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<p>Yes, they are “within their rights.” Whether they are exercising sound parental judgment in enforcing those “rights” is very much another question.</p>
<p>The tone of the article seemed to be resigned to me. I guess the head of an expensive private school is just going to have to learn to deal tactfully with helicopter parents. </p>
<p>When our kids went off to school, I pretty much expected to let them “fly” and make their own mistakes but quickly learned that sometimes an ounce of parental preventions and interventions can make a huge difference. Just made some calls last week to resolve some Catch 22 rules that my sophomore tried to get around and failed. An irate parent sometimes gets results especially when something is not right. It’s those years of experience in dealing with these sort of things. Of course, the colleges hate it when a parent gets involved. There are the ones who are truly out of line, but there are also some that are just insisting that something get done that should have been done upon the student’s request, but youth and immaturity were taken advantage of.</p>
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<p>Son has signatory access to about 80% of our assets. Daughter has access to a few hundred thousand. Would you trust your kids with your assets?</p>
<p>I do ask to see my son’s grades before I write the check for the next semester.</p>
<p>He had issues in high school with not following through with things, but managed to have a very good year as a senior. So we shipped him off, but I wasn’t secure enough in the turnaround to not make sure on a semester by semester basis that he was sticking with the program.</p>
<p>When he is in the workforce he will have performance reviews. I see this as more in that line rather than helicoptering or being controlling.</p>
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<p>I believe enforcing those rights is sound parental judgment. </p>
<p>First, it provides a good real world preview on how large financial grants/loans work when dealing with third parties/institutions. </p>
<p>Second…it shows them that most people who provide a large financial loan/grant expect reasonably good/excellent results or progress to indicate as much. </p>
<p>Third, it does neither the parent nor the student any favors to continue paying for poor/failing performance. </p>
<p>Some of my undergrad classmates/friends from other private colleges from upper/upper-middle class backgrounds who floundered to graduation with low-mid 2.x cumulative GPAs or worse…ended up on academic suspension/expulsion are still having to explain that to graduate programs/potential employers even 10+ years after graduation from our college/another college.</p>
<p>That’s where we differ. I think that using financial carrots and sticks to continue to exercise control over an adult child is abysmal parental judgment. If the child is not an adult at 18 - and many aren’t - don’t send them away to college. If they are an adult, treat them like one.</p>
<p>Parenting means making a lot of judgment calls, Fast and hard rules are not always the best way to go. </p>
<p>Being an adult doesn’t mean not needing help on some things. I could use some help on some things now. </p>
<p>As for trust, I’d trust my sons with my checkbook and credit cards, but can’t trust them to fill up the tank of my car when returning it or putting the toilet seat down!</p>
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<p>Using financial carrots and sticks isn’t just about parents and adult children. It’s also commonly used in every adult relationship which involves a large outlay of financial resources from one adult to another to both give incentive for the one providing/lending the funds…including ensuring the other party remains accountable as both a reminder that a large amount of funds are involved and that he/she should rightly be held accountable for its use/fulfilling conditions. </p>
<p>I find it interesting that you believe otherwise considering your other positions. Never thought providing large grants/loans with no conditions/accountability mechanisms would be considered demonstrating an appropriate “adult” relationship. </p>
<p>If anything, that’s a notion I’d expect more from children/adolescents and adults who feel entitled to the money by virtue of their being and without any accountability mechanisms/conditions…a notion I’ve always thought of as a sign of severe immaturity/entitlement complex.</p>
<p>Doesn’t this really all depend on the child? My daughter is a top student, highly motivated, and a total stickler for honesty. She is completely out of the party scene and has friends who would far rather discuss philosophy at 2 a.m. in someone’s dorm room. She tells us her grades without us asking, and we see absolutely no need to check behind her or put strings on the money. In some ways, though, the “strings” are already there. She knows that we expect her to do her best and work hard, and she pushes herself even more than we would push her.</p>
<p>We have other children who may need more prodding. They are not quite as driven and internally motivated as our daughter, and I can see that spending more time on social media might be a temptation to one of them. They may need more of a check (“Hey, let me see your grades” or “How did you do on your English paper?”) now and then. If any of them were ever reluctant to do that, we would rethink our hands-off approach.</p>
<p>My parents never asked to see my grades, but plenty of my friends’ parents did. I don’t think that’s changed much in the past thirty years. What has changed dramatically is the level of involvement parents themselves have with the college/university.</p>
