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 research and discovery; I also want to get science into the hands of people who can use it. That’s why I wrote this mini-book for parents of college students.

As you embark on this new life phase with your child, the good news is that research suggests that parent-child relations generally improve as individuals move from adolescence to adulthood: in a national poll of individuals age 18–29, 75% said that they get along a lot better with their parents now than they did in their middle teenage years (Arnett & Schwab, 2012). Two thirds of parents who were polled also agreed that their relationship with their child had improved across emerging adulthood. So if you are still a bit emotionally drained from a turbulent relationship with your child as they passed through adolescence, it’s likely to be smoother sailing from here! But none of these changes in the parent-child dynamic take place overnight, and there are no instructions about how you get from here to there, in the context of all the other challenges that this new life phase brings. That’s what this mini-book is for!

Finally, a note on terminology: I use the words “child/children” throughout. Many emerging adults may object to this term being used to characterize them. My use of child/children is not meant to be a reflection on the maturity level of emerging adults (though at times that may seem apropos). Rather, we are all someone’s child, regardless of our age. Navigating the dynamics of the parent-child relationship across developmental stages is at the very heart of this mini-book. In fact, part of this book is about how to parent your child without making them “feel like a child”– that is to say, how do you interact with your child in ways that can help enhance your communication and relationship. A concerning finding is that the enhanced parent-child relationship that comes about during emerging adulthood is correlated with children talking to their parents less about what is going on in their lives. Certainly, you don’t want to be a “helicopter parent”, that is, intervening on your child’s behalf and making decisions for them. However, your child is about to enter a critical time in their life, filled with big decisions that will shape the course of their life. Now is not the time for parents to check out! This book aims to equip you with skills to help your children navigate the big changes and challenges that they are about to experience, in ways that appropriately recognize their growing independence, while also acknowledging that they are still figuring out who they are and what path to travel. Parents can and should play a central role in helping their children navigate these important life transitions. I hope these chapters will help you on that journey.

Here’s what I’ve put together:

Chapter 2 explores the process of transitioning to adulthood. It will help you appreciate all the things going on in your college-bound child’s life right now.

Chapter 3 is about what’s going on in your child’s brain. The reality is that if you want to understand or influence their behavior, you have to understand the way their brain works.

Chapter 4 provides a basic introduction to behavior genetics to help you better understand your child and the extent to which their genetic predispositions influence their behavior.

Chapter 5 provides step by step instructions about a scientifically-based way to talk to your now adult child about all the hard issues that come up during the college years. It’s a way of having conversations to help your child figure out how to make good decisions and find their path (without resorting to lecturing!).

Each of the chapters stands alone, so feel free to skip around or focus on the ones you think will be most relevant to you. Happy parenting!

Danielle Dick, PhD is a professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Director of the Rutgers Addiction Research Center. She is an internationally recognized expert on substance use and related mental health problems. She has written >400 scientific papers and been awarded >55 million dollars in research funding from the National Institutes of Health. She is the author of The Child Code: Understanding Your Child’s Unique Nature for Happier, More Effective Parenting, published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Visit my website at danielledick.com for free resources, or follow me on social media at Dr. Danielle Dick, for more information about how understanding genetics can help you in your parenting, relationships, health, and well-being.