Laura Hamilton (the author) mentions lots of stuff about helicopter parenting or lack thereof, and its connections with the cost of college and social class.
The comments from readers include anecdotes about the trivial cost of college in the 1970s and such, one mentioning earning a year’s cost of college during an 11 week summer job as a receptionist.
Only 3 categories and only bleak outcomes for third category, the poor girls whose parents didn’t helicopter? Exaggeration much? It is impossible to fathom independent females not stressing about impressing their sorority sisters with their wardrobe or mommy not taking notes for them and not making all the right connections for them and yet still being highly successful professionals?
I sometimes wonder if I live on a different planet.
This column isn’t really about helicopter parents. It’s about the benefits of having well-off, socialite parents.
this is research done by a sociologist. Validity and extrapolation to the real world is not relevant.
Indiana U. Stems from Paying for the Party research. I found it insightful. Why the sociology smear?
“This column isn’t really about helicopter parents. It’s about the benefits of having well-off, socialite parents.”
Or parents who are not well-off, but who are familiar with education. That category did well too. So is the importance of having involved, knowledgable parents really a new thing? Did colleges really do more interventions in the past than they do now, without parental involvement? That wasn’t my experience.
If I remember correctly by reading the book one of the issues she raises is that the university enables students to get “fluff” degrees that offer no advantages in getting a job. For example in the book she said that girls that were in solid majors did better. But they were a lot of girls getting “business” degrees outside the business school, degrees such as “event planning” and that the school offers a lot of “not college level classes” that enable students to stay in college without getting a real college education or something in that line. Now there is no harm for girls with connections getting those degrees but there is no benefit for the unconnected folks. It is a while I read the book though.
I thought the " mommy taking notes" thing as an example of over the top helicoptering was silly. The child according to the article had a septic infection needing medical care. If it was later in the semester the kid might have had friends to ask for notes and no one would have been perturbed. My neighbors husband had an kidney stone attCk while at an out of town conference and his wife flew there helped him find a doctor to break up the stones and went to his conference to take notes on something he didn’t want to miss. We help our loved ones when they are truly Ill. That’s not " helicoptering". That’s being a family.
I’m disappointed their was no category for slacker parents (H and me) who are well educated and can afford to pay for tuition but left it up to their student to figure out how to make it through college and find a good job with no swooping in by parents - because our philosophy is that a part of going to college is to learn to handle difficult situations on their own.
About the most intervention we did was tell kid to buck it up and plow ahead when he called to complain about something - which wasn’t often - I think only the semester when he was taking stats.
I remember when S was in first grade and came home upset about something and I told him to go the next day and talk to the Principal.
Well I told my first graders the same thing, but when one of my kids went to college while handling a few serious health conditions, I would sometimes sleep on her floor to keep her safe. It seems that this author would consider this helicoptering.
The real issue, and I deal with this in my own family, is that it takes money and savvy to stay focused on long term success rather than short term income. I think, often, it is the kids who want the short term, so they can feel independent, or buy things, or socialize, so they take a menial job for the summer when a parent might want to pay for something that contributes to long term success, or support them in an internship.
There are young 20 somethings I know who have to work to pay rent and food and it is difficult for them to raise the funds to even take a college class. Some are waiting until the year they turn 24 to get better aid. These kids aren’t in this article at all. Their parents are absent, grounded, struggling themselves.
Finally, there are other factors to relationships between parents and young adults these days, especially technology. Cell phones, texting, e-mails, whatever (especially texting, which I have started doing and find it remarkable how closely we stay in touch with just a few words and emojis). And for very complicated reasons, many parents and mature young adults truly are friends at some point. Is that helicoptering?
My 20 somethings have taken to patting me on the head and calling me cute. I think that they are about to start helicoptering me. I think that is a reward, but I’m not sure 
Interesting article. I quickly identified myself as a “paramedics” parent.
@Ballerina016 I see myself as one too though I haven’t, thankfully, had to start up the ambulance yet!
I remember the book, which I read a few years ago, mentioning parents help with professional apps and such, so this seems like an article elaborating on that, mainly. It’s an interesting angle on a study I found fascinating when I read it.
I thought Andrea probably needed psychological help, and also that it’s terribly unfair for other students to have to compete with Andrea’s mother rather than a fellow student.
BUT — I know that as an academic myself (and an administrator) there are things that I have been able to help my kids with that I was clueless about when I was in college. I have been very proactive about encouraging my kids to go to office hours, to ask for exceptions to the rule (i.e. I know I"m only a sophomore and technically I’m not allowed to take this 300 level course, and I also know that technically I don’t have the prereqs but here’s what I’ve taken that is equivalent). I never knew that courses had waiting lists when I was in college, never knew that one could ask to have the requirements in one’s course of study for a major altered through an academic petition to the registrar’s office, etc.
The other thing that I have found puzzling however, is that in our own circle of friends there’s a couple with two daughters where Mom basically picked out the colleges, picked out the majors, picked out the dorms, and plans to go on apparently picking out the internships, the friends, the husband, etc. My kids have apparently had their own minds and preferences since they were 12 or 13. There’s no way they’d let me pick out their prom dress, their prom date, their major, their college. Are some kids just naturally more compliant? How do people get these kids who let Mom make all the decisions and never rebel?
