Parents Need to Leave Their College Kids Alone

Let them make their dumb mistakes.

I have been in Minneapolis since Wednesday, at the Big Ten Tournament with my son William. Minneapolis is a great American city, vastly underrated and underappreciated by anyone who has never been there; it’s a city with a vast indoor walkway system, a rich cultural history, sports teams with dedicated fanbases who all (hockey and soccer excepted) play right in the downtown area, and a rich music history that runs from Bob Dylan to Prince to today, where the great First Avenue rock arena, just caddy corner to the Target Center, hosts an endless parade of fantastic bands. This month alone featured Jenny Lewis, Cat Power, Jason Isbell, Aimee Mann, Futurebirds, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, Bully, KMFDM and Sleater-Kinney. There is a little part of me that dreams of getting an apartment downtown here and just going to Timberwolves and Twins games and rock shows every night. I will forever love the Mary Tyler Moore statue downtown. Here is William posing in front of a statue of a woman he does not know representing a television phenomenon he will never understand.

This is my fourth trip to Minneapolis. I covered the MLB All-Star Game here in 2014 — the famous Derek Jeter “pipe shot” game — and the Super Bowl in 2019. But the first time I came here was in college. It was 1995. The Associated College Press Association was hosting its annual convention in Minneapolis that year, and, as the managing editor of the Daily Illini, I went with several of my student colleagues, including my friend Mike Cetera, who was editor-in-chief of the DI and who, if any of you have read Are We Winning?, is the Cubs fan friend I went with my father to the Cardinals-Cubs game I write about in that book. It was, for all intents and purposes, my first-ever business trip.

We chartered — a student newspaper could charter a small flight back then — a flight out of Willard Airport straight to Minneapolis; all I brought with me was a Cardinals backpack. Other than a flight I had taken with my grandparents to Florida when I was eight years old, this was the first time I had ever been on an airplane…