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<p>ATM parents. Provide funds but don’t interfere.</p>
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<p>According to former UCLA student Alexandra Wallace in her video “Asians in the Library”, at her apartment complex the relatives of Asian students would routinely come on the weekends to do their laundry and groceries and cook their meals for the coming week. Wallace was obnoxious, but I do think there is a subset of Asian parents who reason that</p>
<p>(1) Our children doing well academically is all-important.
(2) Therefore any activity that distracts our children from their studies, such as doing the laundry, should be handled by us.</p>
<p>That makes sense. As an Asian parent, is that what you personally believe appropriate, Beliavsky, or are you simply reporting what you observe among other parents?</p>
<p>Regarding the overdraft - why not let him overdraft and then make him responsible for owing you the money for the overdraft? Do that once or twice and he’ll never overdraft again. I sympathize with the temptation, but maybe that one he needs to feel the pain of the consequence.</p>
<p>It depends on the personality of the kid. Whether you do chores for a college student (or pay to have them done) may depend on how whether think they will spend the extra time productively (for example studying) or not (say watching TV).</p>
<p>Absolutely, there is a place between the two extremes. Somewhere in the middle is a great place to be. Every kid is different. Just because a kid goes off to college doesn’t mean that every single one is ready to just be let go. It is an individual families decision and I don’t think what is right for one family is right for another. I respect another parent’s right to have a complete hands off policy with their child and at the same time, I expect them to respect my decision to parent or not my child without accusing me of helicoptering every time.</p>
<p>I am not speaking of/or accusing people on this thread, but just discussing the topic in general.</p>
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<p>Thank you for your response. Would participating in extracurricular activities (a political action club, a theater production, etc.) be something you would consider productive? </p>
<p>My kids were very lucky as we had household cleaning help as they were growing up, and therefore they didn’t have major chores to do other than keeping their rooms neat and picked up, helping set / clear the table for dinner, caring for the dog, light yard work and being expected to be generally helpful if someone else in the household needed a helping hand. Their laundry was done for them and their sheets were changed for them. D’s school did offer a laundry service and I really did struggle with - would this make her life easier - versus does she just need to be a regular kid and figure out how to fit laundry into her week just like everyone else. Neither of my kids are slacker-types, they take their studies seriously, so that wasn’t a concern. Even so, my D had a minor health issue recently for which she needed a common over the counter medication that we have on hand at our house, and I’ll be honest that my first instinct was to mail it to her before I realized that she needed to just figure out how to fit getting to the nearby drugstore into her day instead of my rescuing her.</p>
<p>On another thread one of the parents said she likes to think of herself as an umbrella parent…they come out when it rains.</p>
<p>I kinda liked that. :)</p>
<p>Hyper college students can make middle-aged parents depressed.</p>
<p>"All that hovering for naught - Did the study say anything about depressed parents? "</p>
<p>I am thinking about changing my ID to reflect my general mood - </p>
<p>neuroticparent-metoo.</p>
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<p>Are you often accused of helicoptering? (and italics/emphasis were mine, not the poster quoted above).</p>
<p>And since when has “paying attention to one’s kids grades and classes” been classified as helicoptering?</p>
<p>Maybe we need to get a general consensus as to what a helicopter parent actually is when we engage in these discussions. And I would also venture to guess that there are few to none at CC who “want to feel better and have an excuse for no longer parenting.” Parents like that would never be interested in a site like this.</p>
<p>Here is one definition:</p>
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<p>My own additions to the above:<br>
-a parent who refuses to allow a child to make even rather benign mistakes, which costs the child an opportunity to learn from said mistake.</p>
<p>-a parent who assumes their child is incapable of taking on more and more responsibility, so does things for them in an effort to avoid the negative consequences of the assumed incompetence, thereby preventing them from in fact mastering those tasks.</p>
<p>-a parent who tries to keep their child dependent in order to maintain their image of older/wiser/more competent or to feed their own need to remain “needed.”</p>
