Are we likely to see parents insisting on coming to class with their children? Possibly. Parents have already shown that they will get their way. Schools have even created "dean of parents" positions to deal with parents. More and more students are signing their FERPA rights away so their parents can
Are students whose parents followed the "attachment" model likely to even know how to function on their own? I doubt they'll be more competent than the crop we have now. It seems bad enough now with students asking me if the library sells their textbooks, let alone anyone who has never slept in a room without mom or dad being able to function away from home.
Am I overreacting and drawing conclusions that make no logical sense? Probably. But either way, if this is a big trend, I am going to need a new job in 10 years because I'm not sure there's enough College Misery support that will make up for teaching students like that.
What are your thoughts on this?
Maybe this is related, but in recently years I've been more struck by interfering spouses and bosses than I have by parents. Maybe it's because I've only been teaching for 7 or so years, or maybe I expect parents to email me so only the spousal emails stand out. And it could be endemic of the whole "My mom says I'm cool! -- but my mom's unavailable, so talk to my wife???" style of convincing a professor that you deserve a good grade.
ReplyDeleteYikes, I'm clearly drunk. PUT THE COMPUTER AWAY.
My guess is that, in c. 15-20 years (I know, not soon enough, but some of us expect to still be teaching then), the pendulum is going to swing the other way, either because the hovered-over generation is not going to have the slightest idea how to care for anybody else, let alone hover themselves (bad), or because they'll realize that the hovering their parents did wasn't good for them, and head in the opposite direction (better). Or maybe there will be a battle royale between the hoverers-like-their-parents and the anti-hoverers, reminiscent of the working-outside-the-home vs. stay-at-home moms battles of today (this is almost certainly bad, too).
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime, my only advice is to work for a school where many students' parents are too busy eking out a living (and too unfamiliar with college) to interfere. There are definite downsides to this scenario, but there are upsides, too.
Another semi-solution would be to leave the country and teach in English to students whose parents likely can't function as well or at all in anything besides their native language; English-language universities seem to be sprouting up everywhere. Plus, outside North America parental intervention is much rarer to begin with.
DeleteEdna, I am an "expat" in the US, so to speak, so I know what you mean. :o) That's an idea I have strongly considered (returning home).
DeleteOne of the guys in our college has been known to say, "You know you are getting old when the students' moms look hot."
ReplyDeleteI'm already there in real life. This mom just makes it worse.
I'm cool with the attachment parenting thing for little kids. There have to be plenty of ways to raise a healthy and well-adjusted child, otherwise humans wouldn't have made it this far. Kids start out reasonably resilient.
ReplyDeleteIsn't the theory that by raising a secure and well-attached child, they will become confident and able to go out into the world? Of course, that means the well-adjusted parent can tell the difference between normal, healthy attachment and clingy, learned helplessness.
I have more faith in the kids than the parents on this one.
I feel like a bad feminist here, but eeewwwww on the breastfeeding your preschooler scenario. To me this sounds like the kind of attachment parenting that's about the parent's attachment to the kid never detaching.
ReplyDeleteMy God, it's Katie!
ReplyDeleteI don't usually go in for cliches and edu-pablum, but one of my colleagues recently articulated this phenomenon my saying that our parents are increasingly "preparing the path for their children instead of preparing their children for the path."
ReplyDeleteOther than a jumping off point, I do not see how the how-old-to-wean debate (a subset of the larger breastfeeding discussion) has any role in the helicopter parent debate.
ReplyDeleteFact 1: Historically, humans nursed to a relatively "old" age compared to most industrialized nations in the modern era. I'll leave exact ages on both ends to a different discussion.
Fact 2: The helicopter-parenting fad, on the large scale, exists in industrialized nations in the modern era.
There is more historical evidence for a correlation between helicopter parents and bottle-feeding than there is for a connection between older weaning ages and helicopter parents.
If our anecdotal evidence is correct, it is generally American students who grace us with their helicopter parents. In many other cultures, breastfeeding continues until age 3 or 4. Should we meet these students in our classrooms, I doubt we'd have the same kinds of problems with their entitlement that we often complain about here. I don't breastfeed my children that long myself, but I'm unwilling to draw these sorts of conclusions based on parenting techniques that are, to most of the world, perfectly natural.
ReplyDeleteAh, "Time" magazine.
ReplyDeleteYou know, there was a period when that publication actually meant something, that it was solid news and slightly worth the fifty cents you paid for it.
That time? World War II.
After that "Time" became more of a pro-Cold War, center-to-right-wing magazine thanks to Mr. Luce's infatuation with Madame Chiang Kai-shek and love of CIA-backed dictatorships.
I think the writing was on the wall when "Time" put the "Miami Vice" actors on the cover in 1985; the magazine has become more about the Lifestyles of the Middlebrow, and far less about news.
Yeah, that was the same year Time put Madonna on the cover, with the byline, "Why she's hot." U.S. News and World Report then ran an ad that had fun with that, pointing out that they published news.
Delete....And "U.S. News and World Report" is now out of business, but the sad-sack shambling abomination that is "Time" keeps stumbling along.
DeleteThere is no justice in the world of middlebrow magazines....
Other cultures may get away with doing this, but in America, it quite obviously creates what in my day was called, "a big baby." Seeing as this "attachment parenting" has been going on since 1992, it would explain a lot about my students today.
ReplyDeleteI think that in the image, "breastfeeding your five-year-old" is standing in for the whole of attachment parenting, which we are then correlating with helicopter parenting.
ReplyDeleteThe helicopter parents I encounter are not the attachment parenting parents; they're the tiger moms.
However, I do wonder if the kids who refuse to accept responsibility for anything they do, who are not generally the kids of the helicopter parents/tiger moms where I work, were attachment parented.
Someone needs to do a study, quick, before we all kill ourselves.