"The idea of placing our 14yo on a college campus is suddenly a whole lot more real to us, let's just say, now that we're only a year away."
I would offer an opinion, but college was quite possibly the worst five years of my entire life, from a social and emotional perspective.
Of course, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, only that it was required for membership in the adult human community.
However, the caveat here is that I probably had an emotional age of 13 when I started college, which made things that much worse.
