ArcaMax

Dear Amy: My wife and I worry about our daughter. She's a sophomore at a top university. She's made the honor roll for three semesters in a row. Obviously, her academic progress is not our concern.

What we don't talk about is her worsening drinking problem.

Since she started college, she's been cited twice for underage drinking (Minor in Possession) and broken her wrist in a fall that we all but know was alcohol-related. We don't know how, if, or when to say anything about our suspicions and fears.

Ours is not a family comfortable with open discussions about sensitive subjects; we tend to go the ostrich route. In my gut, I feel we're heading for disaster. How can we intervene before something even worse happens? She has a car on campus and we worry most about her driving drunk.

-- Worried Parents

Dear Worried: According to a recent government study, 39 percent of college students binge drank within the last month. If your daughter is drinking, it makes her vulnerable to legal consequences (getting caught), physical injury (this has already happened), unwanted sexual contact, fractured relationships, hurting or injuring others by driving drunk, and the possibility of graduating from college with a serious drinking problem.

I hope you are brave enough to take your heads out of the sand in order to try to be honest about your concerns. Intervening now, before she is of legal drinking age, might be most effective.

Colleges have a long way to go to control student drinking. Your daughter's school may only fine her and require her to take an online alcohol education course.

But you are her parents. In your gut, you feel you are headed for disaster. I hope you will violate your family's ostrich technique, and open up this topic for a loving parent-to-daughter talk.

Expect her to laugh, deny, deflect and maybe even blame you. Tell her that your concerns are so grave that you don't trust her with the car. A DWI could not only alter or end another person's life, but ruin hers.

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