Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation of children

Parents Forum
521

Sorry, but are you looking to pick a fight? People in high-paying, high-powered professions typically work longer hours and travel and commute more than people in average jobs. My neighbor works hard in maintenance, but is only on the job 8-4 and works a few minutes from home. It seems that these articles tend to paint a profile of helicopter parents as competitive, upper class professional folks who have money and influence, including the means to pay for top schools and the EC’s their kids supposedly need to get there. So if this is the group who is helicoptering, I find it hard to imagine they’re doing it because they have so much free time on their hands they need to fill. And if it’s people like me who are not the go-getters of society willing to work 90 hours a week plus a commute to the city, then why would we do it either, unless it really was necessary?

I don’t recall saying I don’t want my D to compete with the top kids. I don’t know what you mean by that. I don’t see succeeding in high school as a competition, but yes, I’d like her to be able to compete for a spot at a decent school while still sleeping 6 hours a night.

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522

There’s a lot of talk about homework and how much time students spend on it, but a much of it is just talk. Many students are very poor at motivation and time management.

523

Of course that is the problem of some students. But why is it so hard for you to accept that maybe in some cases the problem lies with the culture of the school, community, or geographic region? Quantmech and cobrat concur, as do parents interviewed in all the articles complaining about excessive homework. I am pretty sick of this scapegoating of parents.

524

@justonedad "There’s a lot of talk about homework and how much time students spend on it, but a much of it is just talk. Many students are very poor at motivation and time management.’

That is definitely true. However, some of the best students are still pushed to the wall. A lot of it depends on the quality of the teacher and the teacher’s alignment with the AP exam. One AP History teacher at our school likes to talk about whatever he finds interesting about the current chapter, but not what will be covered on the AP exam. If you want to pass the AP exam, you will have to prepare on your own. God Bless tenure.

In contrast, the BC calc teacher DD had completely focussed efforts on what you need to know to pass the exam and pounds it into them. There was a normal amount of homework, but not excessive. He has two classes of 25 students each, and 47 of them got a 5.

In AP Computer Science the teacher whenever DD asked the teacher how to program x or y, the teacher always said, “that is was part of the assignment.” I took her a while to figure out the the teacher does not know much about programming, but is too ashamed to just admit that she does not know how to do it. lol

With advanced high school courses, the amount of homework time can depend a lot on the knowledge level, teaching ability, and approach of the teachers.

525

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/27/students-spend-more-time-on-homework-but-teachers-say-its-worth-it

If the average number of hours of homework is 17.5 hours per week as stated in this article, how is it a stretch to believe that the kids in harder high school classes have much more than that?

526

I’ve never indicated that it’s hard for me to accept that can happen. However, being old and experienced, I’ve seen an awful lot of situations where it’s as I described.

527

Thank you for having a reasonable approach to this.

I, too can agree that situations far outside of the norm CAN occur. But, if some of “the best students” (to use your term) are being brutalized by unreasonable homework assignment, how long is it really going to last? If the top 10% are faltering and coaches and music directors are seeing performance decreases from their student/athletes and student/musicians, things are gonna happen.

Maybe it’s a matter of what we are terming “best”.

528

It’s perfectly possible to handle a course load with many APs, too much homework, and a demanding EC on about 5.5 hours of sleep per night (sometimes less), without actually faltering–which is what a lot of the top students around here have been doing. It’s still brutal, in my opinion, and I don’t think it’s desirable for a teenager to have that type of schedule, even if they are managing it.

529

What if they enjoy it?

530

Here’s one data point. My kids go to one of those über-competitive high schools … average SAT almost 1300 / 1600, 8% of the class are national merit semifinalists, 85% of the kids get 4’s and 5’s on the AP exams, etc.

My last kid who graduated there took 6 AP classes as a junior (Calculus BC, Chemistry, English Lang, European History, Spanish, Computer Science). That was the busiest year. The biggest variable was whether his sport was in season or not. Here’s how I’d guess a typical week broke down for him when his sport was in season -



35 hours / week : official school day
27 hours / week : sports and EC's
27 hours / week : homework, writing papers, studying
20 hours / week : eating, showering, driving to school, etc.

