Missing home
The Associated Press reports that intense homesickness in young can interfere with normal activities:
DETROIT – Janise Stone spent her first semester in college dreaming of home – literally.
Ms. Stone, 18, would get up in the morning and grudgingly attend classes at Paine College in Augusta, Ga. But the minute she returned to her dorm, she curled up and thought of family in Indianapolis as she slept the day away.
"I was so depressed," Ms. Stone said recently. "I just kept thinking that if I slept through it, I'd eventually get back home."
She isn't alone.
Almost everyone experiences occasional homesickness, but many young people suffer from a particularly intense form that interferes with normal activities, according to a new study by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The report in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics offers tips to physicians for recognizing risk factors among patients who are leaving home for the first time.
"Leaving home is a universal developmental milestone," said Dr. Edward Walton, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. "Our goal is for them not to lose time and experience in the adjusting."
Dr. Walton wrote the study with Christopher Thurber, staff psychologist at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
About 95 percent of young people say they miss something about home the first time they are away, Mr. Thurber said. Most of them simply miss their Xbox or their mother's cooking.
But a smaller percentage – about one in 14 – suffer from what Mr. Thurber calls "intense homesickness."
"They're not eating or sleeping right, not playing with others," he said. "Or they have an intense preoccupation with home."
Those behaviors and attitudes can "seriously impair" experiences while away at camp, school, college or the hospital, he said.
Ms. Stone's first college experience could not be going worse. The once straight-A student isn't eating right and is failing many of her honors classes.
According to Mr. Thurber's and Dr. Walton's research, physicians could have predicted her reaction.
Ms. Stone had never spent a night away from home, not even with relatives. Other warning signs include low expectations and little control over the situation.
The study outlines how to ease children into a separation, including giving them practice time away from home; never offering to pick them up before the separation is to end; and involving them in each aspect of the decision.
Ms. Stone said she wishes more resources were available to her before she left for college. As it is, she shudders at the thought of returning to school. "Maybe if I would have been prepared I wouldn't be where I am now," she said.