symptoms,” Thurber said.

“When homesickness is really bad, it’s hard for people to eat, sleep or interact with others. That’s terribly rare, but it does sometimes happen.”

Age can play a crucial difference in coping with homesickness.

When you’re 8, you don’t have a lot of formal operational thought nor hypothetical thinking, said Thurber, so being away a month can seem like forever. But an 18-year-old is more likely to be able to translate that into a more manageable time frame.

“You’d be making comparisons in your head: That means if I do laundry once a week I do it four times. That changes and as people’s concept of time becomes more sophisticated, so does the quality of their coping,” Thurber said.

Experience counts, too.

“It turns out, [homesickness is] the very thing that inoculates against a future bout of homesickness,” Thurber said. “By living through a difficult separation, your mind forces itself to cope.”

It’s this reason why experts advise parents against helicoptering their children out of college if they complain about homesickness.

“It’s kind of like a bailout,” said Ruperto Perez, director of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s counseling center. Students end up being robbed of picking up problem solving and time management skills.

If there’s any sort of deal parents can make, it is to agree to stop communicating — be it text messages or via e-mails — with their freshmen every five minutes.

Instead, Klapow said, parents should schedule a specific time, once a week, to contact their children. It also allows space and time for college students to make strong social connections among their peers — perceived absence of social support was a strong predictor of homesickness, according to Thurber’s report — and gain much-needed independence.

Perez said this can be crucial in this day and age in which children have become more and more reliant on their parents. “There is more of an uncertainty of how to be independent. Probably because parents have provided more for them, for a longer period,” he said.

While homesick kids at summer camp have the supervision of counselors, college students have less of that.

Colleges have been hypervigilant for signs of depression and anxiety particularly after the Virginia Tech shootings. Counseling centers such as Perez’s are taking steps to increase the awareness of the help students can turn to by promoting their services at orientation sessions and working with faculty and residential staff.

While there is still a stigma when it comes to approaching a counselor, Klapow said not doing so is as foolish as not consulting a doctor when a student is suffering from, say, stomach cramps.

“For college students, hey welcome to the big world. And the big world says, sometimes your emotions need to be dealt with,” he added.

While homesickness can be dealt with, can it be prevented?

Not quite, Thurber said, despite the title of his study, “Preventing and treating homesickness.”

“But what you’re able to do is change its intensity,” he said. Allowing teens and young adults to be active in deciding which college to go to helps.

Then there’s practice and preparation.

Practice time away from home, Thurber recommended. Parents, too, can help by working with their freshmen to learn about the new environment by visiting campuses and talking to alumni. “They increase familiarity and, thereby, reduce anxiety,” Thurber wrote.

Pena-Hernandez, who is finishing her Ph.D, makes a trip home once a year. She still misses home occasionally, but has the support from more friends and church as well.

We get homesick because “there are things that we love,” said Thurber. “It’s the byproduct of the strength of our attachment. If there were nothing in the world we were attached to, then we wouldn’t miss them when we’re away.”

FULL Published Studies:
From the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy: The Adolescent Brain:A Work in Progress (36 Pages)
From the National Council of Economic Advisers: Teens and Parents in the 21st Century (29 pages)

Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different [New York Times]
Researchers Identify Successful Weight Control Strategies for Adolescents [Journal of American Dietetic Association]
Half of Australian Parents Think Alcohol is OK for Kids Under 18 [News Limited]
Interview with Katie Douglass About Using Twilight as a Discussion Starter [Princeton's Institute for Youth Ministry]

