One thing that adults have in common with their teenagers who’ve newly emerged from high school or other education programs, is the stress of decision-making regarding the children’s next destinations and their future.

It can require a change for the whole family to consider, due to ranging costs from getting a job, to entering university, college or trade school, to travelling, such as taking a “gap year” (if affordable).

Whatever the choice, a range of resources may be needed, such as parents having much earlier established an education savings plan.

Or, be prepared for this: your children may have far different interests and intentions than you’d fully recognized. How certain are these young adults about their path ahead? Have they focused on a specific interest in, say, physical education, mental health studies, trades, etc.? All are significant and needed fields of endeavour, but is the one your child has chosen the right fit for them?

This is when parents have their most important role.

Just as any new entrant to the workforce can feel insecure and even inadequate for what they signed on to achieve, so too, new graduates may seek entirely new and different paths of learning from their previous exposures.

Think back to your own coming-of-age regarding your future.

There are strong influences and reasons why postgraduate students embrace totally new experiences, especially travel. Or signing on to jobs they’d never consider permanent yet sticking with them to earn more money for more travels.

One male traveller in his late teens did something unexpected after leaving school: He volunteered at a hospital to help carry to safety the frail, sick and injured inhabitants of a city that had just suffered an earthquake. It’s likely (and lucky, too) that the young man’s parents didn’t know the dangers which their son faced at the time. But they later fully recognized the emerging strength of his character.

Be aware that a family’s emotional support is equally important at this time of new adventures, potential dangers and the graduate student’s concerns about finding the right fit for their own personal interests during the years ahead. As parents, you’ve already noted hints of some of your adult child’s leanings. Yet, you still may get some surprises if and when an entirely new direction and interest is raised.

It could be anything from wanting to opt entirely out of academics, to leaving medicine or law to pursue art history instead. Or even, as one young woman did, changing a long-held goal of becoming a doctor to study poetry in Europe. Remember, once accepted for a university or college course, it’s often possible to switch to other courses and other schools.

Back to basics: Financial matters are still important once adult children leave home on their own.

If they’d earned their own money during summer jobs, and have some savings put aside, parents must be sure to acknowledge their resourcefulness. It’s a seriously important trait, especially for people seeking an entirely different direction from one they’d imagined in their past.

Even if parents’ own school backgrounds are from very different countries and teaching methods than ours in Canada, they can stay in touch by asking about the details of their children’s experiences and, yes, also listen to their complaints about occasionally difficult circumstances, without overreacting and stressing their worries for their child.

Remember this about adult children living on their own: As the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof quoted Mark Twain: “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”

Kristof favours the “gap year(s)” before college or junior years abroad. Even an “extended gap” can alert a person who’s new to travel to its many possibilities, such as living for an extended period in one or several different countries, where language barriers can be overcome enough to make a personal connection. In his campaign for broadening the minds of travellers, Kristof wrote, “nothing beats the thrill of a trip of discovery, and the education that comes with it.”

I agree completely. Every trip I’ve ever taken, and while staying within different cultures, enriched both my knowledge of those locales, and, of a populations’ history and culture. Breaking bread with people of totally different backgrounds is a multi-faceted education, and in some special cases, it’s the beginning of long and dear friendships.