Book strives to do for college parents what Dr. Spock did for new parents

Christine Schelhas-Miller Frank DiMeo/University Photography

By Susan Lang

Your college freshman finally comes home for a break, dumps the laundry on the floor and disappears for most of the week.

Your daughter is devastated: She was rushed but received no sorority bids.

Your college junior wants more money in order to live in an apartment or to go on an expensive "educational" trip.

Your son seems so stressed at college but won't say much anymore.

What's going on? What should you do? What shouldn't you do?

The answers are in a new nuts-and-bolts parenting book for your child's college years -- so often fraught with concerns, conflicts and crises unique to this stage of life.

The book, Don't Tell Me What to Do, Just Send Money: The Essential Parenting Guide to the College Years, is written by adolescent and young adult development experts Helen E. Johnson and Christine Schelhas-Miller (St. Martin's Griffin, 2000). The 348-page guide offers strategies and advice for reshaping parental relationships with emerging adult children during the college years and coping with the major issues that parents of college students face.

Schelhas-Miller teaches adolescent development at Cornell and is a consultant to independent, secondary schools on issues related to adolescent development. She also has provided academic, personal and career counseling to students at four universities over the past two decades. Co-author Johnson was the founder and former director of Cornell's first Parents' Program. She has worked in higher education for more than two decades as a career center director, assistant dean of students and as a writer and lecturer on careers, parent-adolescent communication and parenting college-age students. She is also the parent of two recent college graduates.

The authors based Don't Tell Me What to Do, Just Send Money not only on the two decades of experience each has working with college students and their parents but also on focus groups conducted in seven cities with parents of college students and college juniors. They also consulted hundreds of autobiographies written by Cornell students, and Johnson surveyed 18,000 parents and conducted counseling sessions with hundreds of parents and college students.

Schelhas-Miller and Johnson will be signing their book at the Cornell Campus Store from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, June 10.