Is Your Teen Ready for University Life? Try this thought-provoking family

This post is a collaboration with TV Licensing (TVL), but all thoughts and experiences are my own.

A friend of mine recently shared a post on social media saying, ‘If you think their messy room is hard to look at, just wait until it’s empty’. That really struck a nerve with me.

It won’t be long until Grace starts thinking about higher education – and the frustration of her messy room and her not getting up until lunchtime will turn to upset that she is not there. This also led to me wondering how prepared she will be for life outside this house and how to go about making sure she is armed with all the information she needs.

There is so much information to impart to Grace so, it is great to see TV Licensing giving us parents a helping hand. They are sharing information with students to understand their responsibilities when it comes to needing a TV Licence – amongst many other things – with the help of their Uni Checklist.

Not only are they helping to ensure your teenager is properly covered to watch their favourite shows once they are away from home, but many other responsibilities too in the form of a quiz on student life to uncover how aligned they are with the realities university will bring, including mention of their TV Licence responsibilities! So, we decided to sit down as a family and try out the questions on each other.

The quiz has two rounds; Round 1 is in a Question-and-Answer format which tests your teen on the knowledge of living independently and university in general. Round 2 is what we dubbed the ‘Mr & Mrs’ test (if you are of a certain age, you may remember this television show!) which is presented in a format to test if you’re aligned on some specific topics.

In the first round, where we asked Grace questions about living independently, there were a couple of surprises.

First up she knew that raw meat should sit on the bottom shelf of the fridge – mainly because there is a massive note from me on the magnetic wipe board (really to remind her dad!). We accepted her answer on Googling it if you needed to find out which day to put the bins out. We were very surprised that she thought the timing to boil an egg for a runny yolk was 40 seconds! (Strictly speaking, she wasn’t wrong – but that would be if you wanted a runny white too!).

We were very pleased to see that she got 2 out of 3 of the TV Licensing questions correct. Did you know that you need to be covered by a TV Licence to watch or record programmes as they’re being shown on TV or streamed live on an online TV service? And that’s not just the BBC; it’s all channels on any platform and on any device. You also need to be covered to watch BBC iPlayer.

Overall, she did pretty well. Then it was time to move onto Round 2 and our turn to answer questions in response to her thoughts.

Firstly, we were asked what we believed would be the item she would most likely be taking with her. We both said one of each of a childhood possession which she takes to bed every night. We were both right!

It was heartening to hear that we were right when we said that she would go to all her lectures and I was a bit disappointed to hear that she wasn’t intending to join any clubs or societies in Freshers week – but that blow was softened when we discussed this, and she explained that she would prefer to focus on her subjects.

Her stress busting tip and the time of when she would go to bed the night before a 9am lecture showed us all how in tune we were – listening to music and 11pm respectively!

Overall, the quiz has certainly given us food for thought and shows that there is more to deciding on a university and getting the right grades. There is the whole living away from home situation to take into consideration and this quiz has opened several discussions and things to think about BEFORE Grace disappears off and has to call home far more often than the once every fortnight answer she gave!