Joining
Whoever you are, oh, wise man or woman, who goes by “Counselor-O-Matic” on the Princeton Review web site, thank you for your kind wording for the kids who don’t do bupkis for extracurricular activities in high school.
I mean, the choice, “You are an independent spirit and usually shy away from group activities, preferring to do things on your own,” makes it seem downright ok to click that little circle and still imagine getting into a college of your dreams.
And the resulting matchmaking choices you render! You’d think all this hype about colleges looking for participation in numerous activities was pure bull!
If only you, oh wise Counselor-O-Matic whom I liken to the Wizard of Oz, behind a white curtain, with crazy white hair, and long fingers pressing all those matchmaking buttons, if only you were in the business of college admissions.
Since you’re not, but since you are part of the esteemed Princeton Review to whom all colleges and students are heedful, here’s a suggestion: Add a whole new category for colleges to consider when they’re looking for good students, something like, “As an independent spirit, what do you prefer to do on your own? Do you 1) Read literature? 2) Stay abreast of current events by reading newspapers and magazines on a regular basis? 3) Engage in discussions with others about the human condition? 4) Create art/poetry/short stories for yourself? Or 5) Use your thumbs for twiddling and text messaging?
Just think, if high school kids could lay claim to options one through four, wouldn’t it make for a great applicant? Wouldn’t a college admissions dean feel darn right smart about whom he was accepting to his hallowed school? Wouldn’t such an applicant reveal more about the authenticity of his character as someone who listed a multitude of extracurriculars?
I really hope that a shift back to a kind of authenticity is on the horizon; a time when a college applicant didn’t need to have a full resume of life experiences by age 17 to be a desirable candidate. But it’s going to take more than an esteemed web site, even if it can feature the omnipotent “Counselor-O-Matic,” to make the change.
Colleges are going to need proof that overscheduled high school kids don’t necessarily make great college students or even working adults.
Here’s a start.
The burn out rate for college students is the highest ever. But frighteningly, suicide is the second leading cause of death for college students with an alarming 9% reportedly seriously considering it. Add to that, nearly half of all students report having felt so depressed that they could not function in the previous year.
Does anyone get the picture yet? One admissions dean in my camp who was in charge of selecting students for prestigious M.I.T, was known for speaking out against the “hysteria” over admissions until she was ousted after admitting she was once hysterical enough herself to fabricate her college credentials. The admissions dean for the University of Pennsylvania once told the NY Times that he bemoaned the fact that kids didn’t get to just hang-out anymore.
I remember being a teenager in the late sixties and hearing about kids in China and Japan who had to go to school on Saturdays. Those kids had it bad. It was all academics and it was all about excelling. They were getting ahead of us, or we were getting behind, I don’t remember, but I do remember thinking that those kids must have been ready to explode for all the fun they had kicked out of them.
I’m quite sure there were discussions then about “us versus them” and we Americans were considered more humane and creative because we let children have childhoods.
Then I guess it was decided not too long ago that we were falling enough behind so we needed to create miniature adults too. Except we cleverly switched around some words and concepts and next thing you know, successful students had to not only be brilliant students of A.P coursework or International Baccuralaureate, (with Math and Sciences smarts a definite plus,) but also leaders of their several clubs, and church groups, as well as athletes and concert pianists.
What didn’t change at all was the number of hours in a day (that’s still 24,) and in a week, (that’s still 168).
So in those 24 hour days, the most desirable of college applicants is at school for the mandatory seven hours a day, taking A.P. and Honors courses which will require a minimum three to six hours of homework each night.
That’s using up nine to twelve hours, leaving twelve to fifteen.
Piano practice takes up a good hour a day. And German club meets once every two weeks, but organizing the church group for feeding starving children takes at least a couple of hours a week.
Running track, playing golf, tutoring fellow students, volunteering at the nursing home, they are all somehow squeezed into those 168 hours.
There is some sleep involved, and a few meals as well.
All in the name of getting into college.
Now I know I don’t have the energy of a high school student, but I just don’t think it is possible to develop introspective, creative, well-read young adults by filling their days, minute to minute, with activities and academics.
And if your goal is to seek higher education because you want to learn and eventually work in an area of your interest, shouldn’t you be rewarded for being a reader, a poet, or an artist, instead of being left out because you don’t fit the mold of joiner?
How did “Extracurricular Activities” and community service ascend to such importance?
Did it not start out as a way to level the playing field for those who may not have been born to academic greatness?
I may be guilty of over-simplification, but it drives me crazy to hear about kids who are so over-scheduled in this effort to level the playing field that the playing field is now totally uneven, in favor of the busy over-achievers.
