“You know what they say—strict parents raise sneaky kids.”

September 21, 2024 12:05 PM

Helicopter parenting often doesn’t end when a child graduates from high school. Today’s parents have more tools than ever at their disposal to stay involved (or overinvolved) in their children’s lives and keep track of their whereabouts, habits, and activities, from tracking services like Life360 to Facebook groups specifically for parents of college students. If college is historically meant to be a time of self-exploration, complete with bad decisions and murky mistakes, an increasing number of parents seem to be attempting to curtail that growth. from Helicopter U. [Slate]
posted by chavenet (23 comments total)

🚁
posted by HearHere at 12:48 PM on September 21 [4 favorites]

If college is historically meant to be a time of self-exploration, complete with bad decisions and murky mistakes,

My personal opinions on the role of college are more complex and not really relevant, but I think it should be fairly obvious that a (perhaps growing) chunk of parents and of college students themselves do not ascribe to this “if”, and have other goals from their college experience. (Such as attempting to avoid economic precarity by getting a degree with a high enough GPA and good enough overall resume by the end so that they can be competitive for entry level jobs that didn’t require nearly as much from applicants back when I or the author of this piece were in college, in some cases.)
posted by eviemath at 12:48 PM on September 21 [28 favorites]

I have not RTFA and I'm far older than the demo being discussed but I will say one thing: my parents were over-protective and my mom was SAH until I was 16, and I was a sneaky lying little bastard and very rarely got caught in my misdeeds.
posted by supermedusa at 12:52 PM on September 21 [18 favorites]

It's a good thing there are so many helpful articles about what parents are doing wrong, how parents are failing their children, how overprotective parents have become, and how overwhelmed parents are! It's not at all exhausting.
posted by phooky at 12:54 PM on September 21 [33 favorites]

..but I think it should be fairly obvious that a (perhaps growing) chunk of parents and of college students themselves do not ascribe to this “if”, and have other goals from their college experience. (Such as attempting to avoid economic precarity by getting a degree with a high enough GPA and good enough overall resume by the end so that they can be competitive for entry level jobs that didn’t require nearly as much from applicants back when I or the author of this piece were in college, in some cases.)

I suppose it's not the intended expertise that's meant to be developed but don't underestimate "learning how to escape the consequences of one's misbehavior" as an economically valuable skill either. Some people manage to develop it to the level of a near superpower, much to the frustration of the rest of us.
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:02 PM on September 21 [15 favorites]

Such as attempting to avoid economic precarity by getting a degree with a high enough GPA and good enough overall resume by the end so that they can be competitive for entry level jobs

I mean, this was my goal back in the day, but I also had to figure out how to run my own life at some point? You can't develop judgment without encountering risk and making errors.

Anyway, the helicopter brigade is largely not from the lower classes, as being able to helicopter requires having a substantial amount of resources to invest in your kid in the first place.
posted by praemunire at 1:08 PM on September 21 [34 favorites]

Any article which uses Ivy League experiences to generalize for all of American higher education is - well, objectively, starkly wrong to start with, at worst. (Remember, there are <> 4,000 colleges and universities in this country.) At best it's just got a very narrow focus problem. That said, I'm glad the author at least cited staff from a non-Ivy, the University of Tennessee system, although didn't mention any students there.

Similarly, any article trying to talk about undergraduate education (I'll charitably assume that's the focus, leaving off grad school, although that's unsaid) that only discusses the residential experience is playing a partial game. Most college students in the US don't live on campus.

Class is clearly here, as praemunire notes.
posted by doctornemo at 2:31 PM on September 21 [15 favorites]

I feel like there’s a crucial difference in type - or at least a difference in scale - between developing as an independent adult and what is, in my experience, usually referred to by the sort of language of self-exploration and “bad decisions and murky mistakes” used, though. There can be a sense that a portion of students have that they are entitled to a certain social experience with college - like the guy from my university who was interviewed on the news after the third or fifth disruptive street party during one of the covid years who claimed that as a college student he was owed the opportunity to party in the binge-drinking, property destruction sense of party. Similarly, there is also a difference in type - or at least scale - between helicopter parenting and the two situations described in the article, that come across to me as in the first case bordering on, in the second case well over the line of emotional abuse and abusive control.

