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

Parents Forum
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@FallGirl I agree, I really enjoy attending my kids’ events. In fact there was a two year period where I attended every single one of my DD’s select soccer games - I had to as I was her coach! It was one of the best two years of our lives. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But my daughter’s ability to play soccer eventually outgrew my ability to coach it and she now plays for a higher-level team. But I still attend as many games as I can. It is a joy to see her joy in playing the game. (We are essentially at stage 3 - watch them do it.)

In any event, the issue is not with watching the games per se. Volunteering with the PTO is not a problem either. It’s wonderful and our schools need volunteers. But you have to ask why you are doing these things. After your child’s concert are you lecturing her throughout the car ride home about her improper bow hold even though she has a private music teacher who can help her with such things? Are you volunteering at the school, not to help the school in general, but rather so you can have more authority over your child’s teacher and/or have access to your child during the day to intervene in every conflict?

Also, to clarify one misconception created by the article, it is not any one action that the author is saying is a problem. Your child is not going to fail at life because you bring her lunch to school one day when they forget it. It is when you attempt to intervene in every aspect of your child’s life from 0-18 (plus) that you can run into trouble.

As the author explains in her book, this is a difficult problem for parents to see for themselves because the results, in an objective sense, might be very good. Your child might, in fact, gain admission to a world class university like Stanford, which most people would (wrongly) assume is conclusive evidence of world class parenting. The irony is, while your constant intervention may have helped your child gain that opportunity, that same tactic may impede your child’s ability to make the most of it.

That’s what triggered the author’s interest in delving into this topic. How could so many students who were so successful at the high school level struggle so much (functionally and emotionally, if not always academically) in the university environment? The myriad of experts she consulted (child psychologists, school counselors, researchers in education and parenting, etc.) often pointed to the same thing - a helicopter parenting style. It is not the only problem that can come up in the process of child rearing, but it is the focus of this particular book and is one that can be addressed without too much difficulty for those who find themselves caught up in it.

The author’s approach is not unknown to us parents. After all, how did most of us teach our children to read? We (1) read the book to them, (2) read the book with them, (3) watched them as they read their book, and (4) they started reading books completely on their own. But why limit that approach to reading? The goal of us parents should be to make ourselves less and less necessary. Each skill they develop in this way can provide lasting value.

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mom2and, I think the general consensus is that NHS is not an impressive EC by any means. However, its absence could be problematic for college admissions due to the possibility that it could signal an integrity violation, because of course the “good kids” all have membership. I mentioned the expanded requirements above precisely because NHS used to be a given for the better students–something they earned as a matter of course without even trying. Posters on this thread keep implying that if kids are stressed and parents are swooping in too much to over-help, it’s because they are striving for perfection or are obsessed with the top schools. What I was trying to say is that where I live, the world has become quite competitive such that even silly NHS now requires a lot of time and effort. Therefore, imagine what it takes to earn a more substantial honor! Demands have reason for everything else as well, like sports. A kid has to have played competitively for years to make our high school teams these days. I’m not saying it’s impossible; I hope D will get into NHS, though she lacks leadership that is not tied to her community service and may not. In summary, the demands on our kids in some regions of the country are substantial for even “basic” accomplishments like NHS and varsity athletics, which in my opinion has led to more parental involvement and perhaps over-involvement.

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Side note: not all kids mention NHS, even when they are in it. No risk, if they have the rest of the goods. If the requirements at one hs are crazy, you can still list the components on the app- that community work, that leadership role. In fact, for the many kids who do just list “NHS,” without mentioning what they did or do, adcoms don’t know what it represents, beyond a hs society. They know standards vary widely, with some hs just looking at gpa.

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The point I have been trying to make is that the statement “some kids do fine” is not useful to a parent, if there are no kids in the local high school who are “doing fine,” and there is no realistic option to change schools. I don’t doubt that there are high-school environments where “some kids do fine.” My high school was like that. In all honesty, I do not believe that QMP’s high school was like that. At any rate, I did not meet those kids, if they existed, nor did I hear of them.

The advice to “figure it out” is not useful to me now, either, except perhaps with regard to purely hypothetical grand-children. I openly admit that I have not figured it out, actually. I tried to observe QMP along the way, and see that thing were basically all right, though more sleep would have been a lot better, in my opinion.

I think TheGFG’s children have been involved in very substantial EC’s, which is part of the picture.

When I was a post-doc at MIT, there were multiple softball leagues, including Fast Pitch, Slow Pitch, and Kentucky-Fried. In my opinion, it would be nice if more activities were offered at the “Kentucky-Fried” level so that students could try a wide variety of options, to find their niches, instead of needing an all-out commitment from the get-go.

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QM, thanks. I completely agree about the lack of sleep. Neither of my kids knew a single top student who was ever in bed before 1 AM. Now when D is up very late and has to post an assignment to Googledocs, there are plenty of other kids in her class who are also posting at 1 or 1:30 AM. There’s a time stamp. At the high school open house, D’s first period teacher said he hates teaching an honors class first thing in the morning because “the honors kids never get enough sleep and it’s hard to get them going.”

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You are responsible for your kids. Presumably, there is lots you learned along the way. If your kid is struggling, not getting enough sleep, you need to take action, as a parent. Different reactions, depending.

What do you expect to “learn,” as your own child’s parent, from my observation that, “…many kids do take to these expanded expectations and stretch well. And sleep, have friends, etc?” It wasn’t parenting advice. it was a comment, in context.

For me, enough of this OT.

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One tip for young people who might read this: think twice about marrying somebody who has intense helicopter parents. They may not be the best in-laws to have.

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Sometimes students who are up late with homework are multitasking. They are texting and surfing the web as they do physics. Our computers are in family spaces. It helps getting homework done with true focus.

