IOWA CITY, Iowa -- The hour when Ariana Kramer will begin her college career is fast approaching -- and her parents are in an office supply store, disagreeing about hanging files, of all things.
"She'll need them," her mother says.
"I don't think so," her dad counters.
Ariana, meanwhile, walks dreamily through the store, offering no opinion on this particular decision. She is confident she will have what she needs when she starts her freshman year at the University of Iowa.
She has mom, the family organizer, with her, and dad, the calm encourager. And they have "the list," which mom printed from one of those "what-you'll-need-at-college" websites.
New laptop. Check.
Comforter with matching sheets. Check.
Laundry detergent. Body wash. Antacid.
Check. Check. Check.
Mind you, Robin and Paul Kramer aren't those crazy college parents -- not like the mother who, as relayed by one dean of students at one California college, stayed in her daughter's dorm room with her for four nights to help her adjust (until the daughter's roommate complained).
Nor have they ignored barricades intended to keep parents from trying to register for classes for their children, or crashed student-only orientation events, which officials at universities across the country say happens more and more.
Still, even for average parents, the letting go is difficult -- more so, they and many others say, than it was for parents of college-bound freshmen in decades past.
Robin Kramer recalls how her own parents, who never attended college, dropped her off with a trunk full of belongings at Drake University, also in Iowa, in 1978. She set up her room and attended orientation without them there. "It's just what you did then," she says.
But these days, moms and dads have gone from reading books that tell us how to raise The Happiest Baby on the Block to new handbooks such as The Happiest Kid on Campus: A Parent's Guide to the Very Best College Experience (for You and Your Child).
YOU and your child?
Linda Bips, a psychology professor who advises parents on letting go, used to carry scissors into workshops.
"Cut the cord!" she would tell them.
It evoked the chuckles she was looking for. "But I don't do that anymore, because no one would listen anyway," says Bips, a professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., and author of Parenting College Freshmen: Consulting For Adulthood.
The process, she has learned, has to be gradual.
Marshall Duke, a psychology professor at Emory University in Atlanta, has been giving those kinds of talks for three decades and also has noted more parents struggling.
For one, they're more connected than ever, by Facebook and text messages and online video chat. They're also often paying huge sums of money on their children's education.
"So they think that gives them license to intervene as they would in other investments," says Duke, who also encourages parents to take a step back.
He wants them to let their children falter, to figure things out for themselves, to become adults.
For Ariana Kramer, it means giving up the comfort of what she freely calls the "bubble" she grew up in, the quiet home and highly ranked schools in suburban Chicago where her main task in life was to study hard and get herself where she is today.
By many estimations, the Kramers are a low-drama family. But even they are having their prickly moments when they arrive in Iowa City, and that's to be expected in this time of heightened emotions, experts say.
Ariana rolls her eyes, for instance, when her mom suggests that she put her class assignments in her BlackBerry calendar.
"Mom, I'm not like you. You're way, too, uh ..." -- Ariana pauses and chooses her words carefully when she remembers her words are being monitored by a reporter -- "better organized than I am."
It's all part of the subtle push and pull that has been happening all summer, her mother says.
One minute it's "I can do it myself!" The next, Ariana is asking, "Mom, can you help me with this?"
Increasingly, colleges have noted the support parents need in letting go, so much that they are starting to formalize the goodbye.
At St. Olaf College in Minnesota, incoming freshmen are shown a video with their smiling, crying parents waving goodbye as one big group. First-year students at the University of Chicago, meanwhile, walk their parents to the university gate as bagpipes play in what some university staff call the "parting of the seas."
But in the end, the message from universities and colleges is the same: Parents, please go home.
After nearly three days together in Iowa, the moment for Ariana to say goodbye to her parents and 16-year-old brother Chase finally arrives.
"If they ask you 'What's the best time of your life?' I think everybody will say college," her dad says. "So make the most of it."
As her parents say goodbye, Ariana takes on the role of comforter. "I'll call you," she says as she hugs her mom, who begins to tear up.
Ariana grabs dad and then her brother, who's also starting to cry. She teases him: "If you break anything in my room, you're in trouble."
Chase, of anyone, has seemed the saddest about his sister leaving: "I think she'll be OK as long as she copes with everything," he had said the day before.
"Oh, she will," her mom assured him. "She's a coper."
Ariana's family departs, and the new freshman looks content, if not a little lost.
She leaves her door open (that's how you meet people, her resident adviser said). She looks around her room.
"It's weird," she says. "What do I do now?"
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