This week, Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post featured The Happiest Kid On Campus: A Parent's Guide to the Very Best College Experience (for you and your child) in her column, The Answer Sheet. Here's an excerpt of the article. You can read the entire article here:

Once upon a time, in another millennium, kids in college solved their own problems -- or let them fester -- but rarely did they seek help from their parents. Today things are different. Student-parent
contact is almost constant, and parents are very present in the life of their kids, often pitching in to solve problems without a real understanding of college life today.

Help is here. Harlan Cohen, author of “The Naked Roommate” that advises students how to handle the many issues they confront at school, has written a how-to book for parents on surviving the college years. There’s a lot to learn, and “The Happiest Kid on Campus: Everything a Parent Needs to Know to H...,” covers it all in hundreds of pages organized to help you easily find a particular problem and a solution. If, say, your child calls and says he/she is so homesick that he/she won’t last another minute, you can find the “Homesickness” section in the table of contents and head over. You will learn that your kid isn't alone -- 65.1 percent of students end up feeling homesick or lonely, and that there are three things you will be facing with a homesick child:

*The first is being able to listen to it (not fun).
*The second is being able to help fix it.
*The third is being able to identify when it’s more than just a passing sickness.

Cohen’s new book has been deemed so valuable at some colleges that schools are buying them in bulk to give to parents when they arrive on campus. Virginia Commonwealth University purchased more than 2,000 to give out. “I tell my parents that I’m not going to test them on the material but I think they are going to find it a really good resource,” said Daphne Rankin, VCU's director of student engagement and a professor of sociology. “He’s a very engaging writer. It is really helpful for first-year parents, and for those parents who have been through it, it’s a good reminder.” “The Naked Roommate” was so popular at some schools that it became required reading on some campuses for freshman, with its advice on negotiating naked, smelly, noisy, and mean roommates, as well as for dealing with professors, how to read a college textbook, and how to think about sex, drugs, laundry, diet, and a lot of other issues....

Read entire article: click here