Helicopter Parenting Has Ruined A Generation Of Kids
Emma Brown writes at the WaPo:
Julie Lythcott-Haims noticed a disturbing trend during her decade as a dean of freshmen at Stanford University. Incoming students were brilliant and accomplished and virtually flawless, on paper. But with each year, more of them seemed incapable of taking care of themselves.At the same time, parents were becoming more and more involved in their children's lives. They talked to their children multiple times a day and swooped in to personally intervene whenever something difficult happened.
From her former position at one of the world's most prestigious schools, Lythcott-Haims came to believe that mothers and fathers in affluent communities have been hobbling their children by trying so hard to make sure they succeed and by working so diligently to protect them from disappointment, failure and hardship.
Colleges pick right up where parents leave off. Jeffrey J. Selingo, former editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes, also in the WaPo:
Colleges instead are practicing a new version of "in loco parentis" -- they are expected to be stand-in parents -- and it begins as soon as students step foot on campus.At many colleges, new students already have been introduced to their roommates on social media and live in luxurious apartment-like dorms. That ensures they basically never have to share a room or a bathroom, or even eat in the dining halls if they don't want to. Those were the places where previous generations learned to get along with different people and manage conflicts when they were chosen at random to live with strangers in close and communal quarters.
...The protective attitude of colleges also extends into the classroom. Professors are encouraged to provide "trigger warnings," advance notices to students that instructional material might elicit a troubling emotional response from them, and on some campuses report "microaggressions."
Indeed, the college classroom reinforces the message that failure is unacceptable. Students are never exposed, for instance, to the feedback process that is the hallmark of most jobs today. Think about it: employees don't work on a project in isolation for months and then turn it into their boss at the end for feedback. There is a back-and-forth with small wins, and many failures, along the way. Even great writers discard several drafts.
Yet in the college classroom, the sole focus of students is on the final product, whether an exam or a final paper, all done in an effort to earn an A. And that's exactly what many students end up getting. The A is the most common grade given out on college campuses nationwide, accounting for 43 percent of all grades. (In 1988, the A represented less than one-third of all grades.)
No wonder students are paralyzed by the prospect of failure. Most of them have never experienced it. Parents are surely to blame for a big part of that, but so too are colleges where young adults spend most of their waking hours.
Here's idiotic thinking from a commenter at the WaPo:
Snook
As we all know failure breeds success! What west coast crap. Teaching 20 years, never once did I see failure motivate a student. Give them all zeroes, that'll motivate them. If you are a parent of a student that attends a public school in America you better be beside your kid advocating for them every step of the way. If you allow public school to do it, they will destroy your kid. Get involved parents! Helicopter if you want because it shows the teacher you actually care about your kid. As for typical homework, it's a joke. One assignment fits all? For a third of students it's too difficult and frustrates them. For a third of them it's so easy it's boring and for the middle third, they don't give a crap because their parents don't either. As a 20 year high school teacher, please get involved in your children's education and lives and stay there, even if some dean thinks you "helicopter."
And here's more sensible thinking from another:
Shawn Marie
The only time my mom helped me with a project was when I was sick (one time) and I'm not sure to this day that my parents ever knew what I even majored in in college ... yet I managed to work full time, finish my undergrad degree, get into law school, graduate from law school and pass the bar the first time ... on my own.
The woman who is now my editorial assistant is in her 40s. I love the hell out of her, and she's the picture of integrity and responsibility and has been for the year she's worked for me. I'm not saying that millennials can't be -- but this last time around, in the wake of my experiences from the ad I put in for an assistant, I started joking that that "Generation Y" stands for "Y show up on time just 'cause I said I would?"
If your millennial kid reflects different values and traits -- like self-sufficiency and the integrity of a person who needs to stand on their own two feet -- they're going to do a lot better in the job market and in life.
I have a hard time believing that helicopter parenting has affected/ruined an entire generation. What about single parents, recent immigrants, working class parents etc who don't have the time or know-how to helicopter? What's more likely is that Stanford has self-selected a body of students disproportionately likely to have helicopter parents. The dean says it herself in her description of incoming students--flawless resumes, affluent background, brilliant on paper. Think there might be a trend there? Stanford is prestigious enough that they can handpick literally anyone they want. So maybe they should ask themselves why their admissions process apparently favors students whose parents so are heavily involved. If Stanford wanted to, they could cultivate a student body that is reliable, independent, and self-sufficient, or any combination of traits that they prioritize. Either make those changes or admit that you don't care about making those changes, but don't just throw up your hands and blame an entire generation of parents for behavior that directly correlates to your own admissions policy.