Becoming Who They Are

Trend analysts like to point to the idea that our technology and our era are pushing kids to become their own brand. Identity formation has always been a big deal for kids—figuring out on an unconscious, unspoken level the idea of themselves they will hold on to. But now kids are being asked to describe their identity very specifically every time they fill out a profile for another social network.
Depending on the personality of the child, it can create a lot of pressure. You’ve got to pick the profile picture that will become the visual representation of your brand (until you change it again tomorrow). You’ve got to define yourself by what music, movies, and books you like—and even by those you don’t. You’re urged to be open about your religious affiliation, your school, and your sports.
Ideas of themselves that kids may have once kept hidden for a while or tried on and rejected they are now being asked to commit to sooner than later by the ever-present blinking cursor. Who are you now?
Even the circles of “friends” (Facebook) and “followers” (Twitter) you most associate with is a very conscious way of creating and refining your personal brand. For some students, the exercise becomes all consuming. Even those who make a joke out of the process are defining themselves, in a way, as being above pressure to conform to the trend (which might be a really healthy way for some kids to go).
Lately, I’ve been working through 1 Peter 1:13-21. A big idea from that passage is that Peter encourages Christians to be who they are in Christ, to live up to the new profile He’s written for those who follow him, to willingly change the very definition they carry of themselves to conform to His.
Our hope is that a few of the questions below will generate a good discussion with your student about identity issues and what it means to live up to our new identity in Jesus.

 Talking Points:

•How hard is it for you to fill out profiles about yourself for things like Facebook or other sites online?

•Is it hard for you to decide what picture to use or what to put down for your likes, dislikes, interests, etc.?

•Does it bother you to be asked to describe yourself so specifically or do you enjoy sharing yourself with people in this way?

•Are you ever tempted to be dishonest about what you really like—or what you’re really like—because you’re afraid of what someone might think about that?

•What is the point of being so open about who you really are with these sites—or anywhere, really?

•If you filled out a profile about yourself that only you would ever see, how much different would it be than one you would show to your friends, your parents, or God?

•Would a completely open profile about who you really are be different as a Christian than if you were an unbeliever?

•What would you say are the most important parts of your identity, in God’s eyes, as someone who has trusted in Jesus for your salvation?

•Would you define yourself to yourself as a child of God, as an ambassador of heaven, as someone who is holy, as a new creation, as being without blemish before God, as a prince or princess in the kingdom of God, as a priest, as a servant of Jesus, as being on a mission from God to use your influence for His glory?

•Do you know that the Bible defines every Christian as having the identity described in the last question?

•How different is that identity from the way you usually think of yourself?

•How different would our lives look if we were really trying to live like we are all of those things?

•What are things we could do as a family to choose to live up to the new version of ourselves we are in Christ? What are things we currently do that might make it harder to do that?

From: http://tinyurl.com/ParentPage3

Contents

1. Tools for Parenting Teens
2. Learn Their Lingo
3. Links to Learn From
4. A Little Encouragement…
   

1. Tools for Parenting Teens

From http://www.realworldparents.com/starters/

Talk About Praise

You likely experience praising God together with your family regularly at church. But how often do you talk about that experience? Why do we do it? Why does God care? What does it do for us and for Him?
Read More:

http://www.realworldparents.com/starters/article/talk_about_praise/

http://tinyurl.com/yk6qws3
http://tinyurl.com/yk3k7dk
http://tinyurl.com/yfgosr5
http://tinyurl.com/yj77yls
http://tinyurl.com/ybtlxeg

Also, check out this short clip from MSNBC-
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/6903341#6903341

 U Cal Berkeley’s Findings on youth internet usage:
http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/

Quik Tips Parent Newsletter

1. Tools for Parenting Teens
2. Learn Their Lingo
3. Links to Learn From
4. A Little Encouragement…And Humor
   

1. Tools for Parenting Teens

 From http://www.realworldparents.com/starters/

Redefining Success

What are you some of our deepest hopes for our children? How do we define “success” for them? Are we rooting for them to gain financial security, career satisfaction, and universal respect and devotion from their peers—or to become success…
Read More:
http://www.realworldparents.com/starters/article/redefining_success1/

2. Learn Their Lingo

Last Texter = That friend that always sends you a meaningless text after the obvious end of a text conversation, just to get the last text.

KPC = Text shorthand meaning “keep parents clueless.”

3. Links to Learn From

Up Close & Personal with Lisa T. Bergren
http://www.christianitytoday.com/momsense/2009/sepoct/upcloseandpersonal-lisatbergren.html

Study Reveals More Details About The iPhone Mom
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/study-reveals-more-details-about-behavior-of-the-iphone-mom/

“Say Aah” …and, “What’s in Your iPod?”
http://www.thesource4ym.com/youthculturewindow/article.asp?id=99

4. A Little Encouragement…And Humor

Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.
- Thomas Paine