Attack of the Helicopter Parents

Today on Best of the Fray, someone posted a link to this article describing a tool called Edline which permits parents to see a child's test scores and papers. The article is primarily about high schoolers and how their overinvolved parents have invaded the ability of those children to develop into adults by, in part, using this tool. I made the mistake of opining negatively on Best of the Fray. The helicopter parents have come out in force against me, though, using their need to be superior parents as their primary weapon: we CARE enough to monitor!

So, am I wrong? Crazy? Or do others see a problem here too? Hmmm. Let's see.

The term "helicopter parents" came into usage in the 1990s to describe late baby boomer parents who have become so involved in their children's lives, particularly in the educational context, that they have been unwilling to allow their children to learn from their own mistakes. I recall first reading about this some years ago, and thinking that this could not be a legitimate problem, since a genuine interest in one's child strikes me as preferable to none at all. But things have developed somewhat from there.

This kind of "hovering" parenting is common enough to warrant warning statements from the College Board, the entity responsible for administering the SATs. Individual colleges, like the University of New Hampshire have had to actually persuade parents to act normal: ie, to allow their children to grow up. Even elite schools have had to deal with parents showing up to sign up their children for classes, arguing about grades, and complaining about roomates. It doesn't stop there. Companies from Goldman Sachs to Ernst & Young have actually had to develop programs to deal with young people whose parents are now involved in their career choices.

Now, you may say this insane activity is all a far cry from merely wanting to know how the kids have done at school while they are still young. In theory, yes. Every parent of course wants to know how their young children are doing and how they can help them do better. But fewer and fewer, it seems, understand that their job is to raise adults, not children. So they increasingly try to insulate older children from having to deal with the consequences of their own actions by monitoring the activity intra-day. This is partly because getting a child successfully into and through college and then a job is viewed as a goal of the parent's . It starts early enough that some high schools have had to toss parents out of meetings, and some private schools have had to point out that they will expel the children if the parents become difficult.

And some people, like me, think that the Edline function is an ennabler of this behavior:

Even more potentially corrosive is Edline -- a hovering tool extraordinaire now used by Montgomery County schools. We are, on the one hand, mocked for being overly involved parents, and then given a code to log onto a Web site to view every test, quiz and piece of graded homework. We can watch every recalibration of our child's grade-point average, then e-mail the teachers to complain. Gone are the days when a kid could lose a physics test, then make up for the bad grade on the next go-around with no harm done -- and no parent the wiser. Edline feels a bit like spying (although compared with the proposal to tag truants with ankle bracelets in Prince George's County, it's probably relatively benign).

Susan Coll in the Washington Post.

Even a self-described "overly involved parent" Matt Johnon from Maryland has this to say about the program on his blog:

What strikes me as odd is that the reliance on technology has replaced a basic parenting skill, that of being personally involved in your child's lives. Programs like Edline display a couple of troubling traits. First, as Coll pointed out, Edline is like spying and displays a lack of trust in your child. As a youngster, did I decieve my parents a little about grades? Yes, as did we all. However, my parents were involved enough (and knew my teachers well enough to call them by their first names) that such deceptions didn't last long. I grew to trust that my parents would generally take me at my word and they in turn trusted me to tell the truth, all of us knowing that eventually the real truth would come out and my version had better be pretty close to reality, otherwise, no soccer. Edline says to kids, it doesn't matter what you say, we are going to check now, rather than hold you accountable later. Proponents may claim real time corrections are possible with the technology, but real time corrections don't serve the child well because the correction doesn't carry enough consequences to be real. As a child, if my version and reality didn't jibe come report card time, I could say sayonara to anything I liked; soccer, hanging out with my friends, swimming, the beach, everything would be gone. Those were real consequences, not a week's grounding for a bad test.


Second, Edline and other technology tools give the adults in a child's life the veneer of being involved, without actually getting their hands dirty. In a age when teachers and other education officials are begging parents to be invovled, providing a tool like Edline will not help. On the face of it, the tool seems a little hypocritical. Edline says to parents, here is a way for you to be "involved" in your kids' education without acutally bothering the teachers. The technology also gives the teacher an out, permitting them to post the hard numbers on a childs' education performance without posting anything qualitative about that child. Since most parents whose kids are going well are unlikely to question the teacher, the teacher also gets a pass from being involved in that child's life and for those students stuggling academically, it is a statistically good bet that the parents may not care enought to pester the teacher. Everyone but the child gets a free pass.

Third, and finally, technology is a tool, it should not be a substitute. I have often argued that people often look at technology as an end rather than a means to an end. Edline and these other techno-parenting tools prove my point. They are the bells and whistles to parenting, not a substitute for solid, personal parenting.

Gee, I guess I'm not the only one. Let me add one more nuance: the school environment is the place where the kid has the most control over his or her own destiny. It's a world designed by and for kids and in the very best of schools, the environment empowers them. In short, kids get to try out self-determination there in a way they can't at home because of the very nature of family life. When parents insert themselves into that world unnecessarily, they ruin it for their children. They've robbed those kids of the world they design daily in favor of the more familiar parental model. That strikes me as an incredible loss.

What amazes me most is that all these comments seem not to be self-evident. That people honestly think that they need to examine their own behavior if their child doesn't do well on a particular test. Really, are you kidding? At what point is it your kid's responsibility? Maybe not at 10, but certainly by 15, a kid ought to be capable of learning basic life skills.

I know we are all fumbling our way, essentially, through this very important task. If I had a child with behavioral or academic issues, I'd be grateful for this kind of tool. More generally, I think the desire to be aware of our children's life and impulses is on the whole a good one. Nevertheless, I believe that our children are better served by learning from their own conduct than from parental fiat.