Helicoptering: Or When Parents Hover and Students Run for Cover

Here's a scenario. Let me know if this sounds familiar to you: A mom wants to motivate her son into finding an academic advisor, applying for financial aid on time, taking a full complement of classes. Son is in his 20s, lives at home, and is fairly typical of a lot of students I see, especially in a very metro area. These students stay close to home, go to community college, and rely more on their immediate family for day-to-day needs (roof, car, insurance, food, health care, incidentals). Is this a good thing, a bad thing, both, or none?

In the past I've suggested to parents in this situation that they need to let their kids make decisions or else they'd have a 35 year old man-child (or woman-child) still living in the attic. For some people, they never want their children to leave home. As an educator, this is one of the worst things imaginable for me. The problem becomes: who is responsible for the 23-year-old student? His education might be partly my responsibility. That is, I have to get current, timely information to him, and I have to be able to evaluate how he processes that information so that I can tell whether or not he's learned the course content. But isn't "Jimmy," the student, responsible, too? He has to come to class, do his work (on time), and do good enough work to successfully pass the class in question.

So where do mom and dad, and grandma, and Jimmy's girlfriend Patsy come in? Unfortunately, they sometimes show up on stage and refuse to sit down. I've seen parents do their college children's homework; call and complain about grades and treatment; storm the dean's office; house, feed, wake up, cook, clean and pamper adults who do not work, but only go to school, and only sometimes at that.

This confusion is not about the hardships of the economy: there are plenty of families out there living together, working hard, and making a multifamily living arrangement work during difficult times. Rather, this confusion is more about middle-class American parents who have always given to their kids to the detriment of themselves, who email professors to find out the grades of their 28-year-old princess, who continue to pay for Jimmy's classes, even when he's failed the same one 3 times (two from a lack of showing up, one from showing up but not turning in any work). Where is the social responsibility to raise prepared adults?

I realize that this "rant" (for lack of a better word) focuses on parental responsibility and how it should be that parents transfer responsibility to their teens so that said teens are ready for the trials and tribulations of a college life. I've recently had a student complain that I got all "volcano" on him for calling him out on web surfing during a class. He never once mentioned that he was breaking a syllabus rule, and being completely rude at that. Where is the responsibility? And what would a professor like me have Jimmy's mom do? Here are some suggestions:

1. Make him go to school full time or work full time
2. Make him pay rent or get his own place
3. Stand up for your stress: don't say something then back down
4. Remind your kids of how hard you worked, how hard their grandparents worked, sacrifice.
5. Look after yourself first. Kids respond well to parents who are not punching bags or victims.

There comes a time in which parents (and professors) can spoon-feed ill-prepared students all the materials they need ("oh, you want another handout because you lost the last one?" "you'd like another week to do the work because you forgot?") but all this does is just delay the inevitable: the more excuses we as professors accept (and parents of college students accept), the harder our lives become in the end.

And isn't it typical that I write an entire post about what's wrong with some students, in that their parents were too lenient? What about all those success stories of students who struggled against the odds, put themselves through school, raise kids, work 2 jobs, suffer but succeed? I think that will have to be my next post. Because without them, it would really seem hopeless sometimes.