Copter parents at two o’clock!!

When I was teaching at the University of Colorado, I had to deal with a student who wanted me to change his/her class grade from a C+ to a B-. The student’s primary argument was not that s/he deserved a better grade for the class, but that his/her GPA had dropped below the minimum required to qualify for CU-Boulder’s study abroad programs. Needless to say, this was not a terribly persuasive argument — not to mention grossly unfair to all the students who had actually earned their B- grades — so I said no. I said no several times. A week after the student’s final plea, I received another phone call asking me to reconsider — from the student’s mother. The mother evinced little concern about her child’s academic performance — she just wanted to see her progeny spend a semester in Florence. I was more than a little surprised by the attempt, and got off the phone as quickly as possible. I haven’t had a problem like that with a parent since the start of the millennium, but I tell this story because of Justin Pope’s AP story on ‘copter parents.’ What are these creatures?:

They’re called “helicopter parents,” for their habit of hovering, hyperinvolved, over their children’s lives. Here at Colgate University, as elsewhere, they have become increasingly bold in recent years, telephoning administrators to complain about their children’s housing assignments, roommates and grades. Recently, one parent demanded to know what Colgate planned to do about subpar plumbing her daughter encountered on a study-abroad trip to China. “That’s just part of how this generation has been raised,” said Mark Thompson, head of Colgate’s counseling services. “You add a $40,000 price tag for a school like Colgate, and you have high expectations for what you get.” For years, officials here responded to such calls by biting their lips and making an effort to keep parents happy. But at freshman orientation here last week, parents heard a different message: Helicopter parenting has gotten out of hand, and it undermines non-classroom lessons on problem-solving, seeking help and compromising that should be part of a college education. Those lessons can’t be learned if the response to every difficulty is a call to mom and dad for help. “We noticed what everybody else noticed. We have a generation of parents that are heavily involved in their students’ lives, and it causes all sorts of problems,” said Dean Adam Weinberg. College should be “a time when you go from living in someone else’s house to becoming a functioning, autonomous person,” Weinberg added.

Read the whole thing. I’m not completely unsympathetic to the parental position — on the list of parental sins, being “heavily involved” in their childrens’ lives is far down the queue. Plus, when parents are spending the kind of money for higher education they are spending now, a little monitoring of one’s investment is to be expected. That said, wheedling for better grades on behalf of their children would seem to cross the line. In Clueless, at least the father had the good sense to make his daughter Cher argue her own case.