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

Parent Cafe
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I think a 20-minute video probably takes longer to put together, per minute, than a 3-4 minute video–of course, that does depend on the nature of the video. And of course the video equipment was not of professional quality–it was what the households had around. But the quality of the video equipment in itself is not related to the time required for such a project, as far as I can tell.

Primary source = interviews with people who were knowledgeable on the topic, which included recent times. One person the students interviewed was willing to talk about the topic, but only on the condition that he was not taped, nor quoted, nor identified. Complicating this whole thing is the fact that I actually have no accurate idea of how long the students spent on the project.

If one had multiple projects of this type, with feedback as one went along, then it would be easier for the students to apply a “rule of rationality.” In a lot of cases, these were high point total, one-off projects, so there was not much efficiency due to transferability of learned skills, as there would be if students were making a video each week.

As far as mis-estimating required times by factors of 3 or 4–my Ph.D. advisor suggested that the ratio between the time a project actually takes and the time one thinks it will take is Pi. This still seems pretty accurate for me.

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Personally, I think there is a difference in “one off” projects that are maybe intended to extend over a quarter or a semester and a general homework load, which is what I thought we were discussing. That said, and particularly for a one off project, I think it is incumbent on the teacher to give the kids direction in what is expected, particularly if you are talking about a project that requires extraneous details like production quality, etc.

And as far as time estimates, I think there is a difference between estimating time required to do a graduate level (presumably research) project and estimating the day to day homework requirements of AP American History. My job as a lawyer requires me to relatively accurately estimate the time it would take others to do certain tasks. Not unexpectedly, it is fairly easy to estimate how long it should take to do simple, rote tasks. Accuracy decreases drastically the larger the project gets. I would assume it would work the same in academia.

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Our better STEM teachers were pretty good at estimating the amount of time it would take most students to complete routine homework, mostly by assigning ungraded lessons to be completed in class at the beginning of a unit and give students a baseline.

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I become increasingly more grateful to the teachers my kids had the longer this thread goes.

By HS I don’t think they had a single “project” except for art (and all work was done in class except for a few museum visits). They did need to attend a few concerts for music appreciation (which was a fun family expedition- I especially remember one at a local no-name college where I was blown away by the talent in a Baroque Quartet…)

Everything else was straight up readin’, riting and 'rithmetic. Research papers done online and at a local library; no fancy A/V equipment, walk-on possible for junior varsity sports, one coach told one of my kids that he’d never be good enough for an actual competition against another school but if he wanted to join the team, participate in practices, and get PE credit for that he was more than welcome- but he didn’t need to travel or give up his weekends to compete. (which was a lovely suggestion for kids who loved the sport but weren’t stellar athletes).

Very grateful indeed. To the Spanish teacher who encouraged the kid to drop down. To the math teacher who suggested “working at your own pace”-- i.e. let the kid decide whether to get A’s in lower level or work harder for B’s in honors. And the college counselors who never suggested that a kid who went to bed at 11 pm was doomed to attend beauty college (not that there’s anything wrong with that option for a kid so inclined.)

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A big problem with time estimates is the huge variation in how long it will take someone to do something, even if they are on task. There are computer science education blogs that discuss how to teach CS to not just the top kids, and I’ve read that in a normal class, there is an order of magnitude variation in how long it will take the top and even the median students to complete a CS homework assignment. I’m sure one would find similar (perhaps factor of 2 or 3) results in HS math and composition.

I haven’t seen good solutions to this problem. At a elementary level, the suggestion would be differentiation–different output expectations for kids on different levels. This is more difficult to implement within a single HS class, because of fairness issues.

Re: Helicoptering
I thought about helicoptering in on a 10th grade English teacher, but didn’t. I advised my son with some unsuccessful strategies for dealing with a teacher, who to all appearances did not actually read and grade individual essays. Sure, I think she is either incompetent or lazy, but not enough to overcome my “don’t get involved” resistance.

I did helicopter in via email on a Spanish teacher who lost multiple test papers and entered zeros in the grading system just before end of term (same problem, both terms!).

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blossom’s kids’ school sounds really good.

My least favorite project was the Rube Goldberg device that had to be constructed for 8th grade science. The directions specified that the students should arrange to work at times when a parent could help them. We looked on the internet for ideas, and found a really great project that would satisfy the rubric. And it only took a team of about 20 Purdue engineering undergrads 1400 hours to complete!

This project would have been fine, and even fun, if there had not been other fairly demanding work going on at the same time.

This project has now become optional. Coincidentally, this was about the time that the teachers’ children were reaching 8th grade.

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I think one key fact is missing from this discussion … In my experience, most of my kids’ high school teachers were not cruel, unreasonable people. They generally seemed to like their students and had no interest in torturing them. Honestly, some of the teachers being described in this thread sound like they’d be at home in dungeons of the Marquis de Sade :slight_smile:

In our school there’s a sizable cohort of students who are taking many AP classes by junior year and doing sports or other time-consuming EC’s. The teachers were able to keep the workload survivable, and if for some reason many classes had a big test assigned for the same day the students would tell the teachers and usually someone would move their test by a day or two.

I would also say that in my experience even students in the exact same classroom can have radically different experiences. Some students can get a homework assignment done in 15 minutes; another might take 2 1/2 hours. Every kid has different strengths, organizational skills, maturity levels, and drive. I suspect good teachers know the range of times it will take the vast majority of their students. If a student is having to routinely put in 3-4 hours / day of homework for one high school class then chances are they’re in the wrong class and they have to figure out how to get in the right class and/or try to get help to correct a weakness in their understanding or their foundations.