I’m defensive about this because it is Hans’ application weakness. Is it really so wrong to be a kid who hangs out at home, spending time talking with family, reading the paper and news magazines like the Atlantic Monthly, checking out the latest in pop-culture by watching the latest episode of South Park or tuning into Brian Williams and the networks news?
If you’re not an extrovert, in fact, if you are an introvert, what does that say about your chances for success in getting into the college of your choice? Leadership seems a big buzz word, but if you’re not a leader, what then?
So about those kids with complete resumes by the ripe old age of 17. Do they have any idea what “navel gazing” is? What would they think about if they had more time? Can we give them permission to slow down?
Oh wise Counselor-O-Matic, can you help?
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Drones
Once again, I’m bristling over another newspaper article about a high school senior who is hoping to hear soon from her dream school MIT. What, she thinks she won’t get in? The article says the girl has above a 4.0 GPA, (I didn’t know that was possible,)was one of six kids in the state to get a perfect score on the SAT college entrance exam, she took advanced classes, did volunteer work and extracurricular activities. Yet, she is fretting about whether or not MIT will accept her.
The article goes on to quote the admissions dean from MIT who paints a pretty narrow picture about who gets in. Just because you look good on paper doesn’t guarantee admission, she says, because the competition is so fierce. So maybe the stellar student won’t get in. Oh. My. God.
Why do I bristle? Because for the life of me I can’t figure out where these kinds of kids come from. Where do they get that incredible work ethic, that drive, to live their lives like little professional students, creating incredible college resumes while they are still too young to vote? And I’m not just referring to their grades…they have resumes that include stellar athletic performance, school or faith based leadership roles, community volunteer work, and to top it off they enjoy going to movies with their friends. I have never personally met one of them so I don’t know if they’re likable, or if they have any real personality. God, I hope not.
Because I don’t know any of them personally, I have taken to calling them drones. As in monotonous, dull. I’m quite sure, even hopeful, that’s an egregious label I’ve assigned to some incredible kids. But since I don’t know them, I’m sticking to the label.
I’ve always been very suspicious of drones and live in fear that they will take over the world. My fear is they will become the leaders of the neo-conservatives and will take away funding for the N.E.A. and we’ll have a society void of artistic expression but lots of big business. They are the kids who as pre-schoolers wore the clothes their mothers put out for them; you know, the outfits of tops and bottoms that actually go together.
So with each article about one more super achiever drone who once wore matching cottons, I bristle. The moment goes something like this:
My husband and I are relaxing in the living room reading the newspaper. It is a winter Sunday morning, and we’re drinking French roast coffee topped with heated milk foamed with the Aerolatte. The early morning sun is shining bright into the room, and I couldn’t feel more at peace. And then. I am reading the article on the super student and begin groaning. “It’s another achiever story,” I sigh, “Get this, this kid is a senior and has taken 10 A.P. courses and is president of his student council. He’s applied to Harvard, Northwestern and Stanford.”
Sig looks up, nods his head with acknowledgement, as in, he’ll read it when I’m done, and goes back to his section of the paper.
I sigh again, noticeably irritated, and begin my diatribe on the drones. I say things, like, “How do you even take 10 A.P. courses?” or “Do you think the parents forced this on this kid,” or “I wonder if this kid has any sense of humor.” When I’m finished, with my diatribe and the article, I fling the section of newspaper across the coffee table to Sig where he picks it up and begins to read.
He likes reading about these kids. He says, “Hans should read this. It will inspire him. At least it will make him realize how hard he needs to work.”
“No way,” I counter. “These kids are nothing like our kids.”
“Well I think they could amp it up a little,” Sig argues. He then goes on to suggest for the millionth time that Hans needs to get involved in some school groups, or do some volunteer work somewhere.
In my gut I feel I’m wrong, but I counter, “Hans will get into college based on his true intelligence, his entrance exams, and a killer essay. The match for him will be a school that sees he’s a true student, not an application whore.”
And there our discussion ends. When Hans comes downstairs a few hours later, Sig will tell him about a good article to read. Hans will take a look, and declare the kid in the article irrelevant.
End of subject.
Except it isn’t the end of the subject. In my mind will be the ongoing fight about what we’ve done as parents to raise kids who are seem to be so unlike those super-achievers. I will start with the fact that neither of us are super-achievers. That’s a good place to start. We haven’t modeled super-achiever behavior. Then I’ll wonder about what right we had to bring into the world these very bright children and not provide them with super-achiever modeling. Ah, we’re hacks for parents, and we’ve been busted. We were lazy. We coasted.
When I come to my senses later in the day, I will then go back to quietly bristling about the drones, and thank my lucky stars for the intelligent, creative, playful, and very real human beings who happen to be my children. I never could tell them what to wear when they were pre-schoolers. You want to wear a Batman sweatshirt for eight weeks straight? Go for it my boy.
