It has always been about who you know. And I absolutely advise students to take advantage of this.
But when you don’t “know” someone, it is up to your own skills. So a hovering parent that cannot provide an inside connection is probably doing their now “adult” a major disservice.
Ultimately, each person needs to be able to keep their employment no matter how they got it!
I continue to thing this “Overparenting Crisis” is the just the current Edu-fad. It is true that there are some over the top parents out there, but in my experience, they are vastly outnumbered by the clueless, and uninvolved parents.
For the vast majority of parents, more involvement would be better.
To the parent who was bitching out his 16 year old kid, and acting like his life is over because he only scored a 29 on the ACT, I would like to see you take it right now and score better. Perhaps he can improve, but that is a very good score. Screaming is not the right approach.
To the parent who thinks his son is in geometry because her homework had to do with “completing the square,” that is algebra.
To the parent who described her son as a “math genius” and then explained that he is starting high school in the fall and he has “already finished pre-algebra,” he actually isn’t a math genius.
To the parent of a high school senior who wanted to know what their son needs to “start doing” to get into an Ivy League school, it is way too late now if he hasn’t been doing the right things up to this point.
For every helicopter parent there are dozens of parents with little or no idea about what is going on at their kids school, who never look at the homework, who don’t attend conferences, and who have no idea what it would take to get into a good top 100 college, say Michigan State (Go Green!). I am just talking about a solid University, not the esoteric fun house world of top 20 admissions.
The real crisis has always been and continues to be parents who are too uninvolved and uninformed about their kids education. The helicopter parents and tiger parents may provide an occasional entertaining side show, but they are not the big problem. If the average parent would just spend one hour per week to be informed about their kids academics, it would make a huge difference. Write an email to the teacher, attend a conference, look at their homework, if your student has to read “To Kill a Mockingbird”, then you read it too and talk with them about it. Take just a little time to be informed about what they are doing and learning.
They’d have to go pretty far to outdo my mother.
When I got married, four years after graduating from high school (and 2 days after graduating from college), she submitted a wedding announcement to the local newspaper. She gave them the name of the wrong high school. Apparently, she didn’t even know the names of the schools her two kids had attended.
OP: I read the article. Plus I’ve heard both these authors interviewed on other shows. As I’ve implied, I think they deal in sweeping generalities, and play on the anxieties of modern (middle class) parents. In general, I think this about most parenting advice books. All the smug commenters on the NPR page who piled on with comments about how horrible modern parents and children show the ugly side to this constant critique of parents.
This is why I am sympathetic to public school teachers. They get the same sort of treatment, with book after book by supposed experts describing how bad they are. It must be infuriating! At least parents don’t have to worry about losing their kids when they go too far. I expect the constant scrutiny of parents and the scrutiny of teachers are related in some way, but that’s just a wild guess.
Back to parents: to be fair, as @gettingschooled stated at #24, there probably are some parents who could benefit from the advice and if they read the book and make some changes in their parenting style, more power to them. However, I just can’t get into attacking a subgroup of parents about dumb things they do. No one is perfect.
Finally, this is not a crisis. There are real crises easily observed in the world, this is not one.
@Much2learn , I don’t disagree with your assertion that uninterested parents are an issue, but it’s not an either/or argument.
Academic neglect can be as harmful as helicoptering. In fact, many of my peers became helicopter parents because of their experiences as a kid with their parents not valuing academics (me included-parents said “college is for suckers”).
They boomeranged into over-worrying because of the realization of how many opportunities they missed as kids.
I would say my worst offenses as a helicopter parent involved fiercely battling the administration to ensure my kids had access to opportunities that they had earned by the numbers, but the teachers, for whatever reason (typically gender bias against females in STEM) had not recommended them for the class/project/opportunity/test, etc.
I wasn’t interested in “firing bad teachers” like another poster; I was interested in protecting opportunities for my kids. You have to recognize at a certain point, though, that once they get to high school, they have to learn to fight for their own opportunities, and also suffer the consequences when they blow their opportunities.
THAT was a hard transition for all of us-they were used to having me go to bat for them and had no abilities at all in that area. It continues to be a teachable transition…
Haha, I didn’t mean it that way but it happened. I was just planning to clear the “weeds” for my kid before she had to attend that high school. The principal wanted parents to send their kids there.
D1 is beginning to think about getting married and having children. She said to me, “I can’t believe you actually let us drive by ourselves. A car is a killer machine. What kind of parent were you!” Guess who is going to be more of a helicopter parent.
I think that uninterested parents are a red herring. Don’t we tell our kids, “I don’t care what other kids’ parents let them do, I care what you do”?
