College administrators grumble about the rise of "helicopter parents," moms and dads who keep hovering over the lives of their children even after they leave for college.
But helicopter parents aren't just hovering. They're swooping down in attack mode.
Having established the rising horror of helicopter parents (when I wrote for New Woman I always had to say that whatever I was writing about was "skyrocketing"), the article goes on to report survey data that directly contradicts the lead (I never did that, of course):
There's an upside to intervening parents. Their children are more engaged in college life, happier and reporting getting more from the experience.
"We speculate maybe these students are persisting and taking advantage of a lot of opportunities in college, when they might not have done that if their parents weren't prodding," Kuh said.
It sounds as if "helicopter parenting" in college happens for the same reason it does in K-12, which is students not doing well:
"We speculate maybe these students are persisting and taking advantage of a lot of opportunities in college, when they might not have done that if their parents weren't prodding," Kuh said. However, those students do get lower grades.
Barbara Hofer, a psychologist at Middlebury College in Vermont, said the results are similar to data she has gathered but not yet published on students at Middlebury and the University of Michigan.
[snip]
Like the NSSE survey, Hofer has also discovered communication stays constant through college (about 13 times per week, by phone and electronically, for both freshmen and seniors), and that students who are more independent about academics had higher GPAs. However, it's unclear whether that's cause or effect: Does laissez-faire parenting produce smarter students, or do students who struggle academically draw in their parents for help?
source:
Survey eyes hovering college parents by Judith Pope
Seeing as how we have years of research on the question of what parenting style produces the most successful students (hint: not laissez faire) this is not a burning question for me.
Interestingly, while I've read Steinberg's book, I hadn't remembered that parental involvement in the schools works only for "authoritative" parents, not permissive parents.
This makes me chuckle.Abstract
This article examines the impact of authoritative parenting, parental involvement in schooling, and parental encouragement to succeed on adolescent school achievement in an ethnically and socio-economically heterogeneous sample of approximately 6,400 American 14-18-year-olds.
[snip]
Authoritative parenting (high acceptance, supervision, and psychological autonomy granting) leads to better adolescent school performance and stronger school engagement. The positive impact of authoritative parenting on adolescent achievement, however, is mediated by the positive effect of authoritativeness on parental involvement in schooling. In addition, nonauthoritativeness attenuates the beneficial impact of parental involvement in schooling on adolescent achievement. Parental involvement is much more likely to promote adolescent school success when it occurs in the context of an authoritative home environment.
All along I've had the sense that hammering your school doesn't do any good if you aren't also hammering your kid -- and research proves it!
Newsflash: kids doing well don't need help. Kids doing badly need SOMEONE to be their advocate. It
ReplyDeleteThe Baby Boomers' kids are growing up now, and guess what, all of the changes that the Boomers wanted on college campuses when they were students are now the status quo for their kids. And they know perfectly well how bad it is.
The Boomers know that universities baldly and completely LIE to parents about how universities act "in loco parentis". They know they schools are lying when they say they'll intervene a student in trouble. They know they are lying when they say the dorms don't have drug problems. They know they are lying when they claim they don't have crime problems. They know they are lying about domestic abuse, sexual assault, rape, and drinking. They know that the universities won't lift a finger to help a student in trouble academically unless that student already knows how to work the system. Kid's flunking out? What do they do BEFORE that happens? School says "kid needs to get it together" but you'd think at 30k a pop, just maybe, maybe, they might try to intervene, no? But they don't. And the parents know it.
So they know they are paying upwards of 25k a year for the privilege of being treated as if they don't count, unable to control where that money is used, if that student attends class, if tutoring is REALLY available, etc. Of course they are going to helicopter.
The Boomers made it so no one can touch the universities because it's all about free expression. Now that's come home to roost, and they know what schlock it is.
Have you been following the horror stories about parents not being able to get their kids' files or access to any of their things after the kids have disappeared from the face of the earth?
ReplyDeleteHorrifying.
A friend of mine dealt with a very serious situation with her college child, involving hospitalization,...the hospital took the child's phone away and my friend had no way to contact her child, speak to child, find out what was going on....this all took place because child had the right to refuse to give information, etc.
ReplyDeleteThis was a complete and total nightmare.
The "privacy" rules colleges are now following need to be abolished or radically revised. (I think parents are now negotiating with colleges before they let their kids enroll, so that may be an option.)
This was a situation where, yes, the college student is an adult.
However, the parents were going to be picking up the pieces, which they did. So the parents were supposed to get on a plane, fly across the country, and somehow intervene on the basis of NO information.
When my friend got there, the hospital wouldn't release her child because she didn't have a formal "exit plan."
Naturally no one had told her she needed a formal "exit plan," because no one would talk to her because her child has a right to privacy.
So: the parent has all the responsibility, experiences all the terror of not knowing how bad a situation is, AND is given none of the information all of the other actors possess.
Catherine,
ReplyDeleteCould you post some links? I can readily imagine how easily there could be problems with confidentiality and emergencies, but haven't seen any news stories.
Amy P
Thanks for the reminder - I had meant to get hold of those stories. There were two long ones in the WSJ, as I recall.
ReplyDeleteA Mother Takes On MIT
ReplyDeleteHow University's Privacy Policy Complicated
Sue Kayton's Search for Her Missing Son
By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN
September 10, 2007; Page A1
Colleges Should Not Hide Behind Privacy Act
October 1, 2007; Page A21
(letters to the editor)
Families Grapple
With Student Privacy
In Face of Federal Protection Law, More Colleges Offer Waivers
That Let Parents See Their Children's Records; Will Kids Sign?
By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN
September 20, 2007; Page D1
I'll email you the articles.
This is interesting:
ReplyDeleteUnder federal law, colleges are barred from releasing information in a student's record, including grades or disciplinary actions, without the student's permission. There are certain exceptions to these rules, including when the school deems there is a health emergency. But parents are often dismayed to find that schools tend to err on the side of preserving a student's privacy.
That's obviously what happened to my friend. No question she was dealing with a health emergency; her child had been hospitalized.
The school & hospital refused any and all information.
This is great:
ReplyDeletePrivacy waivers for college students could be a step forward. A more important step, however, would be for institutions of "higher learning" to accept the fact that the parents (and other relatives) coughing up $30,000 to $40,000 a year have rights, too. My wife and I funded four years of college at a middle-range Eastern school for our grandniece and were appalled to discover that we had no access to her grades or other academic records. We were even more appalled when we found out that she had been lacking in diligence, having taken only a partial classload and was more than a year from graduation after four years and more than $100,000 of full tuition, room and board, etc. Is there any other transaction (short of traditional no-strings philanthropy) in which the payer effectively kisses his money goodbye with no accounting or accountability?
Robert Myers
New York
Of course, the answer to that is: paying taxes to support your local public school.
The administration gave a presentation on tenure last night, confirming the fact that no measure of student achievement is considered in the decision to award lifetime employment.
One surprise: the school also cannot consider student evaluations of their teachers in tenure decisions.
This is in the union contract.
As a parent of a college student, your article on student privacy ("Families Grapple With Student Privacy," Personal Journal, Sept. 20) rang true. I was absolutely floored by the statement from the University of Wisconsin administrator that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act "is about judgment." I have found the exact opposite to be true.
ReplyDeleteWhen confronted by parents and others, school officials abandon judgment and hide behind the privacy act. They use it as an excuse to do nothing about legitimate concerns. I hate to admit it, but my wife had to pose as my daughter over the telephone to clear up a relatively simple issue. What a mess.
Joel I. Cehn
Oakland, Calif.