Shannon Jones at October 26, 2015 7:16 AM
While I agree with Shannon's comment that Stanford's selection process is likely to blame for the prevalence of children with helicopter parents at the university, Forbes has found that the latest generation of Americans is falling behind in basis skills needed in the workplace and in life - problem solving, literacy and numeracy, ability to follow directions, technical proficiency, etc.
That isn't just a Stanford thing.
Perhaps the majority of elite universities has driven us to this, favoring "meaningful" experiences over summer jobs and compelling life stories over knowledge in admission weightings. Basically, they've forced parents who want to see their children get into an elite university to take over their children's lives so they'll have enough resume filler to get into the Stanfords of the world.
http://fortune.com/2015/03/10/american-millennials-are-among-the-worlds-least-skilled/
Conan the Grammarian at October 26, 2015 7:32 AM
Stanford is prestigious enough that they can handpick literally anyone they want. So maybe they should ask themselves why their admissions process apparently favors students whose parents so are heavily involved.
Ding ding ding! I went to a university where more than half of the student body came from local fancy private feeder schools.
I still remember my first midterms. I got a crappy grade on one from a really tough professor and figured, "Well, that sucks. I'll go back to the dorms and see who wants to go eat pizza and ice cream with me." When I got back into my room, I found both roommates on their phones sobbing to their parents about their grades on the same midterm. One of them had her parents draft an email that she could send to the professor, asking for a do-over because her aunt was kinda sick.
I considered calling my parents just to satisfy my curiosity about whether they'd laugh at me, or just hang up.
My adviser once told me students would cry over bad grades or tough assignments in her office -- and that some parents requested she copy them on emails, whenever she emailed their child.
Guess who didn't act like this? The commuter students, the students who rented the cheap apartments off campus, and the ones who worked to support themselves while in school.
I've always thought colleges would do better to prioritize students who had jobs in high school along with excellent grades (and maybe some achievements and long-time dedication to an activity or two), rather than those who had dubious and clearly exaggerated "internships" and a laundry list of extracurriculars. Also, we need to try to de-stigmatize the gap year.
sofar at October 26, 2015 7:44 AM
Okay, it's ruined a generation of ELITE kids.
Amy Alkon at October 26, 2015 7:54 AM
Nope. The state schools take their admissions methodology cues from the elite schools.
The Stanfords of the world set the tone for admissions requirements and if they value a month with Habitat for Humanity in Costa Rica over a summer working at the local carwash, then Michigan State does too. If Stanford and Harvard value a compelling life narrative over demonstrating actual knowledge gained while in secondary school, then so does North Carolina State. And if Yale and Dartmouth don't require an admission test, then neither will SUNY.
That means valuing self-esteem and diversity over actual student knowledge will filter down to the schools for the rest of us. The whole trophies-for-everyone movement has invaded Middle America.
Conan the Grammarian at October 26, 2015 8:59 AM
This brand of "in loco parentis" has migrated up the academic hierarchy, from undergrads, to grad and professional students, and now to the faculty. I'm afraid it is going to get worse before it gets better.
DrPinWV at October 26, 2015 9:15 AM
Helicopter parenting was not unknown 60 or a hundred years ago.
It was just extremely difficult to do as effectively as technology lets us do it now.
I believe it is almost impossible to produce a musical, sports or academic prodigy without being a helicopter parent in certain areas, but you can't be a *do it for them* helicopter parent. You have to be a task master helicopter parent. Or turn your kids over to a coach who is.
Douglas MacArthur's mother moved into the Thayer hotel at West Point for his entire four years there.
She had a view of his room from her window so she could see if he was studying or not.
Must have worked. He was terrified of her, and graduated at the top of his class.
The difference is, back in the day, you had to be pretty wealthy to pull it off.
We had a local grocer when I was a small child. His daughter won all sorts of academic awards in high school when she was living with her parents. Went to the state University, a hundred miles away, and flunked out the first semester.
Now colleges have a profit motive to keep these students, and their money around, so they take over the helicopter role for the parents if necessary,
And as Conan and others say. The admissions process is stacked to select for these over parented types. Which is why we are graduating so many people with worthless degrees.
Isab at October 26, 2015 9:32 AM
There's an Alkon thread about this (much of it is about homework and parents), from 2010:
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2010/09/07/leave_our_kids.html
Excerpt:
...he tells of a letter from a reader who was disgusted with a letter she got from her child's teacher that urged parents to be constantly involved with their kids' homework. (He) agreed it was outrageous and wrote a letter that he suggested all parents send in return to such teachers. It said in part:
Dear Teacher: With all due respect, I don't do my child's homework. I will not even always help her with it even if she asks for help. Sometimes, I will simply tell her that she is smart enough to figure it out on her own...Micromanagers do not bring out the best in people. They bring out the worst...One does not become a great pitcher if Mom is standing on the mound too, and one does not become a great student if Mom helps with homework every night, or even nearly so. But here's my counteroffer. If my child does not do her homework or does not do the work she is capable of, let me know, and she will wish she had. Oh, fear not. I won't beat her or starve her, but I will surely teach her that misbehavior results in undesirable consequences. By the way, if her story concerning what happened is different from yours, I will believe you, even if I don't think you saw the big picture...
lenona at October 26, 2015 9:42 AM
"If your millennial kid reflects different values and traits -- like self-sufficiency and the integrity of a person who needs to stand on their own two feet ..."
