You may have already discussed alcohol use with your son or daughter and your expectations of responsibility and appropriate behavior. We encourage you to make this an ongoing and evolving dialogue. The challenges and experiences of college life offer you the opportunity to talk to your Penn student again about their attitudes, values, and decisions about alcohol.

We encourage you to look for "teachable moments" to reopen the conversation. Often it helps to start these discussions using newspaper articles or information you learned from TV news. In fact, a quick search of our own DP archives can provide interesting and Penn-specific articles to spark your discussions. We think you will find that opportunities for conversations are plentiful.

Situations to consider are:

We offer some general guidelines for productive conversations based on suggestions from other parents who have had these discussions. They are designed to suggest some ideas and options to help initiate important dialogue between you and your Penn student. We hope you will adapt them as you feel appropriate when talking with your son or daughter.

If you feel a situation warrants a deeper, more detailed conversation, you may want to use the following guidelines as starting points:

After talking with your son or daughter, you may feel the need for further information for yourself. We encourage you to use the resource guide on this website to contact us with any questions you may have.