College life, for resident students, is communal life.  Students live together in apartments or dorms and share their music, their ideas, their belongings, their clothes, and their germs.  It is a truth of college life that many students begin to get sick just a few weeks into the semester.  They are tired, may not be eating right, and they have been living together and exposing each other to their germs.

You will not be able to prevent your student from getting sick, just as you couldn’t prevent it when they started pre-school or kindergarten.  You can, however, send them to school with a first aid kit, a comfort pack for when illness does strike, and some reminders of ways to try to fend off some illness or shorten the duration of the inevitable.

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Most college students head off to college with lots of ”stuff”.  Students need to furnish their rooms, take the items that they need for daily living, take study aids, clothing, recreational items, and sentimental items that may remind them of home, family and friends.  Increasingly, many of the items that students need to take to college are expensive.  Students come to college armed with cell phones, laptops, video game consoles, TVs, bikes and cars.  All of these items are enticing: potentially easily stolen, and easily sold.

When it comes to theft on campus, many incidents are crimes of opportunity or convenience. Things are there, and they are easy to get at.  Some awareness, forethought, and careful actions on the part of your college student can help decrease the chances that they will become a victim of theft.

Talk to your student before they head off to school about campus safety.  It is important to be aware of how to take care of personal safety, but they’ll also need to think about how to protect belongings from theft.  There are some relatively simple things that your student can do to help keep track of those important belongings.

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It is, of course, inevitable that your college student will get sick while at school.  It may happen early in your student’s college career, or it may not happen for a while.  They may be very ill, or more likely, just miserable with a cold or virus circulating through the residence hall.  For many students, that first illness often occurs a few weeks into the first semester — the seasons may begin to change, students may not be getting as much sleep as they should, may not be eating as well as they should, and they have all been in closer living contact and sharing their germs.

Even if it is simply the common cold, that first illness away from home is often a difficult time for students.  This may be the first time that they will need to care for themselves.  This may be a difficult time for you, as parent, as well.  You’d like to be there to provide the medication, the chicken soup, or maybe just the TLC.  However, there’s not much that you can do if your student is miles away at school, and this is an important life-learning experience anyway.  You may feel helpless and frustrated that you can’t be there.

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