But I don’t ever really let it go. I don’t because I remember my children from their younger days when they were so precocious. From my paleontologist, my mathematician and artist, to my language lover, all three thrilled us with their interests and innate intelligence. I imagine most of us watch our children in a kind of amazement, and could write pages about the talent and skills that showed up early in our children.
But what about those parents of the super-children? Were their children so incredible from day one that they kept up a kind of drill-sergeant relationship with them to maintain their uber-student status? Is that what we should have done?
I appreciate a smart driven kid as much as anyone. I just fear this crazy college bound culture could be sucking the authenticity out of these kids, turning them into drones.
So I bristle.
Once again, I’m bristling over another newspaper article about a high school senior who is hoping to hear soon from her dream school MIT. What, she thinks she won’t get in? The article says the girl has above a 4.0 GPA, (I didn’t know that was possible,)was one of six kids in the state to get a perfect score on the SAT college entrance exam, she took advanced classes, did volunteer work and extracurricular activities. Yet, she is fretting about whether or not MIT will accept her.
The article goes on to quote the admissions dean from MIT who paints a pretty narrow picture about who gets in. Just because you look good on paper doesn’t guarantee admission, she says, because the competition is so fierce. So maybe the stellar student won’t get in. Oh. My. God.
Why do I bristle? Because for the life of me I can’t figure out where these kinds of kids come from. Where do they get that incredible work ethic, that drive, to live their lives like little professional students, creating incredible college resumes while they are still too young to vote? And I’m not just referring to their grades…they have resumes that include stellar athletic performance, school or faith based leadership roles, community volunteer work, and to top it off they enjoy going to movies with their friends. I have never personally met one of them so I don’t know if they’re likable, or if they have any real personality. God, I hope not.
Because I don’t know any of them personally, I have taken to calling them drones. As in monotonous, dull. I’m quite sure, even hopeful, that’s an egregious label I’ve assigned to some incredible kids. But since I don’t know them, I’m sticking to the label.
I’ve always been very suspicious of drones and live in fear that they will take over the world. My fear is they will become the leaders of the neo-conservatives and will take away funding for the N.E.A. and we’ll have a society void of artistic expression but lots of big business. They are the kids who as pre-schoolers wore the clothes their mothers put out for them; you know, the outfits of tops and bottoms that actually go together.
So with each article about one more super achiever drone who once wore matching cottons, I bristle. The moment goes something like this:
My husband and I are relaxing in the living room reading the newspaper. It is a winter Sunday morning, and we’re drinking French roast coffee topped with heated milk foamed with the Aerolatte. The early morning sun is shining bright into the room, and I couldn’t feel more at peace. And then. I am reading the article on the super student and begin groaning. “It’s another achiever story,” I sigh, “Get this, this kid is a senior and has taken 10 A.P. courses and is president of his student council. He’s applied to Harvard, Northwestern and Stanford.”
Sig looks up, nods his head with acknowledgement, as in, he’ll read it when I’m done, and goes back to his section of the paper.
I sigh again, noticeably irritated, and begin my diatribe on the drones. I say things, like, “How do you even take 10 A.P. courses?” or “Do you think the parents forced this on this kid,” or “I wonder if this kid has any sense of humor.” When I’m finished, with my diatribe and the article, I fling the section of newspaper across the coffee table to Sig where he picks it up and begins to read.
He likes reading about these kids. He says, “Hans should read this. It will inspire him. At least it will make him realize how hard he needs to work.”
“No way,” I counter. “These kids are nothing like our kids.”
“Well I think they could amp it up a little,” Sig argues. He then goes on to suggest for the millionth time that Hans needs to get involved in some school groups, or do some volunteer work somewhere.
In my gut I feel I’m wrong, but I counter, “Hans will get into college based on his true intelligence, his entrance exams, and a killer essay. The match for him will be a school that sees he’s a true student, not an application whore.”
And there our discussion ends. When Hans comes downstairs a few hours later, Sig will tell him about a good article to read. Hans will take a look, and declare the kid in the article irrelevant.
End of subject.
Except it isn’t the end of the subject. In my mind will be the ongoing fight about what we’ve done as parents to raise kids who are seem to be so unlike those super-achievers. I will start with the fact that neither of us are super-achievers. That’s a good place to start. We haven’t modeled super-achiever behavior. Then I’ll wonder about what right we had to bring into the world these very bright children and not provide them with super-achiever modeling. Ah, we’re hacks for parents, and we’ve been busted. We were lazy. We coasted.
When I come to my senses later in the day, I will then go back to quietly bristling about the drones, and thank my lucky stars for the intelligent, creative, playful, and very real human beings who happen to be my children. I never could tell them what to wear when they were pre-schoolers. You want to wear a Batman sweatshirt for eight weeks straight? Go for it my boy.
