Helicopters

A boy, his adult sized body too big for his twin size (extra long) dorm bed sleeps soundly, without displaying the wakefulness of someone who knows that morning has come. Closed curtains make the dorm dark even though it’s 8 am. The cell phone on its charger next to his bed rings the custom trill signifying it’s the boy’s mother. Boy wakes without opening his eyes and answers groggily, “L’o Mom.”

On the other end, mom is chirping, “Good morning, time to get up! I’ll call you back after your shower.” Boy drags himself out of bed, heads down the hall for a shower and gets back just in time for Mom’s post shower call.

“Ok,” Mom begins, “today you’ve got two hours after your Psych class to work on your essay for Anthropology. I thought I’d come by from four to five to clean your dorm room and I can take a look at your essay then. I see you got an A minus on the Calc exam, what happened there? Oh, and don’t forget, I set up that meeting with your counselor to talk about that Honors program. He sounded like a very nice man, so be sure to be on time. Well, go get some breakfast, and I’ll see you at 4. Love, you…”

Boy is set for the day without so much as slapping an alarm clock. His mother loves him, he gets great grades, and he doesn’t even have to clean his dorm. Boy is set, period!
Mom feels great too. She’s managing her college son, making life so much easier for him, so all he has to do is go to class and study. She says he really doesn’t have time for all those other distractions, why wouldn’t she help him out?

I can’t tell you Mom or Boy’s names because they exist mostly as a disturbing memory I have about a very real version of a mother and her son who were profiled on a TV news show a couple of years back when the term “helicopter parent” was being introduced. I watched with horror as both Mom and Boy gloated over their set up. God they were smug.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one horrified. To this day, I’m hopeful that Boy and Mom were exaggerated aberrations like the scary moms in the TV reality show Trading Spouses. But they sure did a good a job illustrating a phenomenon that is permeating the culture of launching our kids.

This is a culture of excessive competiveness, combined with affluence, which seems more extreme on the coasts than where I write from in the Midwest. Two admissions deans and a psychology lecturer from Harvard even published a lengthy article “Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation,” in which they included a description of parental pressures to excel from babyhood through the college admissions process. When I read about some of those parents I react mostly with a sense of utter disbelief and disdain. But that doesn’t mean I’m immune to understanding that there’s a game to be played if you want your kid to get full credit for his intellect and hard work.

The rub is, who’s doing the managing? That’s where the helicopter parents are so offensive to me as I try my damndest to avoid the label. But I know how fierce the competition is and live in a kind of surreal fear that one missed step will ruin my children’s opportunities.

How will I know if I’m becoming a helicopter parent? Oh God, could it be that angst I have about my children and their college careers means I’m on the fence, ready for take-off? I did after all, get pretty anxious about Hans’ SAT scores, and secretly hoped he’d have done better. I now cross my fingers that his ACTs will give him the high score I seem to be hoping for. I do like looking at college profiles in the “Best 361 Colleges” put out by Princeton Review. Do I have the disease?

I don’t. Thank God. This is confirmed via a CollegeBoard.com survey I took where I confidently checked “no” to such statements like number 7’s, “Are you planning to write your child's application essays or fill out his or her college applications?” It turns out I just suffer from self-diagnosed concerned mother syndrome, a somewhat benign condition that if not carefully monitored could result in a full-fledged, nasty, outbreak of helicopterism.

The irony is that the whole notion of helicopter parent, before it had the moniker of helicopter parent, has been repugnant to me since I had my first child in the mid 1980’s. David Carr, a popular columnist once wrote a piece in a parenting publication about the merits of what he called “benign neglect parenting,” and I immediately related, felt validated, and took ownership of the term. God knows, real helicopter parents wouldn’t recognize the term.

In my view, benign neglect allows a small child to play without adult interaction, taking a few risks, and learning from the frustrations or successes. It allows your second grader to present an oral report on Brazil to his class without you in attendance, camera ready. It allows your junior high daughter to get a B minus in a class without your calling the teacher and asking how this could have happened. It allows your high school junior to sign up and take his college entrance exams on his own, all you have to do is provide the credit card.

Helicopter parents are the scary ones at the science fair who are so proud of “our” display on electronics, some of them are the power moms who make teachers miserable by insisting on a continual, unrequested presence in the classroom, and some of them are the ones who have made colleges hire additional staff just to meet their demands.

There’s even a label for the really, really, overbearing sort, like the mother I saw on TV. They’re called Black Hawks. You don’t want to encounter a Black Hawk. Especially one toting a jug of bleach into her son’s dorm room.

I am fascinated however, by the kind of child who allows a parent to micro-manage his burgeoning life. Where’s his pride? Did he never get a chance to experience pride?

Admittedly, there were plenty of times I wished my kids would have let me help or fix one of their projects. But it was mitts off from virtually day one.

So, would we have been helicopter parents if we had been allowed?
Not likely.

There is a huge distinction between being helicopter parents who hover over their kids, to being engaged parents who have an astute awareness about their kids, but can successfully detach through a healthy dose of benign neglect.

It's a tricky balancing act.