Comments on: Helicopter Parents: why the Hovering?

By: Maureen Donehey

Maureen Donehey — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 04:03:12 +0000

Our gifted young son, Jack, is a college student with Asperger Syndrome and other developmental disorders. While he can adeptly debate politics, religion, and literature in French, Italian, Spanish, English and (soon) Arabic, he gets physically LOST on campus and organizationally lost in a calendar. He cannot and will never be able to drive. There is NO public transportation to get him to his community college due to “township boundries”. As soon as Universities adapt the layout of the campus, offer “outreach transportation” and faculty members begin to realize that “disabilities” include more than wheelchairs, I will continue to accompany my son to his college night classes so that he can someday become INDEPENDENT. Until the day when our community ALLOWS us to help our son to separate from us, I will proudly yet reluctantly wear my “helicopter parent” uniform. I would LOVE to ground my helicopter and to retire from the force…yet
Call me “Captain” of the helicopter squadron!
http://www.aspergerplanet.com

By: aj hensley

aj hensley — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 04:53:13 +0000

maybe it’s the fact that we were the generation that had to raise our kids with a fingerprinting pad because of the threat of child abductions; maybe it’s because we were urged to check the s-x offenders web site to know who was in our neighborhoods; maybe because we had to track the web sites our kids visited because it was so much easier for them to be preyed upon in their living rooms; maybe it’s because we bought the lie that I am entitles to a perfect life – and if it isn’t, i’ll sue someone… maybe it’s because we know our own lack of character and assume no one else has any either–or maybe it’s Bush’s fault, like everything else!

By: Architecture and Morality

Architecture and Morality — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 03:25:47 +0000

Why is Tuition so High?

I will admit to having very much enjoyed my undergraduate experience. The college I attended was very small, having fewer than 1200 students, and an exorbitantly high endowment. The students there were coddled every step of the way and there were arg…

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 03:00:28 +0000

I’m working on the filter. Sorry for the problems.

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 02:44:58 +0000

Your spam filter is freaking out and rejecting ordinary words.

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 02:43:41 +0000

2 reasons.

1. Tuition is now so high that we can’t let the process go off track. An extra year because of bad **** advice or poor course selection can be a sever financial hardship.

2. When I went to college in a previous millennium, the faculty was composed of members of the greatest generation and refugees from Europe. The former were men of great character, the later were men of great learning. Now the faculties are composed of members of the worst generation (the odious baby boomers) who have bad character and no learning.

**** an adjective relating to universities, which was rejected by the spam filter.

The spam filter also rejeced the comination of the past tense of make and the preposition that is the opposit of down.

By: Ken

Ken — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 01:16:23 +0000

Well, most parents have always seemed to harbor a d e s i r e to get their offspring to grow up as slowly as possible. Now that society and the law have firmly come down on the sid e o f no one ever even coming close to being ready to grow up until age 18 (after many years of gradual change in that direction), some parents are “pushing the envelope” seeing how much more childhood they can push onto their offspring. Not letting them face any real challenge alone in college, even down to attending orientation by themselves or adapting to scholastic standards and procedures, is a good strategy to keep them helpless and childlike a few more years. As a bonus, the more professors they can browbeat into grading easily, the less a college d e g r e e will be a sign of real achivement, and the more likely their child will need to go to graduate school to get the kind of job a college d e g r e e gets him now, leaving their precious child d e p e n d e n t on mommy and daddy even longer.

By: Dave L

Dave L — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 20:40:59 +0000

I favor the increased ease of communication as a reason. In my case, when I got a cellphone my communication with my parents increased dramatically to say the least.

By: ajbibi

ajbibi — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 18:47:06 +0000

I don’t know what is going on this year but for the first time, the parents greatly outnumbered the freshmen at the department’s orientation session. Got to talk with a lot of highly motivated kids, but in some cases, the parents were so eager that the actual students couldn’t get a word in.

I felt sorry for one girl as her mom just kept blabbing on non-stop in obvious indifference to the issues her daughter wanted to bring up.

Is this a blip or a trend? But this year is very different from what I saw just 2 or 3 years ago.

By: Richard Heddleson

Richard Heddleson — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 14:29:44 +0000

Loks like you guys scoped Drezner.

By: Kevin F

Kevin F — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:06:15 +0000

Re: “But she had to jump through the first hoops herself.”

I agree with your approach; we’ve taken the same tack. I have friends that are in academia who cite the same overbearing parents you describe. They were a pain in grade school and high school, and now they’re a pain at the alma mater.

Yet many of these selfsame universities abandoned in loco parentis and buckled under to student takeovers at college campuses in the late sixties and seventies. These former students, now parents, have simply shifted their revolutionary ways from taking over the dean’s office by force to taking it over by e-mail.

It’ll be very difficult to undo that legacy.

By: Richard Heddleson

Richard Heddleson — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 12:55:45 +0000

There’s a big difference between kid’s running into a bureaucratic brick wall and asking for their parent’s help and having the parents anticipate and resolve problems without the kid learning how to identify and solve problems on their own.

When one of my daughters was having trouble with the student health service, I finally sent a sharp e-mail to the college president that had the desired efect. But she had to jump through the first hoops herself.

I spoke to a professor about this at a party last week and the kinds of calls they get are to argue about grades, to get pre-requisites relaxed and to discuss course selection for coming quarters. And these are not after the student has been in to see the prof, this is out of the blue. That’s just a bit much.

And I know folks whose children call them at least daily between classes from cell phones. It all smells like control freak boomers who don’t want to loose control of their precious cargo even though they’ve taken down the “Baby on Board” sign.

As for jerk profesors, I had my share. 60% of my first semester intro calculus class got an F or D. And this was in spite of the jocks leaving en masse when the prof announced the curve on the first day. They’re going to have jerk bosses at some time in the future, they should find out how to work with them sooner rather than later.

By: BlogWatch

BlogWatch — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 12:40:22 +0000

Higher Learn’n

Dismal reports from Academia by Kevin Fleming at The Chicago Boyz in Helicopter Parents (hovering)….