But I don’t ever really let it go. I don’t because I remember my children from their younger days when they were so precocious. From my paleontologist, my mathematician and artist, to my language lover, all three thrilled us with their interests and innate intelligence. I imagine most of us watch our children in a kind of amazement, and could write pages about the talent and skills that showed up early in our children.
But what about those parents of the super-children? Were their children so incredible from day one that they kept up a kind of drill-sergeant relationship with them to maintain their uber-student status? Is that what we should have done?
I appreciate a smart driven kid as much as anyone. I just fear this crazy college bound culture could be sucking the authenticity out of these kids, turning them into drones.
So I bristle.
Take Away the Launching Pad
First I was the backpack boss at the suggestion of the junior high counselors. I’d go through Alek’s backpack after school to check for stray worksheets or unfinished homework. I would grill him on due dates and project progress.
It drove him crazy and made him defensive. This checking of backpacks lasted only through seventh grade at which point I told Alek it was time to be held responsible for his own backpack. Sure, he missed handing in a few assignments, but he paid the consequence with his grades. But then, those were his grades and not mine.
Would he have received better grades had I continued to play backpack boss? Would he have gone to a selective college if I had made sure he always turned in his homework and knew about every test he had?
It’s not that I became a total slacker for a mom; it’s just that I couldn’t keep up a pretense of being what would later be termed helicopter parent. I couldn’t do it. I had to hand back the responsibility. Ask my children, and they still think I nag.
But it took some effort to remove myself from that first son’s air space while still attempting an active kind of engagement in his school life. Would he do all his homework? Would he remember to turn it in? Would he bring home the permission slip for me to sign?
Little did I know that checking backpacks was just the first in a series of good- intentioned efforts by school administrators to get parents more engaged with their children’s academic life. How benign that seems in retrospect.
In one of those which-came-first, the-chicken-or-the-egg scenarios, more and more information started being made available to parents, particularly via the Internet.
At Alek’s freshman orientation in the fall of 2003, kindly administrators gently prepared us parents for our college student’s life away from home. There were many teary eyed mothers and fathers listening to stories about how our kids would be beginning their lives in college and how wonderful it was that we were there supporting them. (I believe this parent orientation was mandatory.)
Then we were told how to obtain a pin number so that we could access on-line our kids’ class schedules and see assignments and grades. Of course, our kids had to provide the pin number, but the college did make it available.
Check your college kid’s grades? It seemed to me not only to be a huge invasion of privacy, but also too much information. What would we do with it? Call our kids and tell them to work harder, call them to remind them to hand in their paper that was due in two weeks? Send care packages because we knew they have exams at 10, 12, and 3 the next day and they’ll need brain food?
Wow, fuel for the helicopter!
Doesn’t being grown-up enough to go to college, drive, vote, serve in the army, mean you should be able to keep tabs on your class work, and not have to report in to your parents?
Colleges and universities all over the country are touting their accessibility to parents. They figure they charge so much, the people who pay ought to have front row seats! Even CollegeBoard.com added a parent site in recognition of the tendency for parents to “coach” their kids along. They’re pandering to the helicopter parents while denouncing them at the same time.
I never did ask for a pin number to access Alek’s freshman grades. We had cell phones, and e-mail, and my boy loved to call with a report of a good grade on a test or a paper. He’d also tell me about the “jerk” professor, which I knew enough to translate to a C on a paper. How much more did I need to know? Aren’t you supposed to go off to college and experience some ups and downs? Aren’t you even supposed to keep things from your parents?
And now the high school and junior high have on-line “parent portals” allowing us to have constant access to our kids’ daily assignments, and grades.
Three weeks into the first quarter after the portal was set up, I checked my kids’ grades. I tensed up, realizing I’d only be content seeing A’s and feeling irritation to see anything less. All you have to do is do the work to get A’s I argue. Of course when I talked to the kids, they looked at me as if my life was totally lacking fulfillment, that I was putting too much pressure on them to get A’s, and that in fact the grades I was seeing didn’t reflect final drafts or final tests or final anything.
In a futile attempt to express his exasperation with me, Hans actually changed the password to the portal so I couldn’t have access, creating a new password clue: “Ha”
I know now that it takes restraint to use the portal correctly, that is, you don’t fly off the handle if something hasn’t been turned in, or there is a less than desirable grade. But if I am going to avoid flying helicopters, it would be nice if I didn’t have a launching pad in front of me at all times.
First I was the backpack boss at the suggestion of the junior high counselors. I’d go through Alek’s backpack after school to check for stray worksheets or unfinished homework. I would grill him on due dates and project progress.
It drove him crazy and made him defensive. This checking of backpacks lasted only through seventh grade at which point I told Alek it was time to be held responsible for his own backpack. Sure, he missed handing in a few assignments, but he paid the consequence with his grades. But then, those were his grades and not mine.
