For the record, I do love my kids, and not just in the abstract. I love having them around the house, love having dinner with them, watching TV, joking and playing music. They are fine young adults.

But enough with this winter break already.

The twins, 20, get a little more than four weeks off between the end of their final exams and the resumption of classes. And that’s too long.

Not for me. I’m lucky in that my kids don’t get on my nerves. They don’t have the knack. But it’s too long for them.

They need one week to recuperate from final exams, see friends, squeeze in doctor and dentist checkups. And then they need another week to observe the holidays, see relatives, maybe go on a family trip like we did this year.

But then they need to get back. Back to their campus friends and academic pursuits. Back to the simulation of real life that is college. Back to moving forward.

Four weeks — some schools now break for as long as six weeks during the Thanksgiving/Christmas season — is wretched excess.

I can’t play the “in my day.” card because it was in my day, the 1970s when I was in school, that many institutions of higher learning responded to dramatically rising energy prices by extending their winter vacations to save on heating costs.

“Serendipitously,” wrote Noreen Malone in a 2009 essay in Slate, “this cost-cutting measure coincided with a broader movement inside academia toward experimental pedagogy, like study abroad, mini-classes, and internship programs that could be completed over a slightly longer break.”

Winter term. December Quarter. J- (for January) term. Fine ideas. Usually optional. And not offered at my kids’ schools, as it happens.

Instead we have I- (for Idle) term. Lots of fooling about online and sleeping in.

Don’t call this “free time,” though. Students will pay for it in the late spring, when their school years will end a little later than they otherwise would, cutting their summers a little shorter.

There’s an argument that colleges and universities should expect year-round attendance with minimal breaks, the way, say, most employers do. Prepare the little lotus-eaters for the real world and expedite their educations!

I’m not there. Long college summers are great for getting work experience earning money to pay tuition, hobo-style traveling or other broadening endeavors. Starting them early gives students a head start on applying for jobs and internships.

But long college winters are generally a waste. Some students secure temporary seasonal employment, but most don’t. And with everything else going on and so many peers on different schedules, it’s a lousy time to go backpacking through Europe or hike the Appalachian Trail.

“It takes students out of a routine for too long,” wrote then-St. John’s University student Patrice Bendig in a 2008 essay for her campus newspaper that made the case for shorter winter breaks. “A month may not seem like a lot to be out of practice, but when there is absolutely no kind of reading or writing beside instant messages and Facebook walls, it is too long. This makes it harder for students to (go) back to being slammed with research papers and textbook outlining on a daily basis.”

Many parents responded in the negative when I asked on Facebook if college winter breaks are too long. They wrote, as I would write, of the pleasures of being in their children’s company, of savoring the dwindling moments of having them home just rattling around, of interacting with them without much of the drama of adolescence.

Four weeks? If I could stop time it would be four years.

But I can’t stop time. And I want what’s best for them, not for me.

C’mon colleges! Two weeks off and then let’s get back to it.

Pay no attention to the lump in my throat when I hug the last one goodbye next week.

Eric Zorn wrote this for The Chicago Tribune.