From the article:

Besides the location tracking, there are also constant phone calls. Sofia’s mother calls in the morning to ask if she’s started studying yet. She calls in the afternoon to check if Sofia is in the library. She calls at night to make sure Sofia is in bed. And if the calls go unanswered, they stack up, with Sofia’s phone flashing up to 15 missed calls. The texts come in too, telling Sofia she’s at school to study, that she’s wasting money, that her mother is going to stop paying her tuition.

and

When Anna (not her real name), 21, was a freshman at a college about 1,000 miles away from her hometown, her parents constantly monitored her location and called her to ask why she was where she was. Once, she overslept by 20 minutes and missed her parents’ check-in call. When Anna woke up, it was to the campus police knocking on her door: Her parents had called in a wellness check because she hadn’t answered their phone call. Anna wasn’t surprised by her parents’ overinvolvement—in high school, they had an app on her phone that would forward all her text messages to them and they read each one

I’m not saying that helicopter parenting doesn’t exist or isn’t an issue - my university plans activities for parents on new student drop-off day to help them through that transition on top of orientation activities to help new students with the transition. I just think this article is a little bit confused about helicopter parenting vs abusive levels of control, and about exactly what the issue with helicopter parenting is - or at least, for the latter, it uses similar language to many other pieces I have read that also fail to differentiate between a young person developing into an independent adult vs a young person being entitled to a particular form of social experience that has been held up as the one correct way to do a transition to adulthood right of passage but that has mostly only been available to economically privileged white males, historically.
posted by eviemath at 2:40 PM on September 21 [25 favorites]

I have a tangential comment: has anyone else noticed that many articles nowadays start at the beginning and run along for a while, then just stop? Like they hit the number of words they were assigned and didn’t need to write any more.

Maybe I can locate the editor’s parents and see if he’s spending less time at the office.

I’m puzzled why kids put up with helicopter parenting in college if they live away from home. I guess threatening to cut off the kid’s tuition never really occurred to me. I was more in the “kids gotta learn to live” camp.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 2:40 PM on September 21 [12 favorites]

Notice, as well, how every student profiled in this piece is female? It does make me wonder if part of what parents worry about is the impact of male students’ transition to adulthood rituals on their daughters, ya know? And I think the right thing to interrogate about that situation is the entitlement to the male students’ transition to adulthood rituals.
posted by eviemath at 2:43 PM on September 21 [23 favorites]

Anyway (last comment, sorry!), the thing about our current situation vis a vis capitalism is that, whether a statistically justified fear or not, feelings of economic precarity are no longer just for the lower classes. I guess it’s some sort of democratization of experience, so … yay? /insert head-desk or holding forehead with pained expression gif here/
posted by eviemath at 2:48 PM on September 21 [4 favorites]

Eviemath, and it was in the back of my mind as to whether or not these emotionally abusive parents of girls would only be willing to release the chain when the girls were turned over to an approved male in order to take up their role as a tradwife to produce heirs and grandchildren?

Control is a helllofa drug.
posted by BlueHorse at 3:40 PM on September 21 [5 favorites]

Anna, 21, not her real name, definitely 100% has a burner phone.
posted by mhoye at 4:40 PM on September 21 [16 favorites]

One thing that's interesting to me is how different this is in places with different social structures and expectations than the US.
In Chile, there's no assumption that you'll become "independent" as soon as you graduate high school. Our cost of living is comparable to the US or Europe but our wages are about 1/3rd, so it's harder to make it on your own, at least at first. We're also a very centralized country, most people reside in the capital, Santiago. Most santiaguinos go to university in Santiago, and most live at home while doing so. I left home at 27 and that was a fairly average age to do so for somebody of my class, education, etc.
There's also no assumption that you'll move away from your 'home town'. Most of the people I went to high-school and, later, architecture school still live in Santiago (as do I).
We have stronger family connections than I think most people in the US and the richer parts of Europe, so living close to your parents, grandparents, and even cousins, is important. This even impacts in what part of the city you choose to live in. I'm fairly typical in that, even though Santiago has over 7 million people, we live within walking distance of my parents, my brother, his ex and their children, my in-laws, and my brother-in-law.
Of my high-school era friends, the only one who moved away from Santiago to study did so because he couldn't get into any good schools here. He moved back as soon as he graduated.
Helicopter parents are probably a thing, but I can't imagine anybody stretching it past high-school, mostly because they probably still have their kids living at home.
posted by signal at 5:49 PM on September 21 [24 favorites]

As a former college employee, it was always kind of a joy when a parent found out they couldn't just find out every single thing they wanted to know about their child's anything because the kid is 18 and an adult and they can do that. Wanna know their grades? Ask your kid. No, you can't order their transcript if your kid doesn't permit it (one time someone managed it and it was a huge FERPA violation and locks had to be put on that kid's record). We can't tell you anything over the phone as a mommy/daddy, you're gonna have to get your kid on the phone for this. There was some kind of parental signoff that financial offices could do so parents could view the kid's tuition bill, but we had nothing like that and parents were locked out. Kids had to handle their own stuff. A good life lesson to learn, really.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:12 PM on September 21 [19 favorites]