Would he have received better grades had I continued to play backpack boss? Would he have gone to a selective college if I had made sure he always turned in his homework and knew about every test he had?
It’s not that I became a total slacker for a mom; it’s just that I couldn’t keep up a pretense of being what would later be termed helicopter parent. I couldn’t do it. I had to hand back the responsibility. Ask my children, and they still think I nag.
But it took some effort to remove myself from that first son’s air space while still attempting an active kind of engagement in his school life. Would he do all his homework? Would he remember to turn it in? Would he bring home the permission slip for me to sign?
Little did I know that checking backpacks was just the first in a series of good- intentioned efforts by school administrators to get parents more engaged with their children’s academic life. How benign that seems in retrospect.
In one of those which-came-first, the-chicken-or-the-egg scenarios, more and more information started being made available to parents, particularly via the Internet.
At Alek’s freshman orientation in the fall of 2003, kindly administrators gently prepared us parents for our college student’s life away from home. There were many teary eyed mothers and fathers listening to stories about how our kids would be beginning their lives in college and how wonderful it was that we were there supporting them. (I believe this parent orientation was mandatory.)
Then we were told how to obtain a pin number so that we could access on-line our kids’ class schedules and see assignments and grades. Of course, our kids had to provide the pin number, but the college did make it available.
Check your college kid’s grades? It seemed to me not only to be a huge invasion of privacy, but also too much information. What would we do with it? Call our kids and tell them to work harder, call them to remind them to hand in their paper that was due in two weeks? Send care packages because we knew they have exams at 10, 12, and 3 the next day and they’ll need brain food?
Wow, fuel for the helicopter!
Doesn’t being grown-up enough to go to college, drive, vote, serve in the army, mean you should be able to keep tabs on your class work, and not have to report in to your parents?
Colleges and universities all over the country are touting their accessibility to parents. They figure they charge so much, the people who pay ought to have front row seats! Even CollegeBoard.com added a parent site in recognition of the tendency for parents to “coach” their kids along. They’re pandering to the helicopter parents while denouncing them at the same time.
I never did ask for a pin number to access Alek’s freshman grades. We had cell phones, and e-mail, and my boy loved to call with a report of a good grade on a test or a paper. He’d also tell me about the “jerk” professor, which I knew enough to translate to a C on a paper. How much more did I need to know? Aren’t you supposed to go off to college and experience some ups and downs? Aren’t you even supposed to keep things from your parents?
And now the high school and junior high have on-line “parent portals” allowing us to have constant access to our kids’ daily assignments, and grades.
Three weeks into the first quarter after the portal was set up, I checked my kids’ grades. I tensed up, realizing I’d only be content seeing A’s and feeling irritation to see anything less. All you have to do is do the work to get A’s I argue. Of course when I talked to the kids, they looked at me as if my life was totally lacking fulfillment, that I was putting too much pressure on them to get A’s, and that in fact the grades I was seeing didn’t reflect final drafts or final tests or final anything.
In a futile attempt to express his exasperation with me, Hans actually changed the password to the portal so I couldn’t have access, creating a new password clue: “Ha”
I know now that it takes restraint to use the portal correctly, that is, you don’t fly off the handle if something hasn’t been turned in, or there is a less than desirable grade. But if I am going to avoid flying helicopters, it would be nice if I didn’t have a launching pad in front of me at all times.
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.
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.
Defining Success
When my oldest son was a senior in high school, the question I grew to despise was “Where’s Alek going to go next year?” When my answer, through the month of April, was, “He doesn’t know,” it was met with sympathetic nods, and implied knowledge that my kid wasn’t an academic. He obviously wasn’t on track to go to a high-end school…like everybody else’s kid. Or so it seemed. I resented the sympathy, but even more I resented hearing about plans other kids were making.
I tried adjusting my thinking, my point of reference for what determined success in a 17 year-old. But mostly I came up disappointed and questioned our parenting and where we went wrong.
Alek was an easy-working (someone who doesn’t work hard) B student, didn’t belong to clubs, and didn’t do volunteer work but did work part-time for a chain sandwich restaurant nearby. A tall, good-looking boy, he laughed and joked easily, and enjoyed hanging out with us until he began driving and dating. He didn’t engage in risky behavior…in other words he didn’t drink and do drugs, and he had nearly perfect school and work attendance. He was also polite. In my day, we’d have said he was doing enough. But this was his day, and I was feeling mighty disappointed.
Ultimately he did choose a school, one far away from home, one that was happy to provide a scholarship for his 3.1 GPA. And I finally had an answer to inquiries about his plans.
