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How Schools Are Handling an 'Overparenting' Crisis

• ciupicri 11y ago
  Speaking of overparenting, is it true that the US law mandates adult supervision for children under the age of ~12 and that's why babysitters are needed all the time?
  • gizmo686 11y ago
    The law varies by state. Here in Maryland, it is illegal to leave a child younger than 8 alone, and their supervisor must be at least 13.
  • dboreham 11y ago
    I live in the US and have two middle school aged kids. I don't actually know the legal age when children can be left "home alone" so I looked it up. It turns out there is no law and social services advice is to "consider your child's maturity" etc. A quick flip through the web page for free range kids seems to indicate that most US states have no firm age. Therefore it looks like it is not true as stated. fwiw around here (small-town western US) you see kids as young as 4-5 making their own way to/from school -- either walking or biking, without adults, and the typical parent will leave their kids home alone when they're 10-12, depending on the kid and other factors.
  • aidenn0 11y ago
    Most states don't have a law that specifies an age, but there is an organization lobbying for 12. [edit] To clarify, all states have vaguely worded laws against leaving young children unsupervised, but most do not list a specific age.
• ams6110 11y ago
  Schools have created this problem by meddling in the parenting process for the last few decades. Calling the police if the kid walks home by himself. Calling social services if they come to school without lunch. Involving juvenile justice authorities if two kids settle an argument with a bit of fighting. Now after they have parents thinking that one false move and their kids will be placed in foster care, they complain about overparenting.
  • swagv 11y ago
    I'd honestly blame parental expectations more than the schools for this.
  • maemilius 11y ago
    To be fair, the people making those decisions are (probably) parents themselves and those policies exist to protect the school or appease parents (or just make them feel superior, but that's a bit cynical).
  • sloanesturz 11y ago
    I think that the schools where kids show up without lunches and the schools where parents are doing their children's homework are very different places. The article even concedes that the issues that the authors are trying to fight against are very much "first world problems" at the end of the day.
    • acheron 11y ago
      I think that the schools where kids show up without lunches and the schools where parents are doing their children's homework are very different places. Maybe that holds in segregated urban areas, but the vast majority of the country is not near a city. Certainly my small-town high school had both of those groups, because when there's only one high school around, that's unsurprisingly where everyone goes.
      • ninguem2 11y ago
        I think the majority of the population (of the US) lives in urban areas. http://www.citylab.com/housing/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/ http://www.citylab.com/housing/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...
        • deleted 11y ago
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  • pki 11y ago
• dusing 11y ago
  My aunt has been an Elementry school principle for a long time. She says it used to be lots of helicopter parents, but now it's "snow plow parents". They try to prevent anything troublesome from reaching their children. I have 4 kids, I let them make mistakes and am pretty hands off on the day-to-day. I can hardly get along with the parents I meet at school. They have no lives outside of their children and hover 24/7, and their kids behave poorly for it.
  • cesarbs 11y ago
    Yeah, I'm the same and my wife and I feel really awkward compared to most parents we see at our child's elementary school. We really push for her to be independent and be responsible for her own stuff (with a lot of success), while her classmates' parents are all around their kids all the time.
• roymurdock 11y ago
  Schools and parents need to stop blaming each other, and work together to show children that we value learning. Yeah, good luck with that. Private institutions, especially colleges and universities, are exactly where they want to be right now. Parents have an extremely inelastic demand for sending their children to good private schools because signaling is so important in this terrible job market - this allows universities to raise tuition with impunity. Combine this with an ever-increasing pool of candidates for roughly the same number of spots at ivy-leagues and other comparable institutions, and colleges are set to make a killing on tuition. Why would private schools have any incentive to change a system that benefits them to such a degree?
  • Yomammas_Lemma 11y ago
    Honestly, I think one of the major problems with elite undergraduate institutions is they're inherently elitist. Of course they're going to reinforce the socioeconomic status-quo, those are the people whose parents can invest the most into them.
    • plonh 11y ago
      You can fight this by ignoring fancy pedigrees and social signaling when you interview job candidates.
• 1971genocide 11y ago
  It must be really stressful being a kid these days :( Now that I look back - the way we treat kids is just plain awful. When I was a kid I used to write using my left hand and my teacher and parents used to scold me to try and change my habit. It used to be really stressful and everything they tried did not work, 15 years later and I still write with my left hand and am not a terrorist so it seemed all that work, stress was a huge waste of resources. But more importantly my time and I am not sure what damage that stress must have caused my mental health. Parents are also under enormous pressure and due to college debt need to save a lot of money and literally cash out a huge amount of their life-time wealth for the services of their kid's education. By current projections in 2030 the average tuition is going to be 100,000 dollar per year for a private college. That is terrible news for kids and parents both.
  • jonahx 11y ago
    where did you grew up that there was superstition against left-handedness? that sounds like something from a century ago, not 15 years (in the US, anyway).
