Hi Karen - Thanks!

I'm deleting "ktm guest's" comment.

You're exactly right about the "outing."

I'd be surprised if this comment were true. I spoke to Mr. Dobbs at some length; he had no idea who I was. His mother was quite ill, and he was going to Kentucky to look after her. He's revered by a number of Irvington parents and didn't seem the type to be "hiding" from a parent.

But suppose ktm guest is correct?

Does Mr. Dobbs want his private opinions posted by someone whose identity he does not know?

I sure wouldn't.

I'll add that I'd bet money ktm guest is not a teacher, partly because of the lack of professionalism "guest's" comment betrays & partly because of the grammatical error.

-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Nov 2006

Kathy

The guy who wrote the Wikipedia entry says that the term "helicopter parent" originated at colleges.

Don't know if that's right, but I wouldn't be surprised. Colleges are obviously getting some push back from parents bankrupting themselves to pay tuition.

I've never gotten over the College Board having an entire page of advice for parents on how not to be a helicopter parent.

Nor have I gotten over an article in the TIMES on colleges offering day-long seminars to parents of new freshmen on how not to be a helicopter parent.

-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Nov 2006

Does this college/university offer a day-long seminar on how not to be a helicopter parent?

That is going to be a key criterion when we look at colleges.

-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Nov 2006

The answer better be no.

-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Nov 2006

Well, if the parents have to be told not to call the college to make sure little Johnny gets out of bed in time to go to class, then there's a problem somewhere, and it isn't with the college.

Some of the anecdotes I've read are ROTFL-level outrageous.

-- GoogleMaster - 07 Nov 2006

I would say there is a problem with the college.

It's simply none of their business whether parents are calling their young-adult kids to tell them to get out of bed.

If you read the media in a "meta" kind of way, you'll see that there is constant objectification of parents, scrutinizing & assessing of parents, blaming of parents, etc....people were a little more aware of this back when everyone blamed the mother for everything under the sun. (I was taught, at Wellesley, that mothers caused schizophrenia. For awhile there we could count on feminists to object to this kind of thing.)

Now that the word "parents" has replaced "mothers" we seem to be back to open season on parents.

Private colleges especially are being paid vast sums of money to educate young adults; they need to work for us, rather than tell us to sit in "seminars" & be "educated" by them on how to parent.

If we've done a good enough job "parenting" actually to get a kid to college (and have some hope of paying for it), they should be thanking us.

Not seminar-ing us.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Nov 2006

I've gotta find that Joe Queenan article on being condescended to by the college you're bankrupting yourself to pay - it's hilarious.

One of the things these colleges do is lavish attention on you when they're trying to sell you.

Then when you've enrolled your kid they have things like 20-minute rules for moving your kid's belongings out of the dorm at the end of the year; no parking for parents; strip searches on the way inside the administration building, etc.

wait.

that last one is wrong.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Nov 2006

I forgot!

The striking thing about all this is that parents sign on for it.

Schools seem to be able to triangulate parents against themselves. Journalists go out on their latest helicopter parent story and they find parents willing to criticize themselves as helicopter parents - oy!

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Nov 2006

July 30, 2006
Notebook
A Father’s Lot
By JOE QUEENAN

ONE morning last semester I had to drive my 19-year-old son back to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. We were driving in at rush hour, so I was kind of tired when I arrived. So before beginning my trip home to New York, I decided I would get a cup of coffee.

Parking my antediluvian Previa van in one of the four temporary visitors’ spaces outside my son’s dorm, I dutifully reported to the Department of Public Safety, which sounds incongruously Jacobin way out in Amish Country, and asked if it was all right to leave my car outside.

“How long you going to leave it there?” the security guard asked.

“About a half-hour,” I replied.

“Well, if it’s only a half-hour, I guess it’s O.K.,” was his riposte. His tone was curt — not overtly uncivil, but as if I were boorishly imposing a massive inconvenience on both him and the institution that employed him. “Here, take this pink tag and attach it to your rear view mirror,” he said. “Make sure it’s facing forward. And make sure you bring it back.”