Hey! Stop giving away my competitive advantage!
And as for Snook the teacher, that really says something about her abilities and the quality of school she taught at. By her own words her school destroys students without mercy.
Ben at October 26, 2015 10:04 AM
I am reminded of an event that somewhat demonstrated the mindset of the helicopter parent.
After finishing dinner at a restaurant in Spokane, I walked through the parking lot to find my car. I saw a gigantic, Cadillac SUV inching back and forth repeatedly trying to enter a parking stall. It reminded me of the "Canyonero" SUV on The Simpsons but it was more ornate.
Inside was a yuppie family who's meal I thought was being hopelessly delayed by trying to shoe-horn it's way into a European sized stall. But I was wrong.
When I reached my car, which was parked almost next to Mr. Canyonero, I found it was not the size of the stall that caused the back and forth screeching in, it was a half-full plastic Starbuck's cup that kept leviathan at bay.
He tried everything he could to drive around the cup, for fear it seemed his precious might be damaged by a plastic cup, or worse yet, have the tire stained by the coffee inside. It was truly pathetic: a tank sized yet "refined" road warrior yuppie truckster blocked by plastic cup.
When my father taught me how to drive, he said to drive over pop cans in the road to learn how to judge the car's wheel position. Somehow my 1975 AMC Hornet didn't blow up like an IED.
I watched this go on for a minute or two. Finally, Mr. Canyonero accepted he was defeated and sent out his 10 year old daughter to move the cup and rescue him and his family. Where the girl got this fortitude I will never know. Perhaps the milkman, after all he was armed with plastic milk jugs if the husband doth protest too much about the affair.
So, I am sure that affluence and wimpy parenting are a factor in the decline of fortitude in American youth, it is a sad state of affairs to say the least.
Darren Smith at October 26, 2015 10:40 AM
So let's take stock of where we are:
1. We have established the everybody-gets-a-trophy culture. That leads to...
2. The expectation of success as being a cookbook process. Do the right steps, put in the ingredients in order, put it in the oven, and 30 minutes later a success cake pops out. The extension of this is...
3. College, in what passes in the postmodern world as "liberal arts", is a ticket-punching exercise. You pay for the privilege of entry (both in terms of money, and in terms of conforming to the required lifestyle), you go to class, you parrot the professors' opinions back to them, and after four years you get your credentials that entitles you (at least in theory) to that "dream" job in the government/media/human resources/administration mileau, and you get an in-town apartment where you are surrounded by people who think exactly the same as you. The thought process this encourages is...
4. Everything is ritual. You do specific things, the gods reward you. You step off the reservation... and what might happen? No one knows, because no one's ever done that and lived to tell about it. There was that guy in junior year... remember him? Decided he was sick of it and wanted to go do plumbing or something like that? What is "plumbing" anyway? No one knows. That guy was never heard from again. Something terrible must have happened to him. That's what happens when you step out of line. Let that bea a lesson to everyone else.
Because everything is ritual, things like science or engineering or accounting or marketing or design or the trades need not be studied. There is nothing to be learned from them. Everybody knows that mysterious beings from faraway lands just provide whatever is needed in those areas. Who or what are those beings, and what are they about? Doesn't matter, as long as they keep providing. Which they always will, because as far as anyone in the peer group remembers, they always have before. QED. There's a vague awareness of Others. People who do not adhere to the rituals. They must be kept at a great distance, lest they bring about the wrath of the gods.
(This is where someone finds a Coca-Cola bottle. Or a light bulb. Or an electric guitar. What happens next? I don't know. Possibly the culture succeeds at expelling the foreign concepts. Possibly the adherents see the light and turn it around. Possibly the adherents see the light eventually, but it's too late to turn it around.)
Cousin Dave at October 26, 2015 11:27 AM
Failure's not supposed to motivate them. The fear of failure is. The desire for success is. The rewards that come with success is.
The failure part is a feedback mechanism letting them know that their performance was not up to the mark and to try harder or work smarter the next time. It's the teacher's job to make the negative feedback constructive and not destructive.
Learning to overcome failure breeds success.
"Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom." ~ George Smith Patton, Jr. -- And that's coming from a man who learned to deal with difficulty early in life and made enough mistakes along the way to bury a lesser man.
