Introduction
LOWE

It is well established that first-year college students living away from home frequently either initiate or increase their use of alcohol and drugs (Hingson et al., Parents and caregivers are another potentially promising agent in university prevention efforts (Mallett et al., On the other hand, the role of parents in the lives of their college students is often ambiguous, because some roles traditionally considered parental, such as responsibility for decision making, health, daily schedules and logistics, problem solving, and finances, are increasingly transferred to their young adult children (Lowe & Dotterer, The proximal target of the handbook intervention was parents’ interactions with their students. We aimed to provide parents with strategies to meet the needs of this developmental period. The handbook includes suggested conversations and activities for parents to engage in with their students. These were designed to increase parents’ understanding of the need to (1) support autonomy growth by coaching and asking questions instead of advising; (2) support their students as they navigate myriad new situations; and (3) have reciprocal conversations about values and expectations and continue checking in about substance use, health behaviors, peer relationships, and academics.These approaches to parenting in the transition to college are protective. They help parents navigate their continued roles in encouraging and monitoring students at a distance while still supporting their young adult students’ increasing autonomy. The handbook, by providing examples and opportunities to practice meaningful conversations, (1) helps parents gain respect for and support of students’ autonomy growth by encouraging a focus on the students’ values-based decisions rather than on telling students what to do; (2) emphasizes the continued need for emotional support of young adult children; and (3) provides a developmentally appropriate approach to parental monitoring.We hypothesized that by using the handbook, parents would meet the changing developmental needs of their students as they moved away from home, and that this in turn would decrease likelihood of students’ use of alcohol and cannabis in the high-risk period immediately following transition to college. Evidence-based interventions for parents during this developmental period are scarce relative to programming that focuses either on parents of adolescents or on college students themselves; in a special section of The small existing body of research on interventions with parents of college students generally falls into one of two categories. The first, exemplified by the pioneering work of Turrisi and his colleagues, involves a didactic approach in which parents are provided with materials on how to talk to their student about alcohol use and misuse at college, with a particular focus on challenging myths about drinking and making parental expectations about student drinking clear (Donovan et al., Here, we present a different approach to parent-based interventions with college students. Our intervention, 