What's Really Going on With Those Elaborate (Parent-Decorated) College Dorm Rooms?

Oh no another florescent name sign

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If you want to watch some transformations try here

If you watched any of Rushtok, you’ve seen them: lavishly decorated dorm rooms that look nothing like the spaces we occupied in our late teens. The beds are almost always “vaulted” to make space for storage underneath; the walls are often painted or covered in stick-on wallpaper. Other existing furniture (desks, dressers, wardrobes) are either covered with matching wallpaper/fabric or replaced with “better” items (where does the furniture go? Usually into a storage unit, paid for by the student’s parents). There are THROW PILLOWS and MANY DIFFERENT TYPES OF RUGS and BED SKIRTS. It’s just a lot — and it’s also very, very easy to scoff at the entire thing.

And because this is Culture Study, I wanted to do more than just say it’s the latest sign of the consumerist intensive parenting apocalypse. So when Meagan Francis wrote for The Atlantic about her own experiences in the Facebook groups that often serve as the guiding inspiration for many of these transformations, I knew she needed to come explain the larger dynamics at play in the newsletter.

I’ll just say that yes, obviously, this is about intensive parenting (and turning the consumerist impulse on a new space) but there’s more going on here, too — and I particularly love how this Q&A ends. Stick with us and let’s keep talking in the comments (I’m hoping someone was as cool as I was and had Starry Night and Nighthawks as their own form of elaborate dorm decoration).

And be sure to read Meagan’s piece in The Atlantic — here’s a gift link!

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I’ve become very familiar with the expensive dorm room makeover during my many hours on Rushtok, but for readers who haven’t been a part of this world, can you paint a picture for us of these transformations and how aspirational norms are changing when it comes to dorm room decoration (and, more specifically, parents’ participation in it). (We can link a few Toks here if we’d like!)

I had no idea how pervasive this trend had become until last summer, shortly before I dropped my youngest son off at his freshman year of college. Suddenly all kinds of dorm decor groups with names like “Dorm Room Mamas” started popping up as a “you might like” in my Facebook feed. [AHP Note: if you want to get a sense for one of these groups, I’d recommend this one]. I clicked through out of curiosity and fell down a (overwhelmingly homogeneously decorated) rabbit hole.

The groups had their share of practical questions like which hardware to bring on move-in day to assemble beds, but what really caught my eye were the room reveals and inspo posts. The first one I saw featured two matching beds with layers of designer bedding and monogrammed signs hanging above them displaying each student’s name, flanking a white sofa with a fluffy rug and glass-topped coffee table displaying linen-bound coffee table books about Chanel and Louis Vuitton. I was like, “Wait, is this for real?”

@bre.morrisBAMA FRESHMAN DORM !!! 💖💖 #dormtour #dormroom #bamarush #bamarushtok #dorm #movein #dormmakeover #colorful #dormtransformation

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I guess it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that “normal” parents — rather than just stylists at product companies and lifestyle sites — might be aspiring to these kinds of rooms. It’s not that I’d never seen fancy dorm makeovers pop up on my feeds before, but in my mind I’d just dismissed them as over-the-top aspirational influencer content. But when I saw so many room reveal posts in one place, with so many parents commenting on them and then asking questions to try to emulate that look in their own child’s room, I realized that there were large numbers of parents who were actively involving (and investing) themselves in the dorm-decor process.

I thought back to my own dorm room in 1995. My roommate and I had a blast putting it together with odds and ends we’d thrifted, foraged from our family basements, and made ourselves. We’d taped posters and printouts to our cinder-block walls. Our dorm room was our first grown-up, semi-independent space and we truly made it our own, in all its mismatched, low-budget glory.

As I looked at picture after picture of these students in their homogeneously ‘aesthetic’ rooms without a trace of actual personality and no evidence of that scrappy, “I’m figuring out who I am as I go” sensibility I remembered from my college dorm, I just felt sad for them. And the idea for the piece was born.

I know this is difficult to parse, but how much of this phenomenon seems driven by parents — and how much by the teens themselves?

As you say, it’s difficult to parse. Some of the comments in response to my Atlantic piece claimed that it’s the teens who are driving this whole trend. But then again, it was the parents, not the teenagers, sharing mood boards and decor links in the “dorm room mom” groups I saw! Of course, I don’t know what conversations were happening inside homes and I have no doubt that teenagers are just as prone to social media pressure as their parents. In the end, I guess it’s probably mostly marketers driving this phenomenon, and parents and teens alike are caught up in it, just for different reasons.

And of course, this pressure usually doesn’t manifest itself in the over-the-top, wealth-flaunting rooms you’re going to see in those stories about 10K rooms styled by professional decorators, like the Rushtok rooms. But there’s still a high level of expected parental involvement in the whole process I hadn’t critically considered until I saw it play out in these dorm mom groups.

Just from being a mom of multiple young adults who came of age in an intensive parenting environment, I have to believe a lot of the involvement is parent-driven even if the actual room decor is directed by the students. None of us want to believe we’re the helicopter parents, but we’ve been so entrenched in an intensive parenting culture, we don’t even recognize that we’re doing it at times. And there’s a huge spectrum, too: is making sure our kids have a roll of paper towels and a trash can to toss them in helicopter parenting? No? Well, what about if we add in a cozy throw blanket - those rooms do get cold, after all - and a new set of towels? It’s a slippery slope to monogrammed wall hangings and dust ruffles.