My own kids liked their “harder” classes more (generally, at least) in part because there wasn’t as much of this BS project stuff that consumes oodles of time.

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I have to think that the teachers just don’t know how long the work takes, until their own children experience it. If any other students were doing the work appreciably faster and had no problems, it would be a different scenario. QMP took AP Calc BC as a 9th grader, got A’s and a 5, and took university math courses each year after that, so comprehension rate was not an issue. The university math classes were a welcome relief vis a vis the high school classes.

I always think with gratitude about the high school Latin teacher who had a syllabus comment that there would be no macaroni maps of Italy (and no extra credit of any type).

I didn’t helicopter about the time the high school work took, and I don’t think other parents did, either . . . which is probably why the teachers didn’t know until their children experienced it.

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Catching up. I do think it’s societal in that, as more kids are encouraged to college, many families want to distinguish their kids from those who just roll out of hs into the closest option. CC parents tend to want the “right” opportunities for their kids.

Post 550, GFG: if I’m understanding, the worksheet was flawed? So how did the other class kids manage it?

And, some parents agree the homework you cited (English?) was excessive- but you said she was on a block schedule.

Out of curiosity, how many classes was she taking simultaneously? Ime, it’s not usually the same as kids on a standard schedule. So the homework is accelerated…

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“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.”

This is where I disagree. One can choose to “opt out” of that culture. And if you’re secure in yourself, there really are no bad consequences. We chose to help put our kids on track for really good schools – but we never competed in any such “culture” around us because we would have done the same regardless of whether all the other neighborhood kids were shooting for Northern Illinois University or HYP.

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PG, I made a point quite a few posts ago, but it is easy for it to become lost in a discussion of this length: I am of the belief that a student should do the assigned homework. This has nothing to do with the caliber of college one might be aiming for. One cannot opt out of that without changing school districts, or home-schooling, though perhaps that would have been best. I think TheGFG is in a similar situation.

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At its roots, helicoptering shows a lack of faith in your child to lift his own weight.

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I think it reflects a lack of trust in a school that makes pretend that they are a meritocracy with an even playing field, and that successful students are always functioning without a private support system.

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Right–this is why we made our children change their own diapers when they were infants.

More seriously, kids should lift their own weight in circumstances in which they can, but in some situations they really can’t and need parental help. Figuring out the line is the trick.

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There’s “parenting” and there’s “helicoptering”. Diapers pretty clearly fall in the “parenting” category. Or maybe the “nurse” or “nanny” category, depending.

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Our parenting is based on two thoughts: I’m not and butt. I’m not you personal uber. I’m not your social secretary. I’m not you maid. I’m not you personal chef. I’ll feed your butt. I’ll cloth and house your butt. And I’ll love your butt.

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OK, but the clarity fades as we get into more difficult situations. That’s really my point.

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I think parental behavior varies by district. I also think we are seeing some of the effects of the so-called “Big Sort;” there is a book by that name that outlines how we are choosing ever more to live near people like us (like us on multiple levels, down to political leanings and hobbies.)

There was a study going around in the '90s which purported to show that parental involvement correlated with educational outcomes. Thus, schools developed mandatory parent involvement “opportunities,” such as projects which relied upon parental support. It’s easier to encourage parents to “monitor and support” their children in the early grades than to discourage them from helping in later grades, especially when the tactic pays off. The advent of online grading portals has accelerated the trend.

We are lazy parents. Our involvement was limited to procuring supplies and vetoing overly ambitious projects. It was very interesting to observe other students’ projects on the project fair days. Truly amazing how adept preschoolers were with power tools and hot glue guns.

In my darker moments, I definitely see clear rationing of educational opportunities in the districts I know. In one instance, at gathering of family and friends in another town, we learned that a bright boy of our acquaintance had been given a schedule at his local high school with no science class. Not “oh, he got the bad teacher.” Not in a regular level rather than honors (and this boy should have been in honors.) No science class at all.

Call us helicopter parents if you will, but my cousin and I spent significant time convincing his mother that she had to physically show up at the guidance department office to get his schedule changed. Not a phone call, not an email, but a body waiting in the waiting room. She followed our advice. His schedule was changed. He’s now at our state flagship on a full scholarship. I doubt he would have had the academic record to qualify for a scholarship, had he not had an adequate high school transcript.

As Annette Lareau portrayed in her study, Unequal Childhoods, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/explaining-annette-lareau-or-why-parenting-style-ensures-inequality/253156/, different classes parent differently. We are involved, upper middle class mothers. She was a working class mother who trusted the school system more than we did. Our default mode was to confront an obviously wrong schedule. Her default mode was to assume the school must have had a reason.

Thus this morning I will advance the theory that if a dean at Stanford perceives a rise in “helicopter parenting,” it may be because its student body is drawn from the middle and upper classes. This is not an income-based class division, but a behavior-based division.

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Diapering is so clearly different because human young’uns can’t get through that phase on their own.

Helicoptering takes place where parents are trying for a particular outcome, not necessarily education or personal growth for the child in question.

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So it’s not helicoptering when I laid the groundwork for my kids to get into really good schools, because I didn’t have a particular outcome (HYP or bust) in mind?