Here’s another set of quotes that I found interesting from the article:
At the first teacher’s conference every year in middle and high school, I told the teachers that in Kindergarten my daughter’s teacher said that her homework was for her to do, not for parents to do, and that she would never let me help.
Of course it helped that in the NYC schools my daughter attended, many parents didn’t speak English well enough to help their kids with homework.
Yeah, well, when I see some of the everyday people out there who can tell you all about the Kardashians but couldn’t name a member of the Supreme Court or the Cabinet, or who argue on Facebook about how “free speech” is threatened when a private company fires a private individual for saying X (not realizing that the concept of free speech has to do with government intervention, not private), or who think that the earth is 6,000 years old because that’s what it says in the Bible … I’m ok being helicopter-y.
Calling other people “helicopter” parents because you don’t agree with the way they parent is a form of bullying. It’s not our business to pressure other people to parent the way that works for us. If you want to choose a hands-off parenting style, go for it. But allow other parents to make whatever choice works for them.
Hmmm. How would you characterize calling people who disagree with you “bullies?”
I’m curious as to the actual percent of parents who overstep as discussed in the article and books. There are definitely over the top parents but I suspect they’re in the minority. I would love to hear from a college staff member how many parents call for grades or interfere in their kids’ new lives.
We have many family members who are public school teachers and administrators so Max & I have always been sensitive to how we’ve handled issues that cropped up in the classroom. Neither one of us has ever advocated for a higher grade, a different teacher or done our children’s homework.
But we were called helicopter parents (to our face!) by an elementary teacher and an administrator who didn’t want to accommodate our children as dictated by state law. Naturally we took an active role in solving the problem, which once addressed not only benefitted our children, but many others as well. So I will proudly take on the helicopter parent mantra if it means a better education for our kids.
On occasion one of us has dropped off a forgotten lunch or emailed a homework assignment left on the kitchen table. But that’s how we support one another in our family. If this were a daily occurrence then we’d have a problem.
I have an acquaintance/friend (probably only because our kids grew up together as we don’t have a lot in common otherwise) who seems to be a non-parent when it comes to academics. She and her husband are fairly well educated but I guess that doesn’t guarantee good parenting skills. DS1 was a mediocre student, but at least had some motivation, made it through HS and is attending a cc. DS2 graduated from HS with less than a 2.0- I didn’t know that it was possible to graduate with such a low GPA. She uses me for a sounding board, but I have learned she really does not want any advice. Our HS uses Naviance, and parents can access their kid’s progress in any class at any time. She would wait till progress reports came out, see that #2 was failing, and then start asking teachers why he was failing. They would point her to his on-line records which showed no homework turned in and failing tests since the beginning-all she had to do was check occasionally. The school suggested some remedial classes to help him catch up, but she said she didn’t want him in with the “dummies”. They finally had him tested and he was diagnosed with severe ADD (it was pretty obvious by talking to him for 2 minutes that he could not focus). Started him on counseling and meds but quit shortly after because he didn’t really want to do it anymore. I suggested that maybe she could have him do his studying in a common area so she could monitor him at a set time everyday, but she said that it was hard because he was so tired after going surfing after school. I avoid her now that the kids are older- I get too crazy listening to her. She is a very involved parent at school as long as it has something to do with sports. Her kids are very good athletes and I think she planned for them to get athletic scholarships. They are probably talented enough, but someone forgot to mention the need for decent grades with athletic scholarships. Maybe helicopter parents aren’t so bad afterall, but the point is that either extreme is unhealthy for kids.
There are some even more extreme cases. I have heard there were parents that wanted to get into the job interview of their college kid. I am sure I have been doing a lot more for my than my parents for me when I was in college. I was basically on my own since junior year at HS and left my family once I entered college. While I do check my D’s student account to make sure there is no payment due.
Oldfort, your kids SHOULD benefit from your experience and wisdom, particularly if you achieved higher degrees yourself, and with home buying, absolutely. You definitely should share all of your experience in these respective fields.
(I’m in a real estate related field, so I totally get what you are saying, but that is different. You are merely illuminating the process and how it works, not controlling it. I’ve done that for many people, neighbors, friends, and family members).
But you shouldn’t insert yourself into the application process for university that needs to be owned by the one going to school, in my view. Some parents go beyond that to literally taking over and prodding the kid to do everything. There is a huge difference.
@austinmshauri “Calling other people “helicopter” parents because you don’t agree with the way they parent is a form of bullying. It’s not our business to pressure other people to parent the way that works for us. If you want to choose a hands-off parenting style, go for it. But allow other parents to make whatever choice works for them.”
