By Faith Hill

If you were a college student in America a few decades back, chances are you engaged in a semi-regular ritual: You’d trudge to the nearest campus payphone, drop in some coins, and call your parents. That image kept cropping up as I reported this story. Susan Matt, a Weber State University historian, recalled walking to the student-lounge phone once a week; even if she’d had the pocket money, her parents wouldn’t have wanted to hear from her any more than that, she told me: “You were supposed to be becoming independent.” Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychologist and the author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”

If you were a college student in America a few decades back, chances are you engaged in a semi-regular ritual: You’d trudge to the nearest campus payphone, drop in some coins, and call your parents. That image kept cropping up as I reported this story. Susan Matt, a Weber State University historian, recalled walking to the student-lounge phone once a week; even if she’d had the pocket money, her parents wouldn’t have wanted to hear from her any more than that, she told me: “You were supposed to be becoming independent.” Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychologist and the

author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”

author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”

author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”

author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”

author of You and Your Adult Child: How to Grow Together in Challenging Times, remembers “a perfunctory 10-minute phone call” every Sunday afternoon. “The idea that I would have been in touch with my parents five times a day,” he told me, “would have been bizarre.”