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The Launching Years: Strategies for Parenting From Senior Year to College Life
by Laura S. Kastner, and Jennifer Wyatt
Three Rivers Press, 2002
ISBN: 0609808060

Author Kastner is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington, a mother of two, and consultant on adolescence and family behavior. Author Wyatt is mother of four and a writer who publishes widely in parenting publications. They are the authors of the Seven-Year Stretch: How Families Work Together to Grow Through Adolescence. The Launching Years focuses on one of the most complicated, yet vastly overlooked, transitional periods for children and their parents. During the two-year stretch from the senior year of high school to the first year in college, young people experience unprecedented academic stress and the first real glimmer of independence as they explore sex, love, drugs, alcohol, work, world views, and changing relationships with their parents.

The Launching Years offers compelling stories about real families dealing with these issues and shows parents how to help their children handle newfound independence and the accompanying challenges. The authors make clear that the overarching goal for parents during this critical period is to successfully negotiate the transition from a child-adult relationship with their teen to a supportive adult-adult one, relying less on direct control and more on mutually agreed upon ways of staying close. Still, the authors note, this process does involve growing pains. The Launching Years shows parents how to steer through this passage successfully.