    • 1971genocide 11y ago
      It was in an english school in dubai. It was seen as not similar to other kids, since everyone else I knew were right-handed. I am not sure what the reasoning was to them - I never asked my parents about it anyway -
      • MisterBastahrd 11y ago
        Isn't this an Islamic prohibition of sorts? In Islam, the right hand is used to do clean things, the left the impure. You eat with your right hand and perform toilet actions with your left. Could be wrong, but that's my recollection.
    • inanutshellus 11y ago
      I suspect you're simply right handed or were lucky enough to be in some kind of safe environment for lefties. For me, a left-hander, while there was no superstitious negativity, there were dozens of harsh, practical negative interactions. One of my first memories of school was being sat at a round table. Every time I'd try to color, cut, paste, whatever, I'd bump elbows with the kid next to me. He'd get mad. I got in trouble. So I started sitting on the floor and doing my work on the chair. So I got in trouble. I'd smear everything I wrote, mangle my fingers in those fricking scissors, and learning that "Sinister" literally means "left-handed" was really grand. I despise being left-handed.
• deleted 11y ago
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• chjohasbrouck 11y ago
  There are always outliers, but I believe that in America today, academic achievement is almost entirely determined by parental involvement (whether it's time or money). > How do you respond to the criticism that the problems you're describing affect only privileged kids? I was really disappointed by this question and the answers the authors gave. Firstly because, this kind of parenting actually does have a large impact on underprivileged kids. It's the reason their failure is virtually guaranteed relative to the privileged kids. The underprivileged kid is one student, competing against the privileged kid, who is essentially a multi-person team of cheaters with a bankroll. Secondly because, the answers the authors gave to the question pretty clearly demonstrate that they're only thinking of this subject from their perspective. And it sounds like their perspective is that of the parents to the privileged kids. This could've been an article about parental involvement in academics and the impact it has on fairness and meritocracy and social mobility. Instead it's some rich ladies talking about how their kids would've been even more privileged if they did a little less of their homework for them.
  • toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Income inequality->Two earner family->less parental involvement->vicious cycle While that is a gross oversimplification, it would do wonders to increase the quality of life for families who elect to have one earner only, with the other (gender regardless) providing more time and resources towards child development.
    • dogma1138 11y ago
      Hmm most middle class and higher families in the states are two earners families with the lower middle class and downwards having one or both parents unemployed or intermediately employed. The days of the American nuclear family with the dad having a career and the mom becoming a world class housewife are pretty much over. And considering that low income / low skill jobs are more available to men and that low income jobs will not be able to fund childcare that pushes lower class families to become single earner families even more.
      • 11y ago
• 1971genocide 11y ago
  >>> "Schools and parents need to stop blaming each other, and work together to show children that we value learning. We can talk about the importance of education all we want, but our kids are too smart to fall for that hypocrisy. As long as we continue to worship grades over learning, scores over intellectual bravery and testable facts over the application of knowledge, kids will never believe us when we tell them that learning is valuable in and of itself." And whose fault is that ? Maybe the fact that there are too few jobs. Maybe the fact that wealth inequality is so skewed that only a handful of people are generating all the demand in the labor market. When I survey the state of science in 2015 - there is literally no shortage of avenues to explore. If the demand side of the free market worked well, then their would by now be a pill to cure cancer and would only cost 1 dollar. That is so much innovation locked up in the minds of kids born today. But we spent more and more time teaching them more and more useless stuff since the job market is unable to generate enough demand pushing people to have better CVs, etc. A high school kid today can start innovating and doing all sorts of cool things for very little capital. There is not even much need for schooling. Most of the greatest minds of the past did not even have a formal education - what they did have was a lot of free time. Boredom and Laziness is the source of human ingenuity, not mindless exercises with no real purpose.
  • branchless 11y ago
    Well said. I think school kind of crushes innovation in many ways. It equips us to know but not so much how to think. I also agree there are a lot of pointless jobs that should not exist. If we got land prices down only one parent would have to work and the other would be free to help the kids and to shape their thinking. One of the (Monty) Pythons cited "time, time and more time" as a necessary precursor for creativity. What a mess western economies are in, as we bow down before the banks.
• oalders 11y ago
  I taught at a private high school for one year. One of my students plagiarized a huge chunk of an essay. When I talked to my supervisor about it he said to punish her by giving her a "B". I eventually took it higher up and had it dealt with. However, our end of term reports were all proofed by other faculty. When I mentioned the plagiarism on an end of term report another teach redacted the word "plagiarism" and replaced it with "the unfortunate incident". On another occasion I had a student who was performing badly. Her mother called me at school and said I should have a talk with her daughter and "say something nice to her". Basically, I've seen the coddling on both ends, both from the parents and from the institution. My best guess is that the institution (in this case funded by the parents) is responding to some pressure by the parents but also keeps in mind that current parents are future donors and you don't want to damage that cash pipeline if at all possible.