In other words, Snook, failure does breed success.
Conan the Grammarian at October 26, 2015 11:35 AM
Regarding the fear of failure, this is a letter to Newsweek, from Sept. 2004:
"I applaud your succinct and articulate examination of the problem of parents who have difficulty saying no when their children want 'what everybody else has' ('The Power of No,' Sept. 13). As a career educator I repeatedly say to parents that one of the most harmful things you can say to your children is 'All I want is for you to be happy.' I point out that it is far more essential for parents to be adult enough to say, 'Life is going to throw you curveballs, and it is more important that I teach you how to deal with that.' You alluded to the fact, but never said, that an important lesson for children is to learn how to deal with peer pressure. If parents give in to their children, for the myriad reasons that you suggested, how will the children ever learn the skill of standing up for principles?"
Mary Lou Dillon
Nyack, N.Y.
But this one's interesting too:
"My parents' greatest wish was for their two children to grow up to be happy, self-sufficient adults. If you raise kids right, they won't grow up lamenting the lack of the latest iPods, videogames or luxury cars. Rather, they'll grow up remembering the values of love, compassion and self-sufficiency. I'm a 22-year-old college student, raised in a wealthy family where I didn't receive every single thing I wanted, and I feel blessed to have those decidedly unsuperficial values bestowed upon me by wise and loving parents."
Dayna Sterkowitz
Naperville, Ill.
lenona at October 26, 2015 1:12 PM
Forgot - here's the link to the article - and yes, it mentions schoolwork too:
http://www.newsweek.com/power-no-126791
lenona at October 26, 2015 1:16 PM
And here are the response letters:
http://www.newsweek.com/mail-call-learning-draw-line-127091
lenona at October 26, 2015 1:17 PM
I'm starting to have to deal with some of these helicopter children now. Luckily, I work in the fire service so we don't tend to get as many as a random corporation would, but OH BOY when you DO get one. Wow.
One hurt himself on the job and his mommy was the one doing all his paperwork, calling for info (and was mightily pissed when the person in charge of his worker's comp claim pointed out at he was an adult and it would violate HIPPA to tell her anything) and who basically was still running his life, in spite of the fact he was supposed to be someone who was capable of running into a burning building to save a life. Frightening thought. Those types of people don't last long around here, and luckily most wash out rather quickly.
Daghain at October 26, 2015 6:05 PM
Trigger warnings are for PTSD patients and no one else.
Patrick at October 26, 2015 6:05 PM
Let us not forget that there are plenty of degreed professionals out there who did the time and the schoolwork, got the job - and now have little or no idea what to do, having no actual aptitude.
Many fields are like music - but when a musician plays, you can tell how skillful they are; it's easy to tell if that guy isn't the next Frank Zappa or Eric Clapton. It isn't obvious when the mechanical engineer designs piping that fails in ten years instead of a hundred, or doesn't bother to see what is installed in the field before advancing changes.
Radwaste at October 27, 2015 2:34 AM
Radwaste,
My personal favorite was the firm that used Florida's snow loading in the upper NE.
(It was funny at first, but I got tired of explaining to the 'fly-over' types how high trees (90'+ pines)are in the SE.)
Bob in Texas at October 27, 2015 4:31 AM
"Let us not forget that there are plenty of degreed professionals out there who did the time and the schoolwork, got the job - and now have little or no idea what to do, having no actual aptitude."
Indeed. Actually, it's even worse than that; a lot of those people are what I call "mal-educated". They've been taught a bunch of stuff that isn't true. In terms of what is actually factual, they know less now then they did when they graduated from high school.
"It isn't obvious when the mechanical engineer designs piping that fails in ten years instead of a hundred, or doesn't bother to see what is installed in the field before advancing changes."
Well, it's not obvious to the layman, but I assume that's what you meant. Of course, it is obvious to another competent mechanical engineer, but they often don't have the standing to do anything about it until it's too late. I've had the experience of being given some code that was basically working, but maybe it had a minor problem or someone wanted an improvement. And when I looked at the code, it was utter crap. Clearly, the person who wrote it had no idea what they were doing; it may work but it's horribly wasteful of computing resources, un-testable, and I find all kinds of latent bugs where the triggering conditions just haven't been hit yet, or the author got lucky and a second bug cancelled out the effects of the first bug. (I find a lot more of this in code from Third World sources... this is one reason I keep saying that software is a you-get-what-you-pay-for business. There are no shortcuts.)
Cousin Dave at October 27, 2015 6:48 AM
Trigger warnings for no one. Requiring trigger warnings is just another way of restricting free speech.
Conan the Grammarian at October 27, 2015 9:08 AM
Trigger warnings for everyone?
'Shit happens. Then you die. You've been warned.'
Ben at October 29, 2015 1:52 PM
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