He could just barely get to bed in time for 8 hours of sleep (pretty much needed 8 hours for his sport). Not easy, and there’s hardly anytime for socializing or going out with friends … maybe a couple hours on Saturday night, plus a few hours texting during homework time. Weekends have to be devoted to sports and schoolwork.

When his sport was not in season, he probably only spent 12 hours / week on EC’s, so he could go out with his friends for 6 hours each night on Fridays and Saturdays.

In our school district, taking a schedule like this is pretty much a requirement to get into a tippy-top school unless you’re a legacy or a recruit. Deciding to curtail his social life for 3-4 months a year was something he (and his parents) thought was worthwhile, but it was definitely his choice to make the sacrifice. It helped that it wasn’t year-round.

Looking back on it, I think he learned good time management skills from playing an intense sport while he was in high school. My son also thought taking the advanced / AP classes was definitely worthwhile despite the increased work load … one year he took a “regular” class for a graduation requirement and I doubt he learned very much or spent more than 20 minutes a week on homework for it.

I don’t think there was a lot of “busy work”, but there were a few dreaded “group projects”. Ugh. My kids probably could have spent more time writing papers instead though; I think that would have improved their writing skills.

Hard for me to know how other children handled their work load. Unless you’re in their house everyday you just don’t know. He did have a couple friends spend a week at our house when their parents were out of town and it seemed like they needed an extra 10 hours / week for schoolwork for a total of about 37 hours / week… that’s actually an enormous amount of time if you use it well. Hell, it’s practically a full time job. What you can’t do is combine it with 30+ hours / week of sports and EC’s and/or socializing or watching TV.

I fully agree that this isn’t for everyone. You have to be a strong student and quite committed.

531

The point was never who might commute and have less time to helicopter. Or whether one’s work is more high-powered and demanding. Or who comes home for an early dinner. Again, that seems to go to defense, not wisdom.

You have a choice: let your kids endure what you consider inappropriate or you make changes. Sometimes, those changes are in your own attitude. You tell the kid to go to bed. You accept the possibility of B’s. You look at the kid’s growth and grounding and adjust accordingly. Ongoing. Maybe that project out of cardboard and cotton isn’t perfect. You don’t pretend it has to be or that they’ll get a zero and their college shot and their futures are doomed. You don’t blame others for your decisions or lack of them.

That’s one of the trickiest (and I think, weightiest,) parts of parenting: how to encourage interest, responsibility, standards and goals/dreams, while watching your individual kid and knowing when it’s the right level of challenge and when to pull back. We know there are parents of all origins, social class, occupation, whatever, who do this well- and who do it poorly. Which will we be? At a certain point, we have to accept that this is our responsibility and quit pointing fingers. We are still the parents.

532

No, my point all along is that if indeed this helicoptering is becoming a problematic trend, then just like any other bad trend like high divorce rates, crime rates, suicide rates, rates of heroin addiction, rates of home foreclosure etc., you have to look at the societal factors. People do not make choices in a vacuum. Why are so many parents behaving in this manner? What I meant to say in the post about jobs is that most people don’t just go looking for more work to do or ways to make their lives harder, unless there’s a very compelling reason. What is it in this case?

I don’t know that any convincing reasons for this pattern have been supplied by posters on this thread. Even if we assume that a large group of parents are now engaging in pathological levels of perfectionism, Ivy-seeking, trophy child behavior, the question is still why? Why now in the history in the US? Perhaps some of you think you could handle our competitive environment better, but as quantmech wrote, she considers herself an intelligent person and good problem solver and saw no solution. One can’t simply choose to “opt out” of the culture ones lives in without consequences, and those consequences may actually be worse than the problems one is enduring.

