GFG, there are ways to do these thing in a quiet manner that it won’t be so obvious.
So the dean of one of the most impossible schools in US to get into, that requires both student and parent commitment above and beyond any normal level (driving to ECs that are world-class, driving to SAT prep, summer school, tutoring, who knows what else) now is saying these parents are too into their kids school and should just let the cards fall as they may (so it’s OK if some of them fail and get kicked out, or do poorly and stress out).
And sure the high five figure check has some meaning there too. You don’t want to be writing 5 or 6 of these or have snowflake fail out after one or two years of these checks and end up graduating, maybe, if you are lucky from NWSE podunk U with your accounts empty and possibly some student debt.
I think the fraction of parents who do enough for their kids is likely much less than you like to think. The parents who do too much are a small minority. When you publish that mass market paperback, who do you think will get the “message” and do less for their kids? Unfortunately, I think it will be the ones who always do the minimum. Helicopter parents are not going to change one bit. Caring involved parents with a bit of moderation will continue to be caring and involved, even if it just a weekly phone call and some helpful questions and ideas.
I think you need to support your kids, at least through freshman year, so they can figure out how to negotiate this new experience and have some support if things don’t go well. No, you don’t go talk to the dean, but if snowflake gets a C, you do bring up all the possible ways to bring that grade up. You might help them pick a schedule that won’t lead to either the 6 year plan or failing out of classes they are not ready for.
I wouldn’t even think it is remotely helicoptering if your child is starting a new job and you help them by being there to talk to and give them some life experiences with the company bully, a remote boss, an angry boss, too competitive colleagues, etc. At minimum, you would do what you would do for a friend or a sibling … and maybe some more.
I don’t see how it is possible that helicopter parents created the current elite college admissions arms race. The blame lies elsewhere. imho.
Well, you could cut out founding a club.
No, seriously, you may know some, but most of these kids aren’t doing everything all the time. Sports is daily, music practice can be, a job has a schedule, but some school year internships are Saturday, community service can be some hours once/month, whatever. All-State is really on a few practices over some short time period. Other competitions may need some intense attention, but not every week of the year.
You really don’t need national level awards or even state. Don’t need world class ECs. Don’t need umpteen AP classes. Don’t need passions, but-
Do need show the right energies and commitment. Your app needs to make sense to those adcoms.
And, if you cut the number of apps to a Stanford in half, you would still have a surplus of kids with great records.
^^We just had hundreds of posts on a thread about the necessary “AND” factor, and although I just skimmed it, posters seemed to agree an “AND” was necessary, in addition to top grades
I don’t believe helicopter parents made up this “AND” idea. I believe they just react to what they see. Some of them are pretty savvy.
Right. So if you aspire to a Stanford, most likely you participate in the admissions arms race. A few rare students don’t, and may still be successful, and then become the example where someone says it isn’t necessary to participate, colleges would much rather see originality. Students who achieved the recommended profile are just sort of boring, since there are so many. This really aggravates me. It’s an impossible situation for applicants. imho.
Basically, the schools are telling us how to parent. imho.
We could opt out. That may disadvantage our kids. Depends how we feel about the elite schools.
@TheGFG, in my few examples (just off the top of my head), each parent used whatever power they had to try to protect their kid from disappointment or failure that would have otherwise naturally resulted from the situation. They weren’t necessarily rich. The soccer volunteer’s asset was expertise and time. He expected it to give his child a competitive advantage that was not warranted based on talent. Believe me, he was extremely disappointed when it didn’t pan out (he argued vigorously that that was the way it worked in that league). And if I had just followed the typical way of doing things no one would have known. The theater parent made donations in advance expecting a certain result. When it didn’t pan out they took extreme action that caused some whispers in the short term, but the child was happy to perform in all those shows afterwards. Both the audiences and the college theater programs to which the kid ultimately auditioned were none the wiser. In the third example, the parents used the power of a group to bail their kids out of a difficult AP class. It didn’t matter what people might have thought in the school or community. All that mattered was protecting the transcript of those students for their college applications.