Gosh. I felt like some kind of impudent beggar, limping in from the streets, seeking a handout. This rankled. It costs around $43,000 to send my son to Franklin & Marshall each year, of which I pay $35,000. Anyway you cut it, $35,000 is a king’s ransom.

For the price of a king’s ransom, I do not automatically expect 24-hour telephone access to the college president, or assurances that my son will land a starting position on the football team, or a guarantee of high grades, or even reasonable certainty that my son will emerge from his four years in college as a well-rounded, well-adjusted young adult fully equipped to make his way in the world and perhaps even land a job in the State Department. All I’m asking is a place to park my car for 30 minutes without being made to feel like a freeloader.

Some people, well, Ann Coulter, at least, think that the most serious issue facing colleges today is the prevalence of left-wing educators spreading their poisonous ideas, but they are wrong. It’s parking. Friends with children in colleges in Virginia, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey and upstate New York all complain about it.

The theme is universal: there’s always plenty of parking near the admissions office before you’re admitted, but there’s not much in the way of parking afterward. Once that tuition check clears, you’re on your own.

My daughter recently graduated from Harvard, which hasn’t offered parking to parents since the 17th century.....

Each year, when my daughter moved in or out of her dorm, the security guards put us through a ridiculous charade of posting passes in our car window entitling us to a measly 20 minutes of parking, when moving in or out in less than two hours is inconceivable. Harvard also charges a king’s ransom for tuition. The least they could do is build a few parking spaces just for parents, if not a five-story lot, which wouldn’t put a nick in their vast endowment.

The media is rife with articles about obnoxious “helicoptering parents” who belligerently disrupt collegiate life. Most of these stories, I believe, are planted by aggressive university publicists who use impressionable journalists to turn public opinion against parents out of fear that they will one day stop helicoptering and instead start demanding more and better parking.

The fact is, most parents are anything but meddlesome, interfering in their children’s academic lives only in emergencies, or when they fear that their children’s needs are being ignored. I myself never, ever meddle, holding fast to the idealistic notion that universities are miniature universes designed to exist both in the world and outside it, much like the Vatican in Rome.

This being the case, I would never volunteer an opinion on issues of university governance, staff remuneration, educational philosophy, student discipline, or whether Lawrence H. Summers, the former president of Harvard, got stabbed in the back by a bunch of pouting loafers just because he asked them to teach a few classes for a change.

The only time I put in my two cents is when the issue is parking. It’s my bête noire, my casus belli, my sine qua non, my idée fixe.

I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. Case Western Reserve actually charges a $20 parking fee when parents show up for orientation in the summer. Boston College, like Harvard, allows no more than 20 minutes for moving in — to encourage slowpokes, explains its Transportation and Parking Department. The situation is so grievous that in Wisconsin a bill was introduced in the State Legislature to eliminate parking tickets during orientation. Tragically, the bill died in committee.

EVER since my children embarked on their great educational adventures, I have been besieged with letters, e-mail messages and phone calls from their universities imploring me to pony up additional cash. The letters usually begin with the words, “These are exciting times at,” which is shorthand for “We’re not going to ask you again, buster: Where’s the moolah?” Sometimes the institutions want money for a new science center, or a new dorm, or a titanium oscilloscope or so they can win the basketball championship for the first time in their history. I’d feel a whole lot better if they came right out and said: “We need $5 million. It’s so you won’t have to park on nearby streets.”

Joe Queenan is the author, most recently, of “Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile’s Pilgrimage to the Mother Country.”

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Nov 2006

"If we've done a good enough job parenting actually to get a kid to college, they should be thanking us."

1. They accepted your child out of a big list of applicants.

2. They require huge sums of money for teaching, room, and board.

Perhaps parents should give them a seminar on what their responsibilities should be. It's not that there aren't some parents who are an incredible problem for their kids or the school, it's that schools presume it is a one-way street.

This happens in K-12 too. They are the experts and we parents need to have open houses and seminars - even on parenting. It's always a one-way street, and they use egregious examples to make their case. Preemptive parental attacks. The term "Helicopter Parents" another way this is done.

Now, I'm all for giving kids much more freedom to sink or swim in college, but if colleges accept my child over many other kids and demand incredible sums of money, then they have to accept more responsibility than sink or swim. They can't just tell parents to go away. They have to assume that parents will try to improve the probability of success.

