Communicating With Parents Can Be Tricky — Especially When It Comes to Coronavirus

When a reception in Miami for the parents of current students was put on her schedule, Mary Pat McMahon, Duke University’s vice president for student affairs, figured she knew what would come up: Questions about career services. Concerns about students’ mental health. “Not a potential international pandemic,” she said.

Instead, McMahon found herself fielding questions about coronavirus at the event last week: What advice was Duke giving students about spring-break travel? Were administrators planning ahead for the disease’s potential impact on summertime research and study abroad? How would the university handle it if — God forbid — their child’s roommate fell ill?

In this era of hands-on, helicopter parenting, the coronavirus outbreak has unleashed a rash of phone calls and emails from anxious families. As colleges scramble to brief their campus communities about swiftly evolving events — just this week, a spate of institutions, including Harvard and Princeton Universities and the University of California at Berkeley, announced they were canceling in-person classes — there is another critical audience they must include in their crisis-communications plans: parents.

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“Of all groups,” McMahon said, “parents are the ones paying the most attention.”

In message boards and Facebook threads, parents are debating college policies for dealing with Covid-19, the disease the coronavirus causes. Some have criticized colleges for remaining open, potentially exposing their children to the disease in the close quarters of classrooms, dormitories, and dining halls. “Everyone’s starting to panic,” one mother wrote in a private parents’ Facebook group.

Other families have taken issue with the decision to cancel in-person classes and, in some cases, shut down campuses altogether. The parent of a sophomore studying in New York City questioned the fairness of paying private-college tuition for online education, “especially one no one planned for and are presumably unprepared for. I can’t imagine the average professor can turn their curriculum into an engaging experience on a dime like that.”

But other parents said they were pleased with colleges’ outreach. Stacie Berdan is a Connecticut-based writer whose twin daughters are undergraduates, at Georgetown University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. She praised both institutions. “That they are communicating regularly and well (as defined by complete and comprehensive) put me at ease,” she wrote in an email.

Duke shares with parents all the messages that it sends to students, so families are getting the most up-to-date information without having to depend on their children to forward the emails.

Lafayette College also includes parents on emails sent by its top administrators, including the president and the health-center director, to students and faculty and staff members. Amy Blythe, the college’s director of parent and family relations, puts Covid-19 information in her regular biweekly parents’ newsletter as well.

When the Pennsylvania college first assembled a campuswide committee to respond to the coronavirus, in mid-January, Blythe urged the group to include parents in the campus messages. “The times we hear from families are often when we are not communicating,” Blythe said, “so the more information we share, the better.”

Jane Turnis, vice president for communications at Colorado College, said that inquiries from parents had come in “waves.” The first wave was from parents of students studying abroad; the second was about spring-break travel. Now the questions focus on whether the college will follow other institutions in offering instruction online to reduce the risk of classroom contagion.

Administrators have been trying to anticipate parents’ questions by sending regular updates. The emails are well read, with open rates of 60 percent or more, Turnis said.

Colorado College is applying lessons learned when wildfires threatened the campus several years ago. “We learned then that you can’t communicate too much,” Turnis said.

With more and more international students on American campuses, colleges also have to communicate with parents from different countries and cultures. Justin O’Jack, who runs the University of Virginia’s office in Shanghai, regularly translates messages about Covid-19 into Chinese and posts them on WeChat, a popular Chinese social-media platform. Even as China was ground zero for the early spread of the coronavirus, parents remained concerned about the health and well-being of their children in Charlottesville, Va., O’Jack said.

Not all institutions have been inundated with queries from uneasy parents. Zebulun Davenport, vice president for student affairs at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, said he hadn’t gotten a single email from a parent — until just minutes before a reporter called on Monday afternoon. The parent wanted to know how the university would handle students who went on cruises during spring break.

Anna Miller, Tufts U.

Davenport said West Chester had been posting coronavirus updates on the parents’ Facebook page. “We want parents to know that we’re working hard to get this right,” he said.

Still, colleges have come in for criticism. When Duke announced last week that it would suspend all faculty and student travel and study-abroad programs in hard-hit Italy, some parents were angry that the university had not done so sooner, as the rate of infections spread rapidly. Others, McMahon said, feel that “every action we take is an overreaction.”

Responding to parents’ fears and frustrations can be tricky. McMahon said Duke administrators emphasize that they rely on infectious-disease and public-health experts at the university’s medical center in making all their decisions.

Colleges aren’t the only ones that are hearing from concerned parents — study-abroad programs are, too. John S. Lucas is president of ISEP, a study-abroad and exchange program that sends students to places around the world. He said pushback from parents had been minor and, in some cases, justified, as when parents worried that a student could be more exposed to the coronavirus by traveling or by returning to a more-infected region than staying put.

“We are trying to do the best we can to cut through the fog of information so the students and families understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” Lucas said.