Happy, Healthy 101: A Parent’s Guide to Helping Your Child Thrive Across the College Years

Chapter 1: Introduction

It’s that time of year! College drop-off. My Facebook feed has been full of pictures of friends dropping their children off at various universities around the country.

If you have a child who is starting college, their life, and correspondingly your life, is about to change dramatically. I’m going to assume that, like most parents, you want the best for your child. You want them to find their path, to discover what makes them happy. You’re likely nervous about this new journey they are embarking upon. If they are leaving home, you’re probably nervous about their new autonomy and sudden lack of parental supervision! You’ve heard scary statistics or stories about substance use, sexual assaults, and growing mental health concerns on college campuses. How do you help your student navigate these challenges, as well as all the important life decisions that lie ahead? What is your role as a parent when your child is technically, legally responsible for themselves? This is the situation in which most parents of college students find themselves.

That’s where this mini-book, consisting of a series of short chapters published free on Medium, is here to help! I have been a university professor for more than 20 years. My dad (a retired general who went straight into the military after college) likes to joke that I loved college so much that I never left. It wasn’t quite that intentional, but on some level he’s right.

My research focuses on understanding risk and resilience among adolescents and young adults, studying how genetic predispositions come together with environmental factors to contribute to substance use and other mental health outcomes. I am currently a tenured Professor of Psychiatry in the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine, where I direct the largest addiction research center in the country. Prior to joining Rutgers in 2022, I ran a university-wide research center entirely devoted to helping college students thrive for over a decade. I’ve written more than 400 scientific publications over my career and brought in >55 million dollars in research grant funding from the National Institutes of Health. But I care about more than the process of…