Opinion: Helicopter parents? Eew!
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At the risk of being accused of complicity in a bogus trend story, I pass along two confirmations of the notion of ‘helicopter parents’ who hover over their college-student children.
Waiting in line at the bookstore at the university where I teach part-time, I marveled at the number of people my age waiting to have their purchases rung up. Maybe the parents didn’t trust their kids with credit cards, but I’m afraid the actual explanation is that they couldn’t pull away from their children when they dropped them off. If my mother had lingered on campus when I was in college in the 1970s, I would have been resentful. If she had accompanied me to the bookstore, I would have been as mortified as the girl in the Verizon commercial whose mother posts ‘I Love You’ on her Facebook wall.
A couple days later I heard from one of my sisters, recently returned home to Denver after driving her son to college in Iowa. One of the orientation activities was a jokey quiz called ‘Are You a Helicopter Parent?’ If so, the college provides the propellers.
On its website is a checklist of ‘Six Ways Parents Can Help Students Have a Successful First-Year Experience.’ No. 1 is not (as it would have been when I was a student): ‘Go home.’ Instead, it’s: ‘Encourage them to establish guidelines with roommates early, and to talk regularly with each other about how they are getting along.’ My favorite is No. 3: ‘Stress the importance of effective time management, and discuss the dangers of spending too much time online.’
The anthem of my generation, accurate or not, was that college students were adults. I remember protests against sign-in books in opposite-sex dorms and the practice of sending report cards to parents (even though parents paid the bill). In general, if grudgingly, parents acquiesced in this liberation. Not anymore -- not on Facebook, and not in the flesh. That whirring sound you hear is the loss of the independence we Baby Boom students fought so hard for.