@Momzie - I have to wonder this, myself, as the parent of a college grad who has been very independent, and also liable to take academic risks (classes taken out of optimal sequence and without prerequisites, unrealistic schedules) all in the interest of slaking intense curiosity and thirst for knowledge, both in areas that come “naturally” and in areas that push this child’s comfort zone. Some semesters this ended well, sometimes not so well.
I ended up being a “paramedics parent” more than once as this child ended up in some very deep holes. I could not help but kick myself for not being more proactive, but I never got information until there was a crisis. (My child did not want me to worry…)
All I can say is I am very glad this child never wanted to go to medical school or an elite law school. Or graduate school in the humanities. Or any grad school that expected a GPA closer to 4.0 than 3.0, and was not willing to make exceptions for an especially rigorous course load. Or work in investment banking or consulting.
How all this demonstrated resilience will play out in the years to come remains to be seen.
That’s exactly how I look at it, and what I have done with my younger child in dual enrollment (and will probably do to a certain extent next year when he actually starts college).
There is something to be said for passing down learned wisdom, as long as you’re not stopping your child from learning anything themselves.
@emilybee , my husband and I are joining you in the slacker category.
We can see things coming (or not coming) in our kids’ directions, but we are not swooping, plowing, coptering or fixing. (Normal kids with normal problems.)
The point in the article I found to be very interesting was that these helicopter moms are still working very hard to help their children when at their age they should/could be focusing instead on their own personal goals or retirement plan. I think this is very true for myself and other moms I know. Whether it is good and appropriate or not is another question. I’ve posted on other threads about D’s recent internship interview at which she was told there were over 900 applications for the program… I have to say, hearing those odds made me very glad I had taken the time to read up on the program and prep her a bit for the interview, because it helped her be prepared for some questions she wouldn’t have anticipated on her own. Advice that tells parents to dial back the help might be more readily accepted in areas of the country where the competition isn’t so intense.
We were a different sort of parents altogether than those classified in the article: Affluent, sophisticated about higher education, and almost completely hands-off once our children were in college. We didn’t pick our children’s courses or majors. We gave them a monthly budget and expected them to manage it; it included money they had to find a job to earn themselves. (When they didn’t manage to the budget, we supplemented it anyway, with proper explanations. This only happened a couple of times to each child.) Thinking back, we did help our first child get a part-time volunteer position doing policy research for a political campaign during the summer after her first college year, when it became clear the summer job she had gotten herself wasn’t going to give her enough hours or intellectual stimulation, and she was looking for something interesting to do. Other than that, we had no involvement with our kids’ job searches, for term-time employment, summer employment, or permanent employment.
Each child had a reasonably serious (but not life-threatening) injury in his or her last year of college. When that happened, we upped the frequency of our telephone calls and texts for a week or so, so that we knew they were dealing with it, and what the doctors were saying. We were at a party when one kid called us from the emergency room; we took the call. We did not rush to be at our child’s side. When one child applied to graduate school, we asked to see his SOP essay, and he sent it to us after the applications had been submitted.
(The year after our younger child graduated from college, the company my wife was working for transferred her job to the city where he was living. They wound up deciding to share an apartment, which my wife only occupied 2-3 nights/week. So that was a little helicopterish, but it was a nicer apartment than either of them would have gotten separately, and for less rent than either would have had to pay for less apartment. Everyone but the two of them thought it was going to be a disaster, yet it worked out really well for both of them, and it ended after 10 months when my wife got a job that let her live at home full time.) (We also fronted our older child the security deposit and first month’s rent when she had five days after graduation to move to New York City to start her job training program.)
We are of course very satisfied with ourselves and our non-intervention, and we feel a little judgmental toward helicopter parents, those in the media, and those we actually know. But here’s the thing: We were really lucky. Our children and we were on the same page about almost everything. They were competent. They did OK in their classes. They were basically responsible. We were never worried that a situation was beyond their ability to handle it. In part, that was because we gave them a long leash well before college; we knew they could handle a lot. But nothing ever happened that seriously tested our parenting method. If one of our kids had hit a real roadblock, not just a snag, I don’t know how we would have responded.
JHS hit on an important point: we parents often do what seems right to us and so long as it works we see no reason to change. We don’t know how well a different method might have worked out.
Our philosophy was to provide a lot of oversight and guidance until high school graduation, and then basically hands-off once they hit college and no longer lived under our roof. They handled all their affairs at college, including choosing their own majors and classes. We never even saw their grades. They also managed their own job searches and interview prep. But they were capable of doing so in part because we made sure they learned some life skills while still in high school. ( I should have clarified that the D with the interview I posted about above is still in high school.)
However, if that method hadn’t worked, I would have been prepared to change the strategy.
I find it hard to be believe that 2/5 are helicopter parents. I just don’t see that among even the parents of graduates from our pretty high achieving, well connected parents. If helicoptering is simply helping a kid get an internship or job, then many are guilty. But I don’t think the bar is that low.