SO glad we didn’t have cell phones when I was in college in the early 90s.
posted by gottabefunky at 6:30 PM on September 21 [7 favorites]

As a graduate of a strict, "traditional" boarding school whose whole system of rules was governed by a lengthy and (often hilariously specific) student handbook, we we simultaneously monitored to an inch of our lives. The rules, the dress codes, the prefects, honor courts, complicated systems of punishments, six day a week classes and all of the rest seemed only to seemed to encourage a much more robust and varied scope of rule-breaking than I'd ever experienced in public high school. Most of my fellow students were affluent and would grow up to be even more affluent and do the things that affluent people do. I often thought that learning out how to get away with shit was a big reason why rich parents sent their kids to boarding school in the first place. Sure, the selling point is that you get into an Ivy with an impressive resume, but really what you're doing is how to get into an Ivy with an impressive resume while learning how to break as many rules as possible. Because those rules? Figuring out how to get around them is just another way to overachieve. Or to quote a fellow classmate at the time, "The rules only apply to you if you're stupid enough to get caught breaking them."
posted by thivaia at 7:01 PM on September 21 [13 favorites]

I've heard "If you're not cheating, you're not trying."
posted by aleph at 8:17 PM on September 21 [5 favorites]

The girl next door was 2 when we moved in. Her parents were always loving and caring but as an only child, she led a really sheltered life. She was always a great kid, it was just weird to us how little time she spent away from her parents with her friends, things like that. Then she went away to college, four hours away. She then went to go get her masters in another state. Then she got her first job out of school in another state, a lot farther away. Then she transferred within the company back here. Soon after I had a long chat with her I the driveway about life, the universe, and everything. It was like talking to a completely different person, but in a good way. Her time away from home was very good for her social development. Like I said, always a great kid, and now a great young woman. That chat was very enjoyable.

Her parents weren’t really helicopter parents, they just kept her really close. But they did raise a good kid. I don’t have any kids, but once you grow up, it becomes very clear that your parents didn’t have all the answers, and they weren’t experts on raising kids. They were just finding their way and trying to figure everything out the best they could. That’s pretty much all parents. I tend to give parents the benefit of the doubt because nothing about raising a kid is easy. But some of these parents never give their kids the space they need to figure out life for themselves. Part of becoming an adult is making mistakes and learning from them, it’s being accountable for when you screw up, it’s figuring out how to work yourself out of a hole you’ve dug yourself into. Helicopter parents are trying their damnedest to make sure their kid doesn’t make mistakes, that they don’t screw up or they don’t face accountability if they do, and god forbid if the kid ever falls behind or anything. Kids need a little space. Otherwise they’re going to make that space and the consequences are not going to be kind to the parent, and very possibly not the kid either.
posted by azpenguin at 10:03 PM on September 21 [7 favorites]

I often thought that learning out how to get away with shit was a big reason why rich parents sent their kids to boarding school in the first place.

I mean, class ain’t gonna reproduce itself by itself, y’know?
posted by non canadian guy at 11:21 AM on September 22 [6 favorites]

Two years ago I wrote this comment (previously: “We need an online equivalent of Free Range Kids”):

> ...when do you stop, and why?

Never. They will be 18 and go off to college, and you'll still track them. They'll graduate at 22, and you'll still track them. They'll turn 25, get a job, get married, and you'll still track them.

It will only stop when they figure out how to escape.

This scales from individual parents to national governments. Power is never relinquished, it is only taken away.

99% of surveillance is pointless and ignored. The remaining 1% isn't used to protect. It's used to punish.

Surveillance isn't about protection, it's about control. Here's the proof: how many of these parents allow their children to have unfettered access to their own texts, emails, GPS location, credit card statements, personal diaries, and browsing history? I'm going to guess it's roughly about 0.0% of these surveiling parents.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:33 PM on September 22 [4 favorites]

Heh. As we’ve since learned, apparently House Majority Leader Mike Johnson is the one exception, with his kind of creepy sharing of browser porn-watching activity days with his son.
posted by eviemath at 2:35 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]

If you've done a good job parenting, as adults your kids will:

1) WANT to mutually share their location on maps with you (most of the time) as a just-in case measure, which also allows them to:
A) Check on you far more often then you do them
B) Harass you when you're not home from work, the store, or (your ex) their dad's when they expect you to be,
C) Give you utter hell if they notice that you've turned off location so THEY can't snoop.
D) Call you to make sure you ok and/or ask you to bring food, unless you turned the phone all the way off.


And don't get me started on how they will overshare way more information about their relationships, friendships, and clandestine activities than you'd prefer they did...
HAZARD: Sooner or later, their friends and/or SOs will, too.

posted by stormyteal at 5:36 PM on September 22 [8 favorites]