@hunt Hmmm. How would you characterize calling people who disagree with you “bullies?”
I think @hunt is making a joke? Not sure.
He didn’t call anyone a “bully,” but he did identify a bullying behavior.
I have seen uninvolved parents use the “helicopter parent” and “tiger parent” labels to rationalize why they don’t let their kids participate in sports or significant extracurricular activities. They like to talk about “just let them be kids” they don’t need to be running off to this and that, and spending their evenings doing homework. For many parents the definition of a helicopter parent, or tiger parent, is any parent who is more involved than they are.
@Motherofdragons “I would say my worst offenses as a helicopter parent involved fiercely battling the administration to ensure my kids had access to opportunities that they had earned by the numbers, but the teachers, for whatever reason (typically gender bias against females in STEM) had not recommended them for the class/project/opportunity/test, etc.”
We had to do this once for a girl in math. I don’t view it as helicoptering because there is no way that the kid could have gotten through to the knuckle heads in charge. To me, helicopter parenting is fighting battles that your kid can or should fight on their own. However, with an issue like proper placement, it is not possible to let them handle that on their own. If you don’t advocate for your own kid, no one in going to.
Good question, Hunt. Am I a bully? I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve spent many years as a homeschool parent, GS leader, coach, and BS leader and I’ve listened to other leaders call our troop/team parents “helicopter parents” to their faces with the sole intent of pressuring them to not get involved. As leaders we get to go to every meeting, sporting event, camping trip, and field trip with our kids, yet a parent who wants to attend an event now and then is a “helicopter parent”? If the parents had seen half of what I witnessed or was told about later by the leaders involved [falsifying paperwork (ironically enough, the troop honor code) to council, using parents who worked in district to obtain private student records, cheating on merit badges, stealing from convenience stores on field trips] they would never have left their children alone with those people.
Now maybe it’s our area and the term takes on a different meaning in other parts of the country, but here it’s used to get parents to fall in line. District personnel use it when parents repeatedly ask the same questions at board meetings (if the board answered them, they’d probably quit asking, but I guess when answering opens you up to a state investigation you have reason to dance around). GS leaders use it to embarrass parents so they quit coming to events (then complain pretty vociferously later on when they end up doing all the work). But I live in a district where the public behavior specialist publicly (on record) called a parent who disagreed with her a b*tch, so perhaps our district is an anomaly.
This happens here, too. I’m a parent advocate, so maybe I just run into it more often than most people. It’s too often used by people in a position of power to get thise with less power to do what they want. I’ve done what I could to protect the children, so if that makes me a bully then I guess I am. And maybe my experience is too limited to know a different connotation for the phrase, so if parents here mean it in another way then I apologize for calling them bullies when that wasn’t their intent.
So I take it that referring to helicoptering behavior (as opposed to calling somebody a helicopter parent) wouldn’t be bullying behavior?
This stuff is hard!
Helicopter parenting reminds me of the hand-wringing over latch-key kids (remember those?) back in the 80’s. There is a lucrative market for parenting advice offered by “experts” who sow seeds of doubt and insecurity. I was a so-called latch-key kid back in the late 80’s when such experts fretted over the fate of children growing up without sufficient adult supervision. I was the kid who never had a parent chaperone a field trip or bake cookies for the class or to drive me to activities (I walked, biked or asked for a ride from friends). I did everything (cook my meals, clean, study, apply for college) except pay the bills, because my low-income parents were making extreme sacrifices to make sure I did not have to work and focus on studies. My parents performed a miracle by putting all five of us latch-key kids through college. We grew to be responsible, employed adults who live comfortable middle class lives. My parents knew what was right for our family, even if that meant being judged negatively at the time for “underparenting.”
Now, as a parent myself, I try to emulate what my parents did for me: make sacrifices for my children’s future. In practice, I am very involved in my kids’ education and in ways that my parents did not have the wherewithal to do. The contrast makes some people think I’m doing the opposite or “overparenting.” But the truth is, I am demonstrating the same commitment to my kids’ futures as my parents did for me. I let my children fail, but I console them and encourage them to not give up - something my parents did not have time to do for me. I do not shield them from consequences, but I advise them on how to right the wrong or otherwise rectify the situation - whether it is at home or at school. I nag them into advocating for themselves at school, particularly when cultivating relationships with teachers. Achieving this level of involvement requires financial security and time, which many parents do not have. My kids are blessed because I do.
Each family is different and we have different coping strategies based on our circumstances. But most of us share in common a desire to give our kids the best start in life. The important thing is to resist blaming ourselves for not doing it the way the “experts” think it should be done.