  • prawn 11y ago
    Did the mother mean you should say something encouraging rather than belittle the student? If so, that doesn't seem unreasonable.
    • oalders 11y ago
      No, I was never going to belittle the student. It was more along the lines of "Don't deal with the actual problem. Just encourage her -- that's all she needs." Essentially the student needed a cheering squad rather than honest feedback. In that environment the teachers have to tiptoe around both the students and the parents.
      • prawn 11y ago
        Yeah, that doesn't sound good!
• bpodgursky 11y ago
  I suspect a lot of this is an unavoidable consequence of shifting from 3-5 kid families to 1-2. When you have 4 kids, (1) you don't have enough time to helicopter all of them, some will just have to deal with their own problems (2) having one disappointing kid isn't the end of the world. you have others to shift your expectations and hopes onto But if you only have one or two kids... you simply can't afford any failures. If your one kid fails, you're a failure of a parent. So you spend as much time and (maybe misguided, maybe not) energy on them. I think this is a natural response, which makes me think it's pretty un-fixable unless family sizes increase.
  • dasil003 11y ago
    I don't doubt those factors are intertwined, but I think it's a disservice to the human conscience to declare it unfixable except by somehow overloading our attention. Actually the answer is remarkably simple though obviously not easy: Stop pinning your self-actualization on your kids and recognize your role to help them discover their own personhood. There's only a short window where you know better than them anyway, so focus on preparing them to make their own decisions.
    • bpodgursky 11y ago
      So I'm not discounting that that's healthier from a personal perspective, but I doubt it's a realistic change across a population. I guess I'm mainly trying to say, I don't think this overparenting trend is society collectively going insane, it's a natural consequence of a different change, that of family size. So I suspect if you took a bunch of parents from 1900 and dropped them in 2015 with smaller families, you'd get roughly the same outcome.
      • dasil003 11y ago
        The average parents in 1900 spent most of their time on manual labor, if I had to guess I'd say that had a larger impact on obsessing over their children than the number.
  • maehwasu 11y ago
• sageikosa 11y ago
  So glad I teach in a martial arts school. You got hit? that happens... keep your hands up next time like I told you...
  • throwaway54984 11y ago
    Neah. Next time hit him first so hard that his mother cries, not yours.
• 11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
  > If the kids subjected to this type of parenting weren't suffering greater rates of anxiety and depression than the general population, then maybe we could wave this off as not-a-real problem. But they are suffering; I can attest that this is true. It's a cult of false consequences that scares the hell out of high-school students, particularly among the affluent: "Of course we want our kids to do better than we did." How many generations of over-achievers can actually accomplish that? These parents are wanting the wrong things for their kids.
• imakesnowflakes 11y ago
  Wait, this is new? This has been a problem for the past 2 or 3 decades. When people stopped having 4+ kids. It is worse when the kid is the only one. But I think we are past that. New generations of parents, because they were subjected to this kind of over parenting (I wouldn't agree with the term though), they are aware of the issue and seem to handle parenting much better.
• bachmeier 11y ago
  Universities are largely to blame for this. Having a 3.8 GPA versus a 3.9 can dramatically reduce your chances of getting into a top university. Being in the top 12% of your graduating class versus the top 8% can hurt your chances of getting in. It's stupid, because these are statistically meaningless differences, yet it matters. In an environment like that, it's rational for parents to get involved.
  • aidenn0 11y ago
    Highschool GPA is still the single best predictor colleges have for College GPA though. They have to draw a line somewhere, and it's nearly tautological that those just above the line have no statistically significant difference from those just below.
    • threatofrain 11y ago
      This isn't central to your argument, but I wanted to make a side point that SAT II is more predictive of college GPA than your high school GPA, which is kind of sad, because the SAT's are a flash in time compared to 4 years. If someone who has never met a child, who devises a test from afar, can better predict that child's future college grades than 4 years of intimate proximity...
      • aidenn0 11y ago
        To me, it is surprising that the GPA is as predictive as it is, considering there was no national standard for how to grade things, nor what the curriculum should be.
• Animats 11y ago
  Pressure on kids in the 1% is high. Palo Alto now has paid anti-suicide guards on duty at all three railroad crossings near high schools. (This is addition to fences and crossing gates.)
• sandworm101 11y ago
  if kids are to accept failure then they must be given room to fail. Your average highschool student wanting to go to a good university cannot accept any failure. Bomb a single test and your math grade will slip from the 98% that assures acceptance and the 95% that doesn't. The grade inflation needs to stop. My unpopular answer: more standardized testing. Don't grade homework. Don't grade the science projects. Grade only those things done by the student alone in an exam room. I know that doesn't remove all parental influence, but at least then the parents aren't the ones holding pen to the paper.
  • sandworm101 11y ago
    Oops. I used bomb as a verb. Please mr NSA man open a dictionary before listing me. I've got to cross a couple boarders next week.
  • normloman 11y ago
    More standardized testing will mean more parents pushing their kids into test prep.