And of course, you could come up with other examples of where parents prevent disappointment by intervening at the front end rather than the back - e.g., by doing most of our kid’s science project for them. A child will be delighted by the good grade and blue ribbon and no one may ever know.
But that is all in the short term. The issue is how our children will react when they ultimately get benched, or aren’t cast, or get the grade they actually deserve and we are powerless to make a difference. Those reactions typically first start happening in college, when kids are away from their parents, and it was the author’s observations of those reactions that caused her to start this research.
Alh is right. The overwhelming consensus on the “AND” thread was that a student needed an exceptional something. Exceptional somethings don’t come easily or overnight; they are carefully developed and nurtured, albeit not necessarily for the purposes of college admissions. When that prodigy is practicing his violin 4 or 5 hours a day and still getting A’s in top classes, I’ll bet his mom is NOT making him do his own laundry or clean his bathroom.
@TheGFG, on its face this is not helicoptering. It appears that the mother was providing support the child absolutely needed to perform something at an exceptionally high and time-consuming level.
On the other hand, there are lots of Olympic athletes who live in college dorms. So I might question whether the young woman had properly explored whether the college itself may have been able to provide her with the resources she needed to continue to train and compete at such a high level.
I think that is right, TheGFG, and commitment to a stringed instrument is certainly something that is year-round. To play at a level of proficiency that would get a student into the fourth chair or better in the first violins, second violins, or cellos required much more than one hour per day of practice at our local school. For example, QMP was something like 17th chair cello with the one-hour per day level of practice. Also, the better players went to summer intensive camps.
A performance group (not strings) that QMP joined was also fall, winter, spring; and summer was added while she was in the group.
It seems to me that advising one’s children to do less in any sphere comes down to an alternative kind of parental directing–not helicoptering, but not leaving things totally up to the child, either.
When I think about this issue in the abstract, I think about Rita Levi-Montalcini’s autobiography, “In Praise of Imperfection.” She is a Nobel laureate, who–to the best of my knowledge–did not marry and did not have children. She opens the book with a poem by Yates, quoted here:
The Choice
The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
I find this poem intriguing, but I have to admit, I have some problem understanding it. I think that Levi-Montalcini is claiming in her book that she chose imperfection of the work and imperfection of the life. The result of no helicoptering by her parents? Actually, her father seems to have “anti-helicoptered,” because he did not want her or her sister to attend college, according to Wikipedia, “as he feared it would disrupt their lives as wives and mothers.” She was Italian.
I have immense respect for Levi-Montalcini–no mistake about that! But from my vantage point, it appears to me that she chose perfection of the work and not the life, by not marrying and not having children. Simultaneously avoiding any worry about whether she was an anti-helicopter, neutral, helicopter, or (in my spouse’s words), an Apache Assault helicopter.
(To avoid taking the thread off track, if you can help me with the interpretation of the Yates poem, please send me a PM. In particular, what choice does Yates think leads to “an empty purse,” is this a metaphor for childlessness, and who has “the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse”? Or maybe “an empty purse” is just what results if your children go to a “top” school and you are full-pay, but not wealthy. 
)
SoCalPapa, given that it was the University of Oregon which regularly trains Olympic runners, I doubt the girl would have lacked for much, mother or no mother. But she likely did not know that before she arrived and needed to be sure Mom could come and help her out when necessary.
QM, sent you a PM
“The overwhelming consensus on the “AND” thread was that a student needed an exceptional something.” As I recall, most posters were giving their own opinions. And/or a few anecdotes. That something doesn’t need to be extreme.
Sounds like you had a lot of cello players.
If you want HMS, you need to be that quality. The shame isn’t in the kids who can handle that and still be grounded, or even thrive,etc. It’s when the kid does struggle, parents insist on their own goals, or, as someone pointed out, don’t help in effective ways that still let the kid flourish.
Thanks to SocalPapa for the explanations.
Easier said than done.
“Easier said than done.”
Not really, elite colleges just need to stop expecting kids to have a 4.0 GPA with a rigorous course load. The majority of students who aim for this are making big trade-offs including lack of sleep. My daughter is a junior taking 4 AP classes and 2 challenging honors classes. She is in school for 23 hours/week plus 12-15 hours of sports. This is not uncommon for the top 10% of students in her school. The day to day pressure to perform perfectly is too much for adolescents; we don’t ask this much of college students.
