I think it's great if they can do it earlier. Leaving for college is an emotional time. Helen Johnson's book advises parents to adopt a mentoring role. But not always. Each scenario is followed by insight into the student's thoughts, the parent's thoughts and objective information about what's going on, how parents should respond and what they should avoid.
Parents can flip through and go straight to the scenario they're facing at any particular time.
While writing Don't Tell Me, Johnson and Schelhas-Miller drew on insights from focus groups, survey results and their years of experience working with parents and students at small liberal arts colleges, state schools and some of America's most prestigious universities. But many of the case scenarios used in the book were taken from Johnson's sons' actual college experiences. In a section about difficult roommate situations, there is a dialogue between a mother and her son, whose roommate keeps animals in a cage under his bed and whose girlfriend practically lives in the room. The problem is one Johnson's older son faced as an undergraduate at Cornell. Such variables have considerably more impact on which issues students face.