My sister had accused me of wanting a “Stepford son.” I’ll admit it, I did. Think how simple it would be to parent a kid who is doing everything you envisioned for him since that day he announced as a three year old he’d like to be a paleontologist. When his nanny described him as a thinker. When his second grade teacher said he was brilliant, but would always be a victim of his attitude. There it is, the early veering off the path, away from the perfection of the robotic Stepford life.
As parents, at what point do we back off and let our older kids, those high school juniors and seniors to twenty-somethings, make choices that make us cringe? And what if in backing off, the result is that independent child chooses a life far from our dreams? The dreams based on his potential, his genetic predisposition to intellectual greatness, and enlightened parenting.
I guess the answer is, it’s his life, not ours. Not ours to live, and not ours to fix. That’s hard to swallow for most of us baby-boomers who have hovered over our children like no other generation. We are the first generation to be so engaged on a continual basis with our kids that the term uber-parenting is used to describe us. (I’m pretty sure it’s not intended as a compliment.) Some of us feel our kids owe it to us to turn out the way we envisioned, agreeing with the values that we imparted, and behaving accordingly. We want back what we put in.
I couldn’t understand why my son couldn’t pull off academic greatness that would have landed him in a prestigious…ok, nice, college. And when he decided to quit college for a year, I worried he would be aimless and find it difficult to re-enter academia. He dated an uninspiring girl, and his friends were floundering with him…what happened to my paleontologist?
There’s very little written about parenting children in their high-teens to low twenties. What you find are books about your adult children moving back home, how your grasp of English isn’t enough to communicate with your child, or how to love a truly dysfunctional (as in the real bad stuff like drugs, criminal behavior and the like,) child. There’s no celebrity pediatrician like T. Berry Brazelton telling us to stop looking in our high school senior’s backpacks for homework assignments, no British parenting guru Penelope Leach suggesting how to ensure our college freshman goes to class each day, no Marguerite Kelly providing personality descriptions/what to expect of the 21 year old.
Several parents with whom I have commiserated, have opined that they are frustrated with their older child… the high school senior who seems to only wake and get to school upon the shill of his mother’s angry voice and then forgets to turn in homework, the college sophomore who dropped out of school to work in a tattoo parlor, and the socialite who stays in constant contact with his peers via his always connected cell or computer at the expense of his grades.
The problem as parents see it, is the child isn’t performing to an academic/success formula that we recognize, and we wonder, “Will he ever get it together?” And we guiltily admit that we wish our kids were the ones attending the selective colleges, getting academic honors, as well as doing community volunteer work, acting in the local theater, dating someone equally high achieving, not to mention saving the planet….
But I wonder how much of what we want for our children is really a matter of imposing our middle-aged maturity onto them? We see so clearly the opportunities that could be theirs and can’t bear to see them throw them away.
Are we really just impatient for them to catch up with us, skipping all the mistakes and miscues we suffered through?
I suspect all we really need to do is to change our definition of success.
When my oldest son was a senior in high school, the question I grew to despise was “Where’s Alek going to go next year?” When my answer, through the month of April, was, “He doesn’t know,” it was met with sympathetic nods, and implied knowledge that my kid wasn’t an academic. He obviously wasn’t on track to go to a high-end school…like everybody else’s kid. Or so it seemed. I resented the sympathy, but even more I resented hearing about plans other kids were making.
I tried adjusting my thinking, my point of reference for what determined success in a 17 year-old. But mostly I came up disappointed and questioned our parenting and where we went wrong.
Alek was an easy-working (someone who doesn’t work hard) B student, didn’t belong to clubs, and didn’t do volunteer work but did work part-time for a chain sandwich restaurant nearby. A tall, good-looking boy, he laughed and joked easily, and enjoyed hanging out with us until he began driving and dating. He didn’t engage in risky behavior…in other words he didn’t drink and do drugs, and he had nearly perfect school and work attendance. He was also polite. In my day, we’d have said he was doing enough. But this was his day, and I was feeling mighty disappointed.
Ultimately he did choose a school, one far away from home, one that was happy to provide a scholarship for his 3.1 GPA. And I finally had an answer to inquiries about his plans.
My sister had accused me of wanting a “Stepford son.” I’ll admit it, I did. Think how simple it would be to parent a kid who is doing everything you envisioned for him since that day he announced as a three year old he’d like to be a paleontologist. When his nanny described him as a thinker. When his second grade teacher said he was brilliant, but would always be a victim of his attitude. There it is, the early veering off the path, away from the perfection of the robotic Stepford life.
As parents, at what point do we back off and let our older kids, those high school juniors and seniors to twenty-somethings, make choices that make us cringe? And what if in backing off, the result is that independent child chooses a life far from our dreams? The dreams based on his potential, his genetic predisposition to intellectual greatness, and enlightened parenting.