“Such “overhelping” might assist children in developing impressive resumes for college admission. But it also robs them of the chance to learn who they are, what they love and how to navigate the world.” — Dean Lythcott-Haims
I read a book about Richard Feynman, a Nobel winner in physics who was truly a genius. Reading about his childhood, I was struck by how he spent his time. He had a self-created lab in his bedroom, he fixed radios and he did stuff like building a burglar alarm. He taught himself math. He solved puzzles. His dad wanted him to be a scientist, but he acted on that only by teaching him what he knew, reading to him and encouraging his experimentation. If he were a child today, he would probably have play dates, homework, summer science camps and travel soccer. I do think modern parents are robbing their children of the free time that allows them to learn who they are. I wonder how different Feynman would have been if he were raised by modern standards.
Yes, really. Elite schools have plenty of students who don’t need helicoptering. The challenge would be to distinguish which are which before you admit them.
Maybe we shouldn’t expect the fastest runners in the Olympics, either. Or pick baseball teams based on who really, really loves the sport.
You can extract yourself from the competition for Stanford. After all, the workload, once there, is tough, too.
I think it is important to recognize that there are trade-offs involved in all of the decisions by students and their parents. Some students will conclude that certain pay-offs aren’t “worth the candle,” and won’t pursue them. Some parents may agree. Some may disagree, but do nothing. Others may disagree, and try to influence their children’s choices to varying extents.
There are trade-offs in helicoptering. Some of the practices listed as helicoptering on this board strike me as unethical, and I could not imagine trying them (e.g., exerting influence on a coach or casting director). In practically all of those cases, even if I did think they were ethical, we would not have had the influence or money to affect an outcome. Fourth villager? Again? And some of the coaches and casting directors did not seem like the types who could be influenced in any case.
There are trade-offs in doing the laundry for your children, or in preparing breakfast for them, or packing their lunches, so that they can pursue demanding interests. Then again, some people’s careers are not compatible with doing any of these things for their children, nor with “schlepping” them around to various EC’s before they can drive.
Yes, there were a lot of cellists at QMP’s high school! There were roughly 11 who were not seated as highly as 17th chair, and that did not even count the separate freshman orchestra. The students with excellent musicianship tended to come from the Suzuki program, which they started at 3 or 4. Students who hoped to be first-chair something, but had not been in Suzuki as pre-schoolers, generally opted for the viola. QMP preferred the sound of the cello.
My spouse also played the cello in his high school orchestra. In fact, he was the entire cello section. He had taken no cello lessons, and only knew where the notes were on the two lower strings. So he converted everything in real time to those strings, while playing. I guess this involved transposition, but I am not enough of a musician to be sure.
The point that I feel that lookingforward has not really responded to: The ability to thrive in an intense high school setting depends quite a lot on the nature of the intensity, as well as the nature of the child. The nature of the intensity is environmentally determined, and not very easily modified by the parents (short of being able to move).
EC’s that are not year round would be great! There might have been some of them at QMP’s school, but most of the “usual suspects” in EC’s were essentially year round.
The fact that some students in some other schools thrive (academics + friends + sleep) on what looks like an intense academic schedule makes me wish that the local high school would adopt the practices of those school districts. Perhaps I should join the PTO now and push for changes to make the local school more like those places, to benefit students there now–if only I knew what and where those schools were, so I could identify their specific practices! I am pretty sure that New Trier, where students reportedly avoid scheduling lunch in order to add an extra AP to their schedules and improve their class ranks, is not one of them. Ditto for Newton Any-Direction. Probably not TJ. Probably not Stuy–but maybe there are some “Super-Sleepless” there, or at TJ.
The only students that I felt were truly thriving at QMP’s particular school were a subset of the students who chose friends + sleep. But that choice too has its trade-offs down the road, and by no means just in terms of getting into a “tippy-top” college.
We apparently did not have any of the students who were biologically gifted with very low sleep demands.