Demetrice Phillips is telling an auditorium filled with students about a sensitive disagreement he has with his wife.

Whenever news breaks about another police officer-involved shooting anywhere in the country, she wants him to talk to their two young boys about what to do if they are ever stopped by the police. They are African American children, and she worries about their safety.

Phillips isn’t ready to have that talk with his sons, ages 8 and 3.

He’s a professor of business administration at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts, where he’s sharing this story as part of a panel.

He’s also a cop.

He says his day-to-day experiences with his fellow officers are so different than what he sees in the news. “They are fathers, husbands, just like me. We’re not looking to harm anybody,” he said.

He understands his wife’s fears, and is well aware of the controversial incidents involving police officers. But he’s not ready to go there with his children.

This was part of an emotional and difficult conversation, which I was invited to moderate, about race, identity and the assumptions we have about other people. Previously, I guided the same kind of discussion at John A. Logan College in Carterville, Illinois.

Both times, I was struck by the diversity of perspectives leading the discussion. A white woman talked about her response in incidents when her partner, a woman of color, is mistreated in front of her. A white mother talked about how she feels when she sees her biracial child ostracized. An African American woman shared her experience with a high school classmate who went off on her, using the n-word multiple times. She says she “read her like filth” in return. The principal refused to punish the classmate for her verbal attack and racist slurs because she had reacted to them. A middle-aged white man, a veteran, talked about having vastly different political views than most of his peers and family members. An immigrant learning English described the reaction one of her fellow students had when she scored the highest on a math exam.

“How is that possible when you can’t even speak English?” the classmate asked.

Each person revealed complex, often painful experiences, based on the assumptions and alienation that most Americans are reluctant to discuss. It makes sense that these conversations were hosted by community colleges, which by their missions, admit any and all people who want a higher education. They are set up to be inherently diverse, and the statistics bear this out.

About 8.7 million undergraduates were enrolled in public two-year colleges in 2016-17. In fall 2017, 44 percent of Hispanic undergraduates were enrolled at community colleges, compared with 35 percent of black students and 31 percent of white students. Overall, 34 percent of undergraduates were enrolled at community colleges, according to the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Maria Cormier, a senior research associate at CCRC, said that some level of tension is bound to surface when people coming from so many different backgrounds and walks of life come together to learn. The students themselves tend to have more life experience and complex lives outside of school.

“It’s fair to say community colleges increasingly realized that, in the face of low completion rates, there needs to be some acknowledgment of the challenges facing their students,” she said. This includes addressing issues like food and housing insecurity, and improving the environment around diversity and inclusion.

Martha Parham, senior vice president for public relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, said equity is directly tied to student success.

“That’s a big part of our agenda,” she said.

Sharing personal experiences helps advance that understanding, and community colleges can lead the way for other higher education institutions to foster those connections.

Phillips told the audience about taking his children to birthday parties and athletic events and encountering other parents’ assumptions.

Once, he dropped his eldest daughter off at a birthday party and came back a short time later. A white mother of another guest met him at the front door and said, “What are you doing here? Who are you?”

He explained that he was the father of a guest, and her demeanor changed.

“Before I was a police officer, I’m a black male,” he said. “It’s kind of a weird world I live in.”

We experience it in different ways, but we all live in this weird world together.

I came across this letter anonymously submitted to AgingCare.com, an online support group for caregivers:

“I am a middle child with four sisters. I am a widow. My children and grandchildren live in St. Louis, and my mother lives in Phoenix. I have taken care of my mother for the last eight months, away from my immediate family. I have done the very best I could taking care of my mother, but it has taken a toll on me physically and emotionally. I lost 25 pounds, couldn’t eat, was depressed, and had to have surgery so I could try to eat again. All of this made me realize I can’t do this anymore. The sisters are sending guilt- and shame-filled texts to try to change my decision, but I can’t. They are being so mean, saying I am being selfish. Not sure how I can deal with this. I would really like some advice.”

The letter struck close to home.

For 26 years, my parents cared for our elderly aunt in their home. They took turns with my father’s older brother and his wife. When you watch your parents, in their 70s, struggle to care for someone in her 90s, it opens your eyes to the massive gaps in elder care support.

And the caregiving crisis is about to get substantially worse.

About 34 million Americans are providing unpaid care to an older adult, often a family member. More than 75 percent of these caregivers are women.

“They are individually bearing most of the burden of one of America’s most pressing societal challenges: how to care for a population of frail elders that is ballooning in size,” Grace Gedye wrote recently in Washington Monthly. No one is prepared to handle the massive influx of demands the aging boomer population will add to an underfunded and incomplete government system, straining overburdened family caregivers and an inadequate healthcare workforce.