I guess the answer is, it’s his life, not ours. Not ours to live, and not ours to fix. That’s hard to swallow for most of us baby-boomers who have hovered over our children like no other generation. We are the first generation to be so engaged on a continual basis with our kids that the term uber-parenting is used to describe us. (I’m pretty sure it’s not intended as a compliment.) Some of us feel our kids owe it to us to turn out the way we envisioned, agreeing with the values that we imparted, and behaving accordingly. We want back what we put in.
I couldn’t understand why my son couldn’t pull off academic greatness that would have landed him in a prestigious…ok, nice, college. And when he decided to quit college for a year, I worried he would be aimless and find it difficult to re-enter academia. He dated an uninspiring girl, and his friends were floundering with him…what happened to my paleontologist?
There’s very little written about parenting children in their high-teens to low twenties. What you find are books about your adult children moving back home, how your grasp of English isn’t enough to communicate with your child, or how to love a truly dysfunctional (as in the real bad stuff like drugs, criminal behavior and the like,) child. There’s no celebrity pediatrician like T. Berry Brazelton telling us to stop looking in our high school senior’s backpacks for homework assignments, no British parenting guru Penelope Leach suggesting how to ensure our college freshman goes to class each day, no Marguerite Kelly providing personality descriptions/what to expect of the 21 year old.
Several parents with whom I have commiserated, have opined that they are frustrated with their older child… the high school senior who seems to only wake and get to school upon the shill of his mother’s angry voice and then forgets to turn in homework, the college sophomore who dropped out of school to work in a tattoo parlor, and the socialite who stays in constant contact with his peers via his always connected cell or computer at the expense of his grades.
The problem as parents see it, is the child isn’t performing to an academic/success formula that we recognize, and we wonder, “Will he ever get it together?” And we guiltily admit that we wish our kids were the ones attending the selective colleges, getting academic honors, as well as doing community volunteer work, acting in the local theater, dating someone equally high achieving, not to mention saving the planet….
But I wonder how much of what we want for our children is really a matter of imposing our middle-aged maturity onto them? We see so clearly the opportunities that could be theirs and can’t bear to see them throw them away.
Are we really just impatient for them to catch up with us, skipping all the mistakes and miscues we suffered through?
I suspect all we really need to do is to change our definition of success.
And So it Began…
How I learned to be neurotic about college admissions…
On an August morning in 2002, a little self-important bullfrog of a woman told Alek and me that he’d never get into the U, and he better think of some state colleges or community colleges. It was the summer before his senior year of high school at the large, suburban high school he’d attended since tenth grade.
“But, he has a B average,” I countered. “I got into the U with a B+ average, and he’ll have that by the time he’s into his senior year.”
“It’s different now,” the seriousness in her voice proclaiming her position as expert high school guidance counselor. “The U (the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities) looks at class rank and GPA, and kids like Alek don’t get in. His 3.1 puts him at the 50th percentile at Hopkins High. Have you thought of St. Cloud State or Normandale Community College?”
Of course we hadn’t. In my day, during the early seventies, when everyone got into the U, only the kids who weren’t really college material went to those schools. I looked at this woman, her stout little body becoming more frog-like as I processed what she was telling me. As she grew warts and her skin began to turn green, here’s what I heard.
“Your son is stupid and lazy, and you are a lousy parent for letting him get this way.”
Great. I quit my job during his kindergarten year so I could be a sharp, engaged mother. I gave up half our family’s income, and any hope of an advertising executive’s career life, just to end up a lousy parent.
Damn the frog woman. Damn my boy!
The expression, “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” should be mother instead of woman. I felt scorned, and someone had to take the resulting punches.
On the way home from that meeting, I was steaming; not talking to Alek, just steaming. He was silent.
At home I took all my anger at having been labeled a lousy parent (at least in my mind) and pacing my kitchen floor, I yelled at Alek. I called him a loser. In a scene punctuated with expletives, I highlighted his missteps as a student for every grade that wasn’t an A, (his ninth grade year was a blow-out.) The counselor was only partly right; he wasn’t stupid I knew, but he was lazy. Lazy people who can’t get into good colleges are losers.
I don’t actually remember his reaction to my tirade. He probably defended himself a little, his 6’4” young adult body trying to stand up to a crazed mother, defending his record, and then resigning himself to my vindictive temper tantrum. I can picture his face, his beautiful blue eyes, so lost and so hurt and feeling that yes, maybe his mother was right, and he was a loser.
God, I wish I had waited until the next day. By then, my mean tempered vitriol had disappeared with the steam that shot out of my head like a cartoon character and I apologized to my boy and began working on fixing the damage I inflicted with my bad mama act. I also arranged to change counselors. Real or not, she made me feel awful, and the new, younger male counselor assigned to us worked to build us back up.