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I tend to think modeling may be the most important parenting tool available, and SocalPapa’s steps seem to me part of the modeling process. Sometimes kids who seem to “just get it” have been the beneficiaries of really positive modeling and sometimes this isn’t even purposeful on the part of the adults in the child’s life. Those kids are pretty lucky.

It is one thing to say there is a problem with education if your own kids haven’t been as successful as might have been anticipated. In that case there was obviously some problem, somewhere. However, when posters whose kids have been extremely successful, in all the ways we tend to measure academic success here on this board, say there are problems, I think it is worth considering their perspective. If the parents of the tippy top students who got into the tippy top colleges think HS was problematic, that is very interesting to me. If those same posters are still worried about this when their kids are very successful graduates of those colleges, I find it even more interesting. Because at that point I have to wonder about them succeeding in spite of unrealistic HS expectations. Not all are so fortunate.

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Thanks, alh and TheGFG. When it comes to modeling–whooh!–I am very bad at that too, unless it’s modeling being a workaholic. :slight_smile:

Friends + sleep is a viable option, to be sure. These days, I sometimes think it might be a superior one. Then I think about a faculty colleague of mine (not any variety of Asian) who asserted, “The American grad students are stupid.”

There are certainly helicopter moms and Tiger moms (and dads) out there. But the student who called his parents to get a UPS box up to his dorm room is the product of a larger environment than just his family. This situation has multiple causes. (Prepping for the SAT should not be one of them.)

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frazzled2thecore: #32

I agree with this. Some of us read this book on another thread and it really opened my eyes. What some of us think is really run-of-the-mill middle class parenting, and modeling, would be incredibly advantageous to kids who don’t have the same access. It can have a huge impact on opportunities. I realized how very much I take for granted.

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The kids I know who succeed at our high school, whether it be in athletics, music, or academics, all have very involved parents. The money, the time, the driving around to training and lessons and practices and tutoring, laundry-doing etc. needed to succeed in this milieu necessitates it. I think we do need to distinguish that sort of involvement from helicoptering. My friend’s son is going to an elite school full time, plus running his own business, and occasionally doing an internship to boot. Thus she often does things for him like write personal e-mails, order his groceries, and make car repair and doctor’s appointments. I never did any of that for my kids, but mine weren’t running their own start-ups with no secretary at age 20 either.

I still don’t know how people can supposedly save their kids from failure and disappointment. I don’t think it’s even remotely possible. Parents can soften the blow perhaps, but they can’t prevent the hard knocks. Lastly, ADD and autistic spectrum disorders are on the rise nationally, which I think is also a cause of greater parental oversight.

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If admissions folks are so concerned that kids with perfect resumes are being helicoptered, then why don’t they stop admitting those kids instead of perpetuating the problem? Yeah, I thought so.

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I’ve seen it happen many times and in many contexts. A few examples:

(1) One of my players was upset about playing time and a key parent referee volunteer threatened to quit unless it was increased.

(2) The child of an extremely wealthy donor to a local children’s performing group was upset with casting. The parent got the board to fire the program’s director and cancel the production. The child had no subsequent problems with casting.

(3) A new AP history teacher at my D’s top suburban HS turned out to be a extremely tough grader. He gave most of his students a bad progress report grade. Despite it being long after the deadline to drop the class, a posse of irate parents petitioned the school to let their children leave the class. The school made an exception and the kids with the low grades were all let out of their commitment. Only 9 students remained.

The list could go on and on.

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@GossamerWings, the book’s author never worked in admissions so I’m not sure where your comment is coming from. Nonetheless, it is notable that the median SAT scores of Stanford students are lower than most of the other top schools (even though they have just as many, if not more, top scoring applicants). Part of that is athletics but the other part is that Stanford isn’t actually looking for kids with “perfect resumes.” For that matter, neither are those other top schools. Take MIT for example: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/whats_the_big_deal_about_402

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Sorry @SocalPapa - I should have said “schools” and not “admissions folks” if we are to assume that the opinions of the Stanford Dean are not representative of the rest of the school.

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As Gossamerwings comments above, the top universities just love to admit students with national level achievements. Seriously, how do you all think those students accomplish such amazing things, on top of spending 7 hours a day in school, studying and doing homework (including work for those extra online or CC classes), putting in their community service hours, running the club for which they are founder and president, and so on? In many cases, I suspect someone is carrying some of their load for them. As an example, since my D was good runner, she followed the careers of the best distance runners at that time. One young lady who was a little older than D, was really exceptional–she even went to the Olympic Trials while only in high school. When she was choosing her college, one criterion was that as a freshman she be permitted to live off campus in an apartment. Apparently, she needed for her mother to be able to come and visit her, to cook for her, and help her out. Is that a helicopter situation, or is it that even the cream of the crop need support to be able to achieve at that high level?

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Indeed. I vaguely remember from the news that there was a father who bought a summer camp that was about to close down. That was not to disappoint his son. Son wanted to continue to go to the camp. That is one of the more extreme examples. They are numerous.

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Socalpapa, we have all seen stuff like that happen, but it certainly isn’t new to this generation of parents. The rich and powerful have always behaved imperiously at times. Also, in your examples, people other than the parent were complicit in allowing those things to happen. Clearly, the parental behavior hurts the child, but it still doesn’t spare him much. He initially did not get a good part, and he knows that. He also knows that he only got good roles after that because his parent pulled strings, and he likely knows too that the other kids and parents know the situation and think he’s a fraud.

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@GossamerWings: In this case, she is a former dean, so I would suggest that she represents no part of the school. But I agree with you in the sense that the extraordinarily-competitive admissions process at elite colleges (together with parents’ not-always-accurate perception of how that process works) is a major contributor to the problem.