Hooking Up Hazards

My parents and little sister dropped me off at the university, helped clean up my side of the dorm room, took me out to lunch, and then drove off after a few words of wisdom and lots of hugs. I was excited to take on this challenge, thrilled that high school was behind me, and scared to death -- all at the same time! Looking back, I wonder how my parents felt. I know my sister was hit by the emptying nest, for sure. I was volunteering to learn about risk and standing firm on what I knew to be right, yet open to new ideas and behaviors. They came too, sometimes faster than I could handle them. Remember those years in your life? Some of the pressures made us cave and compromise who we were. But we learned from weakness where the real muscle was and used it to recover -- or not. In the end, I emerged stronger, wiser, more educated, and grateful my folks lived three hours away.

Flash forward a generation. When we send our kids off to college these days, it’s still with pride, hope, and a depleted bank account! We worry about their roommates, their studies, their friends, and their career choices. But former campus psychiatrist Dr. Miriam Grossman says we better also worry about them being “unprotected,” and how that is influenced by the campus “political correctness” that endangers every student with its attitude toward “hooking up.” Dr. Grossman is a board certified child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist, and is concerned about the effect of political correctness in the lives of our youth. She was first a guest on Woman to Woman® for her book, You're Teaching My Child What? Check out my interview with her on the May 15th program. Her latest book is Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student. She is joined by Dr. Meg Meeker, a pediatrician and adolescent specialist, who has authored Boys Should Be Boys -- a previous Woman to Woman show. Let their counsel protect your child against the "Hooking Up Hazards" on next week’s show. As always, program schedules and a host of other useful materials can be found on our Web site.