In college culture, binge drinking is common. Whereas once kids drank to have fun, as early as the 2000s researchers began seeing a trend of kids drinking to manage negative emotions. They are also increasingly using pot as a way to manage anxiety, but chronic use may actually contribute to anxiety and mood disorders, as well as to psychosis. Bill’s practice has seen six college students in the last two years who were hospitalized after psychotic breaks, all of whom were heavy pot smokers. We also worry about the increase of nicotine addiction among young people, as kids turn in large numbers to vaping without necessarily recognizing its risks.

The problems start well before freshman orientation, however, and the teenagers are not the only ones to blame. For so much of these students’ lives, their parents, teachers, tutors and coaches have told them what to do and when. Ned frequently will offer to schedule a follow-up tutoring session with a high school senior, only to have them say, “I don’t know my schedule. Check with my mom.” Many have not developed the skills to run their days — filling their prescriptions on time, getting their homework done without being nagged, or turning off their phones for long enough to focus.

If you question your teenager’s readiness for college at the end of high school, you cannot expect that he or she will be ready by fall. It takes time, practice and some failure to learn how to run a life. And you don’t want your child to learn these lessons in an environment that is as toxic as it is expensive.

[Read more about helping a teenager to be ready for college.]

Options like gap years or plain and simple work experience can help students mature so that when they do enroll, they are more likely to be successful. For highly stressed, high-achieving students, a gap year offers time to recover from high school before tackling college. Other students may benefit from starting at local or community colleges.

If you have a student who has started college, the struggle may be evident in midterm grades. Many parents, however, don’t see those grades. We often recommend that parents — particularly those of vulnerable students — make signing the grade release a prerequisite of funding college. After all, you wouldn’t invest in a company without being able to see its quarterly earnings.

It’s tricky: We want to support student autonomy and not extend the problem of too much parental oversight in high school to college. At the same time, we’ve seen many kids who rarely go to class and their parents never know. Given the expense of college, parents are well within their rights to say, “I need to see that you’re working hard enough in order to justify my spending this money on your future.” The parents’ role is to avoid disaster, not micromanage short-term performance.

It may be worthwhile to try to carve out some quiet time during the Thanksgiving break to talk to your student about how the transition is going. For some, it can help to look into support services on campus, whether in the form of tutoring or mental health counseling. But at the end of the day, what your child needs most is practice running his or her own life — and college is a risky place to do that for the first time.