At the time of this conversation, Dr. April Scott was leading student health and wellbeing work at University Health Services at UW-Madison, having come to Madison from the South. This week, Angela sits down with her for a wide-ranging conversation about what’s really going on with young people’s health — and our own.
They get into the loneliness showing up on campus even in a sea of cohorts and group chats, why connection has become a skill that has to be taught, and what it means to “take up space” in rooms that weren’t built with you in mind. Dr. Scott makes the case for normalizing failure as part of sending a kid off to college, offers a coach’s-eye view of the shift from parenting to letting go, and gives a genuinely useful tour of sleep — why naps go sideways, what your alarm is telling you, and why most of us are walking around sleep-deprived.
