According to the Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, over 600,000 students a year are injured using alcohol. Over 2.1 million suffer injuries related to someone else using alcohol. Alcoholism on campus is a very big deal. How should parents handle this? To begin with, remember that you are going to send your children off to college with your values. If you get drunk every night. Hello. Guess what your child is going to do on campus. If you are so restrictive you haven't talked about it, then they are going to experiment with it. You have to be fearless about talking to them about alcohol and fearless about saying to them, "Here's what can happen. Yeah, it might make you feel good. You might wake up with a baby that you didn't know about. You could wake up in bed with someone you don't know. You can kill somebody or you could be killed." As parents, we need to confront this and not just hope for the best. We need to tell them, yes, it can feel good, and yes, it is a party lubricant, and yes, you are going to be exposed to it all year round; but if you can think maturely, if you can act like an adult around alcohol, you will graduate. If you act like some idiot student that can't hold their liquor, you will be home. You have to have these frank discussions with your child. They are going to do what they want to do. They are away from the house and to try to talk to them about 18 is way, way, way too late. You need to have these discussions when they are younger, so that by the time they are 18, your morals and values are grounded into them. Will they still experiment? Sure. But it doesn't have to be deadly and it doesn't have to turn into alcohol abuse. In the back of their minds, they are going to go to school with the lessons and values that you send them to school with.