<p>We only deal with the system when it comes to financial matters. We pay the bills and check if there is a charge that we don’t understand. Everything else we expect our daughter to tend to. We’ve been preparing our children for this since they were very young, stepping back more and more as they aged. Scared to talk to your elementary school teacher about a problem? The first time, I’ll go with you but let you do most of the talking; the second time, I’ll e-mail her to tell her the situation and that you will talk to her; the third time, you can do it all yourself. I believe that this is one reason that the teachers have always praised us as good, supportive parents – because we don’t hover all the time. Our daughter has managed to navigate through some pretty formidable bureaucracy at times in college. She has learned to go to professors she doesn’t know and persuade them to make extra room in advanced courses for her. She has figured out how to barter tutoring for food when she overspent her meal plan before the semester ended (and no, we didn’t know about this until later; we would not have let her starve!). It’s so much easier to introduce them to self-advocacy when they’re eight than when they’re eighteen.</p>
<p>And, yes, if I had a college student with a physical health or other disability issue, I would be slightly more hands-on. If I had a child with a mental health issue, I would be even more so.</p>
<p>Yes, it depends on the child. Some kids are very smart but not wise yet. Some kids have physical or psychological difficulties that need parental help. Some kids are not familiar with the bureaucracy or the legal trap that exist in college or in society. It’s better not let the kids fall into irreversible situations.</p>
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<p>The point, once again, is that my relationship with my children is fundamentally different than my relationship with the world at large. If that’s not the case for you, then I concede your point.</p>
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<p>Absolutely yes. As I said in post 37.</p>
<p>The cpt and I seem to have a similar perspective. Perhaps if your family has only dealt with honest, professional and responsive school staff thus far (eg. at expensive private schools), you will have a tough time seeing the need for a parent to intervene on the student’s behalf.</p>
<p>It seems to me that college age is just too late to even think about this. The kind of relationship you have with your kids is probably set by that time, and isn’t likely to change all that much.</p>
<p>It also seems to me that there’s a (murky) line between riding to the rescue and providing help and advice. I always valued my own dad’s advice (I wish he was still around to provide it), and my kids regularly consult me for advice on all kinds of stuff. Sometimes they take the advice, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the advice is: you figure it out. But I would say that at least half the time my advice is for them to get advice from somebody else who knows more (like a faculty member).</p>
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<p>Our daughter is at a non-expensive public university. Although the staff members are generally nice, there is zero hand-holding through all the administrative stuff. The only times we have ever called a staff member are twice when we had questions about the bill. That is our responsibility, and we will deal with it. There have been times, though, when she wanted or needed to change her schedule, get a prerequisite waived to get in a higher level course, figure out how to deal with a missed mandatory adviser appointment that she wasn’t aware of, and replace a room key. I never even heard about any of this until after the fact. She did it all herself. If she had called, I would have advised her on what to do, but she would have done her own legwork.</p>
<p>We would certainly step in, however, if she had a health or mental health crisis or her personal safety were in any way at risk.</p>
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<p>At some point, the relationship needs to transition from adult-child to adult-adult. Certainly what has gone before will affect how successful that transition is.</p>
<p>With DD, DW and I made a conscious decision to make the transition between her junior and senior years of (residential) high school, because we thought she was ready. She responded by acting (mostly) like an adult, at least about the important things.</p>
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<p>One thing we found when we made the transition was that DD was more willing to ask us for advice and to give careful consideration to the advice we gave. Not that she always made the same decision we would have made; though as it turned out, about the most important things, we were in complete agreement.</p>
<p>We have a commercial. Every quarter we are required to send depth financial statements to loan grantor. About every 6 months they call to have a ‘reality check’ conversation with either DH or I. This is after 30+ years of having a stellar payment record as well as having a stellar credit score. They want to know if we are STILL doing a good job stewarding those funds.</p>
<p>So, THAT is the real world…and isn’t that part of what we hope our kids learn during their college ‘experience’?</p>
<p>Advice and helicoptering can be a two-way street. Have you ever asked your kids for financial advice and then taken it? Or asked them to take care of large financial transactions for you because you were incapacitated?</p>
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Not yet, but I have the experience of trying to persuade my mother to do what makes sense with her finances, but she doesn’t trust my advice. She resents her kids’ “helicoptering,” although at this point she really needs it.</p>
<p>I trust my son on financial matters because I trained him. He can provide an unemotional perspective on financial analysis that sometimes I can’t do because I am in the thick of things.</p>