Calculus is D’s worst course. The reason she is taking calculus is that in 6th grade she did very well in math, so she was tracked into Algebra in 7th grade. She also got an A in algebra. She cannot graduate high school without 3 years of math, and calculus (she’s in the lowest level possible) is the only choice given her trajectory. She drops out, she doesn’t graduate. Yet last night D was up very late because she had spent hours struggling over a ridiculous math worksheet that is going to be graded as a test. D is not allowed to get help on the work since it’s a test, but I looked at it and sent the questions to my PhD friend to verify if I was correct in thinking several problems were actually badly worded and impossible to solve as written. My friend about had an apoplectic fit over it and ranted at the low quality of math teachers in our district, and confirmed my suspicions. So I told D to just make up certain data and solve that way to at least show she knew the math even though the physics aspects of the problem were plain wrong, which she did and then went to bed–but not after first wasting a whole lot of time and setting her back in her other homework. In years past, I would have sent her to bed and sent in a note to the teacher about why the questions were bad, but that method never yielded desirable results either, since people generally don’t like their failings exposed and then you have a vendetta situation and I need my D to pass and don’t want her to get an integrity violation. These are the kinds of situations we struggle with, and no doubt you all would have found wiser ways to handle them than I.

533

@TheGFG - “…and sent in a note to the teacher about why the questions were bad, but that method never yielded desirable results either, since people generally don’t like their failings exposed…”

I’m not trying to be difficult - but do you think that this ‘method’ didn’t work well because “people generally don’t like their failings exposed”? When someone (not your boss, not even in your line of work) criticizes you and says your work is “bad,” do you accept that your failing has been exposed? I think it can come to little good to be adversarial with the school and teachers who all WANT to be on the same team with you for your D’s education. (Or so I hope, that they want this.) What would this look like? Perhaps an email along the lines of, “D is working on her assignment, and she came to me with a question about problem #X, i.e. XYZ. Of course I will not discuss it with her under the academic integrity terms, but is there an answer you think I should give her from you?”

When you say that if she “drops out, she doesn’t graduate” - do you mean if she switches to a more appropriate math course she won’t graduate high school? If this is true, then it’s not the teacher, but rather the guidance/administration that you have a legitimate beef with. Your daughter should have access to an easier class that will not make her so miserable.

As a teacher, I also have questions about this math worksheet that is graded like a test - what’s the deal with that? Is the honor code so strong at your school that no one would violate its terms? Or was this a special make-up for your daughter or something? Was it assigned with just one day/night to complete it? Was it supposed to be timed? Proctored by you? I’m also curious about what the questions were, but probably it would violate some integrity for you to tell us. :slight_smile:

534

Gfg, I did understand about busy people having less time for things that aren’t of value. But helicoptering IS a value for some. At its best, it’s advocating, when your kid has needs. Or some helping. At worst, it can be mercilessly pressing the kid, whether realistic or not. In between, it can be a mix.

We’ve explored helicoptering on many threads. Why they do it ranges from wanting their kid to get somewhere in life (not bad, most of us are involved to some degree,) to neurotic, knee-jerk, unsympathetic needs for the kid to reach some level for parent reasons- MIT, doctor, wealthy, famous.

One can modify. One way: you don’t have to get a 4.0 +++ in the most rigorous classes and get to a college that cherry picks 4.0 plus ECs out the wazoo kids. A kid may occasionally be bored by the cotton project, ok. One of mine dropped back from AP calc to honors. (No wasteful projects in honors, for her.) And if honors had been a joke, we would have encouraged her to stay in AP but have realistic expectations. I’ve got annoyed tales of my own, too.

It’s not easy. And I know there are some schools where the tracking is so fixed that there’s rigmarole just to swap classes.

535

Did anyone read sample homework load @TheGFG posted in #487? Because people seem to have missed it. To me, it seems like a lot, and certainly much much more than the AP English class I took in high school, though this was about 7 years aa. I doubt it is normal in most schools. Maybe the solution in this case is to just move.

@Fretfulmother If I read the post correctly, there is no appropriate math class to switch to - Calculus is required to graduate and the current course is the lowest level.

536

An interesting anecdote about the “cotton ball” project and similar is that not too long ago I was talking to a school district administrator about “busy work” projects who grinned deviously and said they make sure that there is only one of them per year for each student.

537

I think that one of the points that TheGFG is making is that if there is a trend toward increased helicoptering (which there probably is), then we ought to think about the societal forces behind it.

Helicoptering might be a “value” in itself for some people, but I think a lot of it is probably anxiety driven (not necessarily related to top school admission).