My experience is that this support happens more in the departments when the student gets past the Freshman year. However, the Freshman year is the most difficult one, where the student might be in auditorium classes of a hundred students or more. The college would flunk out the student who is left with nothing but $40,000 to pay off.

-- SteveH - 08 Nov 2006

Take a look at this--helicopter behavior is now extending to job searches:

Hovering parents now controlling kids' careers By Martha Irvine Associated Press

CHICAGO -- Some parents are writing their college-age kids' resumes. Others are acting as their children's "representatives," hounding college career counselors, showing up at job fairs and sometimes going as far as calling employers to ask why their son or daughter didn't get a job.

It's the next phase in helicopter parenting, a term coined for those who have hovered over their children's lives from kindergarten to college. Now they are inserting themselves into their kids' job search - and school officials and employers say it's a problem that may be hampering some young people's careers.

"It has now reached epidemic proportions," says Michael Ellis, director of career and life education at Delaware Valley College, a small, private school in Doylestown, Pa.

At the school's annual job fair last year, he says, one father accompanied his daughter, handed out her resume and answered most of the questions the recruiters were asking the young woman. Even more often, he receives calls from parents, only to find out later that their soon-to-be college grad was sitting next to the parent, quietly listening.

Donnell Turner, assistant director of the career center at Loyola University in Chicago, is just starting to notice the trend. He couldn't believe it when he saw the first of a few parents walk into a recent job fair for students.

"My parents are very supportive, but they're certainly not telling me what to do," said Ferris Wilson, a senior majoring in accounting and finance at Loyola who navigated the job fair by herself.

That said, she has seen many examples of parents who "dictate every move - even what their kids major in."

Indeed, while many people have heard about the helicopter parent phenomenon, it's tough to find moms or dads who consider themselves one.

"You know, somebody called me that," says Diane Krier-Morrow, whose son recently graduated from Saint Louis University and is now teaching English in Taiwan. She came to the Loyola job fair to get information from employers for her son and brought copies of his resume to hand out.

"But believe me, I'm just going to hand him the bag," she said of the stack of jobs brochures and business cards she had gathered. "The rest is up to him."

She says parents sometimes worry that today's young people aren't as motivated to work as previous generations, so they feel inclined to do some nudging.

But Ellis, at Delaware Valley College, says some students are too dependent.

He puts some of the blame on baby boomer parents, who have a reputation for coddling their children, but even more on the students.

"They've become so accustomed to having their parents take care of every aspect of their lives - and not assuming any responsibility or taking any initiative for themselves - that they expect their parents to continue to take care of things for them," Ellis says.

Eileen Tarjan, a human resources specialist at NCH Marketing Services in Deerfield, Ill., says she gets tired of making offers to students, only to hear them say, "Can I have the weekend to talk about it with my parents?"

"Why can't they just say, `Let me think about it,'" she asks.

And it doesn't stop there. A few colleagues have told Tarjan that parents are now calling to discuss their kids' first performance reviews.

She shakes her head: "It's unbelievable."

-- KathyIggy - 08 Nov 2006

Many grab on to a hot button item because it allows them to stand on a soapbox and spout off using anecdotes and little backup information. Others use it as form of manipulation. They define the context of the argument.

I was waiting in the doctor's office reading a copy of Time (appropriate) when I saw some letters to the editor about an article they did in a previous issue. It was about parents who try to push academics starting in Kindergarten, rather than let kids play and grow socially. All of the comments were NEGATIVE about this "trend". They had a similar article in our main state newpaper. The interviews and anecdotes were all one-sided. The approach is to define the argument and imply that there are no grey areas or alternate views.

-- SteveH - 08 Nov 2006

Perhaps parents should give them a seminar on what their responsibilities should be. It's not that there aren't some parents who are an incredible problem for their kids or the school, it's that schools presume it is a one-way street.

Right there with you!

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Nov 2006

Laura Pedrick for The New York Time
Parents get coaching at Rider University in New Jersey.

Parents’ Rights (and Wrongs)
by Kate Lombardi

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Nov 2006