You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about parenting teen kids (and older) — and also spent a lot of time in various Facebook groups for college applications and dorm decorations. They’re all manifestations of different sorts of intensive parenting, a concept that we’ve talked about a lot here on Culture Study — a posture towards parenting built for our particular anxieties, economic and otherwise.

I know this is a huge question, but what fears, anxieties, and tensions do you see popping up in the conversations about dorm room prep — explicit and implicit? Because it’s about the dorm room, but it’s not really about the dorm room.

I think what struck me is how invested and concerned today’s parents are not just about their kids’ safety — as my parents also would have been! — but also their material comfort, to which I think my parents devoted almost zero brain cells.

There seems to be a lot of anxiety over questions like: will my child know how to organize their stuff? Will they wake up for class on time? Will their friends want to spend time with them in their room? Will they be able to eat when they want to? Will they be comfortable? Questions that, of course, there are no shortage of products that purport to solve. So the decor itself - the matching comforters and monogrammed wall signs and coffee tables - is a part of the trend, but it’s not the whole story.

And, by the way, I’m not exempting myself from this! So far, I’ve only sent boys off to college, and they were stereotypically disinterested in their rooms’ aesthetics. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t concern myself with their comfort - I definitely did, and I’m certain to a degree my parents wouldn’t even have dreamed of.

I think, too, that there’s something here about the way families use space today that plays in. I have moved two of my sons into public state universities, and another into a community college with live-in facilities. In all three cases their residence halls were nicer than any place I lived before the age of thirty, and it was obvious the institutions had poured a lot of money into creating welcoming, functional community spaces: movie rooms, study rooms, game rooms, beautiful shiny kitchens…if any of my college kids have needed a midnight snack or a place to hang with their friends, trust me, they’ve got options.

But our kids grew up in a culture where it’s not enough to have nice shared spaces to use and enjoy; we’ve also helped them feel entitled to a lot of personal comfort in their own, private spaces. So maybe they don’t want to go use the TV in the rec room, they want to lie in a perfectly comfortable dorm room and scroll TikTok on their own device while looking around their own, personal, well-appointed spaces. I’m curious what readers think about that theory!

I think there’s a tendency — and I’m guilty of this — to look at these TikToks, or eavesdrop in these Facebook groups, and think: I showed up to college with an extra-long twin sheet from Wal-Mart and bought a copy of Starry Night from the poster sale in the quad and I was fine. And I was fine!

But I also think I had a very different relationship with my parents at that point: there was no way I’d let my mom help me decorate my room. In your piece, you point to the fact that this generation of parents is much more involved with their children’s lives not just as they head to college, but the years afterwards.

Again, my tendency is to judge that involvement, but that’s because, like a lot of people my age, there were negative connotations to being overly connected to your parents (or parents being connected in that way to their children). I think I harbor pretty entrenched ideas about independence, and could have benefited from slightly more dependence in my life.

How are you thinking through these ideas, both as a parent and someone deep in parenting discourse?

If you read the social media comments on my article you’ll see those entrenched ideas about independence reflected over and over: so many people shared stories about being dropped off at their dorms with a bed in a bag and not much else and making their way inside alone while their parents practically peel out of the lot. Or some people semi-bragging about having no parental presence at all, not even a visit or phone call their whole first year. It’s all very “I walked two miles to school, uphill both ways, through knee-deep snow”

I definitely harbor my own somewhat prideful defensiveness about the way I was raised and it’s colored so many of the realizations I’ve had to face as a mom of young adults, many of which I wrote about in my book. Like, oh, maybe it’s not such a bad thing for our young adult children to depend on us a bit, and maybe it wouldn’t have been so terrible for me to depend on mine a little more?

Ultimately, I don’t think there is a single thing wrong with caring about how our kids experience their first home away from their childhood home. Of course we care, and that’s a good thing! But we are also the parents - the adults - in this scenario. It’s up to us to restrain ourselves for everyone’s good, because as pediatrician Ken Ginsburg pointed out in my story, “Who doesn’t want free, nice stuff?”

Our kids probably aren’t going to decline our help or involvement at this point when we’ve been training them for eighteen years that we’re in control, we’re in charge, we know best. We need to lead the way on creating a new path, a new set of expectations.

Writing this story inspired me to dig up photos of my own circa-1995 dorm, and I asked friends on Facebook to share theirs, too. They were, to a one, delightful. Mismatched, patched-together, tacky, and anything but social-media-ready, but they were ours. I want that feeling of freedom and expression so much for today’s kids! And I want it for us parents, too, as we are learning how to step back into our lives, and decorate — figuratively, literally, or both — our own blank walls back at home. ●

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You can find more of Meagan Francis’s work here and subscribe to her newsletter here. Her most recent book is The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Need: How We Let Our Kids Go and Embrace What’s Next.

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For Subscribers: I’d love to hear what this interview sparked for you in terms of your own college dorm memories — and your thoughts about fetishizing independence, intensive parenting into the college years, and more. Just remember that this can easily turn shame-y if we’re not careful — so think about tone before you comment, take others’ comments in good faith, and let’s try to keep this one of the good places on the internet.