Some of the suggested solutions to overloads involve directing the child–e.g., go to bed, drop out of the school play (if that’s even permitted), or don’t sign up for the school play in the first place. The workability of some of these depends on the child’s personality and the parent/child dynamics. Actually, directing the child seems to me like an alternative variety of helicoptering.

The phenomenon of the Tiger Mom takes directing the child to the extreme–no school plays, no sleepovers, we are not going to see the Parthenon even though you are in Athens with your grandparents, because we have rented a piano so that you can practice uninterruptedly . . .

538

I don’t think it is correct to say that helicoptering is an issue limited to UMC/professional families. I think that the same impulses just manifest differently based on a family’s own circumstances. Go to a rec league baseball or softball field, or take a look at the jockeying that goes on to get junior transferred to the right public high school so he can play for this or that basketball coach. It is the same type of behavior, but the outlets are limited because mom and dad who work at the grocery store don’t have the excess cash for private music lessons or niche sports. Even out here in fly over country the difference between the number and breadth of ECs, or specialized higher level courses, varies widely based on the income demographic of the student body. But a certain number of parents are going to do their best to shape their children’s path in a manner the parent finds most desirable given the options that are perceived to be open.

As to why people do this, I assume that depends on the particular biases and perceptions of the person asked. For me, the issue is a combination of a larger “everyone gets a trophy” culture and the parents’ perception that it will be harder for their kids to achieve the same level of some type of “success” than it was during the parent’s generation.

Two questions for the high school kids need to work 18 or 20 hour a day folks. One, I assume most of these uber rigorous schools are in districts which are more than adequately funded, meaning that there are adequate resources to hire good, experienced teachers. Assuming that is true, why do you think there is this broad misunderstanding of the workload? Or are you saying that the teachers know the normal workload is this intense, but for whatever reason are softballing the numbers to parents?

Second, I worked for a time in a very large law firm where they paid dumb young lawyers an obscene amount of money to work utterly ludicrous hours. One of the things you learn very early in that environment, which I have been told is not dissimilar to the lesson physicians learn during their internship and residency, is that while many people can function on less than four or five hours of sleep a night for a time, virtually everyone suffers a significant productivity drop off your ability to think and be productive. For me, in my mid twenties/early thirties, that limit was about seven to ten days. Having been through that experience it is almost unbelievable to me that high school kids routinely function that way. Is this really a consistent schedule, or are we talking about stuff that happens in spurts?

539

Well one thing I would be doing is to go to the district and say their math requirements are crazy. It should be something like "Three years of math in high school OR completion of Algebra 2 (or pre-Calc if you prefer.) No one should be forced to take calculus in high school.

I’ve always thought that having sleep-deprived residents wandering around hospitals in a daze making life and death decisions was a sub-optimal plan. So what if that’s the way it’s always been done.

540

I’m not buying that this is a societal problem. I think it exists in pockets- and if you live in one of those pockets and don’t buy into the ethos, it must stink to high heaven. But wander outside your “top schools, must take Calc to graduate” bubble… I doubt the parents in Trenton NJ or Bridgeport CT or Chelsea, MA are doing much helicoptering. These are communities within commuting distance of the uber-competitive towns and the teachers there struggle to keep their heads above water, let alone assign projects requiring parental help. Talk to administrators there- the biggest problems are kids who don’t have a fixed address (landlord kicks out the family- kids can end up in three schools in one single academic year), kids who come to school hungry or who don’t eat on the weekends when the free lunch isn’t available, or kids whose guardian is an elderly relative- usually female- who is also raising several cousins, siblings, etc. and doesn’t have the bandwidth to advocate for the child even though the desire and intentions are there.

As a society we are shortchanging millions of kids over the span of a generation or two.

The fact that AP Calculus is too rigorous and Honors Calc is required to graduate is not a societal issue.

Is it horrible if this is where your family has ended up living? no doubt.

But I still cannot believe that a solid student who isn’t a behavioral problem can’t get into a solid college without the string of EC’s and parental helicoptering that some of you are arguing. No matter what some Adcom is telling you. No kid has to stay up until midnight to get into Western CT State College or Stonehill or Framingham State or SUNY Purchase- even though those colleges abut communities where I’m sure there are lunatics who believe that this is not the case.