My latest newspaper column, for your enjoyment

Parents, let students go, grow

St. Cloud (MN) Times

September 2, 2009

As new college students settle into residence halls and begin their first classes, many faculty and staff who work with them are wondering “how long before the first parent calls?”

For some academics the most striking change between this generation of students and the one before is not their ability to navigate the digital world, their growing diversity or their politics, but the extent to which their parents are involved in their daily lives.

Much has been written about “helicopter parents” in recent years. Few would argue that having parents involved in their adult offspring’s lives is a bad thing. But it can go too far. Everyone in higher education has heard stories about parents calling the dean to demand a new roommate at the first sign of conflict, calling the department chair to complain about an “unfair” exam when a grade is lower than expected, or even calling their student directly each morning as a sort of wake-up service.

At the extremes these parental behaviors prevent students from taking responsibility for their actions, slow their progress into adulthood, and waste time and resources better spent on education.

In a world where grocery carts come with sanitizing wipes, “tween” sleepovers are viewed as risky, and many children never go outside without a parent this level of engagement may not be surprising. But how far is too far?

One study found 31 percent of students had a parent call a professor to complain about a grade and 38 percent had parents attend meetings with their academic advisers. While students generally value their parents’ advice — 65 percent in this poll — fully 25 percent reported their parents’ behavior “was either annoying or embarrassing.”

Annoying parents are a universal reality among teens, but at least it used to stop by the time they left for college. No longer though. Even graduate schools are reporting unforeseen levels of parental “involvement” and are having to develop policies to manage them.

A parent’s responsibility to a child changes with time. Surely everyone recognizes that the close monitoring appropriate to a toddler is unnecessary for a tween and likely detrimental to a teenager. Children need the freedom to make choices, experience life, and learn from their own successes and failures.

College used to be the line of demarcation between childhood and adulthood, to one side of which parents rarely strayed, coming to campus for move-in, graduation and perhaps a concert or sporting event in between. But today’s parents are not only physically on campus much more, they are connected with their students by cell phone and e-mail at any whim. A Boston Globe report last spring noted one parent admitting to 144 phone calls with her daughter in a single month!

Rather than giving in to overinvolved parents, some colleges are trying to educate families on how best to negotiate the transition to adulthood. Orientation sessions for new students and their parents may specifically address the issue.

Parents are asked to let their students make their own choices and accept (and learn from) the consequences. Faculty and staff are encouraged to ask parents to send their students to meetings rather than call in their place. More information than ever is being provided to families, who can now keep track of their students’ grades, charge accounts, class schedule, and disciplinary records — sometimes even online.

The hope is to inform parents and to foster communication within families, so minor problems on campus don’t escalate to major ones in a flood of texts, voice messages and e-mails that culminate in a frantic call to the dean by a parent who may have only heard one side of the story.

The solution to this problem is not to silence or exclude parents. Instead, we as a society should encourage young adults to accept greater responsibility. College students should chose their own majors, pick their own classes, settle conflicts with their roommates, and question their professors directly.

If we collectively decide to extend childhood into the 20s, where do we stop? Will parents start attending job interviews with their college graduates? Negotiating prenups for their 30-somethings?

There is no doubt that having parents involved in their adult children’s lives is a good thing. But both parties need to make wise decisions about where and when to draw the line.

-Dr. DRL