<p>Big difference between the above and a parent who remains “interested” in their child’s progress in college.</p>
<p>Any other opinions as to what constitutes “helicoptering?”</p>
<p>it’s probably true that ‘hyper’ parents not only depress college-aged children, but younger children as well. ‘hyper’ teachers probably stress out their students in K-12. i don’t equate being ‘hyper’ with helicoptering/over-involvement. those two don’t necessarily have to go together. to me, a helicopter parent is one who is extremely ego and fear-driven. it’s a parent who is unable to accept that their child is not their property, and is not an extension of them.</p>
<p>My parents won’t let me go anywhere without my phone, which they often call and track occasionally, and my ID. They will not let me go anywhere without telling them where I will be, for how long, and whom with. Would this count as helicopter parenting?</p>
<p>Depends, who pays for the cell phone?</p>
<p>“They will not let me go anywhere without telling them where I will be, for how long, and whom with. Would this count as helicopter parenting?”</p>
<p>They let you go out without chaperoning?</p>
<p>Think maybe this woman qualifies as “hyper” and also “helicopter?”</p>
<p>Wednesday on Dr. Phil:</p>
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<p>:eek:</p>
<p>^^^^^^Oops, that show is on Friday, not Wednesday. Wednesday’s show is about a mother of a 20 y/o who believes the man she has been “dating” for over a year online (but of course has never met) is her true love. The fact that she has sent him over $187,000 (some of which she obtained from family members in less than honest ways) and has yet to meet him has not raised any red flags in her mind. In fact, he sent her $6,000,000 from an account in Grand Cayman that she would like Dr. Phil to help her cash.</p>
<p>Her 20 y/o son believes she’s being duped, but she would like Dr. Phil to help her prove all the naysayers wrong.</p>
<p>Sigh…:rolleyes:</p>
<p>I wonder where these shows come up with these people…</p>
<p>The helicopter parent I know is a woman who drove down to the high school to take her daughter her blue mechanical pencil that she had left at home, even though she had plenty of other mechanical pencils with her. These same parents flew to Italy with their 21-year-old daughter to take her to her study abroad program, and then flew back to italy to pick her up. (When my daughter went to Madrid for her study abroad program, I took her to LAX and helped her check in, and then said goodbye at the security gate. Somehow she found her own way home from Spain.) Her 18th birthday party was at Chuck-E-Cheese. When she goes out with a group of friends, the parents drive, but sit at a different table in the same restaurant (still- she’s 22!) They don’t trust her to do anything on her own or with friends, even though she doesn’t drink. I knew things were strange in middle school when the mom told me she had bought ten dresses for some dance for her daughter to try on at home, and then she would take nine of them back. They also told me they would buy their daughter a house in the future, but her future husband will have to sign a pre-nup (dad’s a lawyer). I thought anything you own before marriage belongs just to you anyway. The strange thing to me is the daughter doesn’t mind this treatment. I think she feels very comfortable knowing she will never have to make decisions or fend for herself.</p>
<p>My daughter, on the other hand, knows she may have to fend for herself because of my cancer, so she has become almost the opposite- fiercely independent. Doesn’t want any input from Mom. I will say one thing- anything can happen to anyone at any time. If you don’t raise your kids to be independent, they will have a harder time coping if you die. And s#$% happens.</p>
<p>I would imagine that the percentage of boomerang kids that came from helicopter parents is pretty high.</p>
<p>The helicopter parent definitions posted above left out the hyper-competitive parent who assists their son/daughter in an attempt to position son/daughter ahead of other students in a competitive environment. Please add this definition, thanks. Believe me, we see it a lot in Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>This is another “press release” of a study that tells us basically nothing of the scientific process and validity used to make these very broad conclusions. The authors had 297 kids fill out an online survey and then found a correlation between parents that were overly involved and kids feeling anxious and depressed. I did not see in the abstract or any of the articles any mention of the significance of the findings or the way the students were selected.</p>
<p>Certainly a parent that is at their kid’s school daily or even weekly, doing laundry, calling professors or otherwise being over-involved is going to undermine their adult child’s sense of autonomy. But does actually cause depression? </p>
<p>Of course they want you to pay for the journal article, but it is frustrating to see this picked up in the press without knowing whether it is of good quality or not.</p>