Between half to two-thirds of seniors will need some kind of long-term care, which is not covered by Medicare, and only partially covered by Medicaid, under specific conditions. The strain that the aging boomers are expected to put on Medicaid, and on their family members, is unprecedented.

And yet, there’s little public policy talk about it.

Lawmakers must begin seriously grappling with the issue, and family members need to have honest conversations about care and finances before a health crisis hits.

Mike Stith, 64, of Edwardsville, Missouri, knows all too well the toll caregiving can take personally. He was the full-time caregiver for both his parents for years before they died, having taken an early retirement when his mother got sick with cancer. He took over making major decisions for his parents, managing their health issues and helping with all the basic tasks of everyday life. And when his mother passed away and his father later moved in with Stith, it became a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week responsibility.

“You change your whole life,” he said. Stith now helps care for his elderly uncle in Kentucky, and spends one week every month there to keep up with his needs.

He says he ended up in the role by default -- no one else stepped up to do it. He hasn’t spoken to his brother since 2015 because he was so hurt by how he checked out of their parents’ situation.

“People think someone else will take care of it,” Stith said.

Caregiving for a relative is one of those family situations in which everyone has an opinion -- except the opinion that they should be the one providing the care.

If someone else has been doing the work, like in the case of the overburdened letter-writer, the bystanding family members should limit their comments to two simple phrases:

“Thank you,” and “How can I help?”

I heard my husband remind our daughter at least twice that evening to make the school lunches for the next day. Each time, we heard the same “okaaaay” from behind a closed bedroom door.

If you have raised or are currently living with teenagers, perhaps you’re not terribly surprised to learn that the lunches never got made. We discovered that in the morning, at breakfast, and were offered a timeless explanation: “I forgot.”

It was the second day in a row this task had been forgotten, despite the reminders. We were frustrated and informed our daughter that she would not be allowed to drive to school for the remainder of the week in an attempt to impress upon her memory this simple chore.

Guess who gets stuck driving busy teenagers everywhere when you take away their car? It feels like you’re really just punishing yourself, but maybe it’s also a way to teach accountability and consequences.

I was still stewing over that morning’s exchange when I was seated next to a former school counselor at an event that evening. She had worked in a suburban high school for more than a decade, and now serves as director of student services in another district. Her own son had recently graduated. I expected a sympathetic ear and perhaps some useful advice when I asked her how to get two high-schoolers to remember to do daily chores without having to hassle them. I’m not talking heavy lifting here -- just helping put away the dishes, keeping up with the laundry, taking out the trash, walking the dog, making lunches, picking up after themselves -- basic life functions.

Her response surprised me more than the unmade lunches had.

Forget it, she said. Let it go during the week.

High-schoolers are more overworked, stressed, sleep-deprived and overscheduled than we were growing up. They are taking more Advanced Placement classes and spending more hours in extracurricular activities, while entrenched in social media to stay connected to their friends. During her son’s high-school years, she explained, she stopped expecting much in the way of chores during the week, though he would help out on weekends.

She advised me to take a similar approach.

For those of us who grew up with tons of responsibility and far greater expectations of household contributions, this can be a difficult idea to embrace. It seemed radical to me, and I worried I might be doing them a disservice by lowering my expectations. “How will they learn responsibility?” I asked. How will they learn to manage time, how to function in the real world?

She suggested I take a hard look at their schedules. Both of them stay after school every day for at least a couple of hours for their activities, then they have several hours of homework each night. This is high-school life now, she said. When do they get downtime? Why add to all the stress? After all, adults who find themselves working similarly long hours often try to outsource as many chores as possible.

I started asking other parents of high-schoolers, and I heard similar remarks: When do they have time during the week to do chores?

The sad truth is that many teens are coming of age in a broken, time-starved system. Adolescent depression, mental distress and anxiety are increasing at alarming rates.

That night, I mentioned the counselor’s comments to my husband. He agreed that our no-car punishment was a little harsh. Then I talked to our daughter, who is in her challenging junior year of high school. I asked if she wanted me to take over making the sandwiches at night. She responded “no,” saying that it only takes a few minutes and that she would try harder to remember. But she seemed to appreciate the acknowledgment that she’s juggling a lot.

We still ask our kids to help out in the small ways family members should to keep a household running. But when they forget or fall asleep right after getting home, or the laundry piles up in their rooms, we’ve backed off the nagging and punitive responses. We’ve shifted some responsibilities to the weekend, when they are motivated to get tasks done before they are allowed to go out and socialize.

The next day, I made their lunches, and she drove to school.