But that summer meeting was when I discovered several things that have for better or for worse created my generally surreal vision of parenting teenagers in preparation for college:
First, students should just get straight A’s if they want full credit for their innate intelligence assuming they have it, and second, students who are willing to play the role of super achiever get all the opportunities.
For parents, don’t ever, ever, let your nag-and-push guard down because this business of planning for college is crazy and one missed step might mean the difference between your kid having a good future or not.
Finally, don’t believe the previous statements unless you’re willing to swim in the tsunami waters of a culture that claims getting into a selective college takes precedence over childhood.
But maybe you won’t recognize the tsunami for what it is anymore than I did.
To prepare you though, here are a couple of statistics from the U.S. Department of Education. In 1972, around the time my husband and I graduated, three million students nationwide graduated from high school. In 2005, just about the same number of students graduated (3.089 million). But now a whopping 62 percent more grads are enrolling in colleges, with another 15 percent growth expected by 2014!
How many of us look at admissions stats at colleges and questionwhether we’d have been accepted today? The answer is many of us would not. No wonder then that our generation, we uber parents who have more than any generation engaged in micro-managing our kids, is going ballistic.
Things are different now.
How I learned to be neurotic about college admissions…
On an August morning in 2002, a little self-important bullfrog of a woman told Alek and me that he’d never get into the U, and he better think of some state colleges or community colleges. It was the summer before his senior year of high school at the large, suburban high school he’d attended since tenth grade.
“But, he has a B average,” I countered. “I got into the U with a B+ average, and he’ll have that by the time he’s into his senior year.”
“It’s different now,” the seriousness in her voice proclaiming her position as expert high school guidance counselor. “The U (the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities) looks at class rank and GPA, and kids like Alek don’t get in. His 3.1 puts him at the 50th percentile at Hopkins High. Have you thought of St. Cloud State or Normandale Community College?”
Of course we hadn’t. In my day, during the early seventies, when everyone got into the U, only the kids who weren’t really college material went to those schools. I looked at this woman, her stout little body becoming more frog-like as I processed what she was telling me. As she grew warts and her skin began to turn green, here’s what I heard.
“Your son is stupid and lazy, and you are a lousy parent for letting him get this way.”
Great. I quit my job during his kindergarten year so I could be a sharp, engaged mother. I gave up half our family’s income, and any hope of an advertising executive’s career life, just to end up a lousy parent.
Damn the frog woman. Damn my boy!
The expression, “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” should be mother instead of woman. I felt scorned, and someone had to take the resulting punches.
On the way home from that meeting, I was steaming; not talking to Alek, just steaming. He was silent.
At home I took all my anger at having been labeled a lousy parent (at least in my mind) and pacing my kitchen floor, I yelled at Alek. I called him a loser. In a scene punctuated with expletives, I highlighted his missteps as a student for every grade that wasn’t an A, (his ninth grade year was a blow-out.) The counselor was only partly right; he wasn’t stupid I knew, but he was lazy. Lazy people who can’t get into good colleges are losers.
I don’t actually remember his reaction to my tirade. He probably defended himself a little, his 6’4” young adult body trying to stand up to a crazed mother, defending his record, and then resigning himself to my vindictive temper tantrum. I can picture his face, his beautiful blue eyes, so lost and so hurt and feeling that yes, maybe his mother was right, and he was a loser.
God, I wish I had waited until the next day. By then, my mean tempered vitriol had disappeared with the steam that shot out of my head like a cartoon character and I apologized to my boy and began working on fixing the damage I inflicted with my bad mama act. I also arranged to change counselors. Real or not, she made me feel awful, and the new, younger male counselor assigned to us worked to build us back up.
But that summer meeting was when I discovered several things that have for better or for worse created my generally surreal vision of parenting teenagers in preparation for college:
First, students should just get straight A’s if they want full credit for their innate intelligence assuming they have it, and second, students who are willing to play the role of super achiever get all the opportunities.
For parents, don’t ever, ever, let your nag-and-push guard down because this business of planning for college is crazy and one missed step might mean the difference between your kid having a good future or not.
Finally, don’t believe the previous statements unless you’re willing to swim in the tsunami waters of a culture that claims getting into a selective college takes precedence over childhood.
But maybe you won’t recognize the tsunami for what it is anymore than I did.
To prepare you though, here are a couple of statistics from the U.S. Department of Education. In 1972, around the time my husband and I graduated, three million students nationwide graduated from high school. In 2005, just about the same number of students graduated (3.089 million). But now a whopping 62 percent more grads are enrolling in colleges, with another 15 percent growth expected by 2014!
How many of us look at admissions stats at colleges and questionwhether we’d have been accepted today? The answer is many of us would not. No wonder then that our generation, we uber parents who have more than any generation engaged in micro-managing our kids, is going ballistic.
Things are different now.
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