The Really Long Good-bye: Helicopter Parents in the College Years

At a parent orientation session earlier this year, Brian McCoy, vice president of student affairs at Nichols College in Dudley, Mass., asked parents how many had text-messaged their children since leaving them at 9 a.m. — three hours earlier. Nearly every hand in the room went up. The session was titled Letting Go.

Many parents, university administrators say, are informed and enthusiastic consumers who want their children to get the most out of an increasingly expensive college education. But faculty and staff at universities across the country worry about a new breed of parent: moms and dads who hover over their college-age children, chiming in on everything from housing assignments to homework. They’re called helicopter parents, and college officials complain that they are shouldering responsibilities that should be part of the college learning experience.

The term “helicopter parent” and the idea that today’s parents are getting too involved became headline fodder in 2000, when the so-called millennial generation began entering college. Their parents — mostly baby boomers who had started families as 30-somethings, later than in previous decades — had more money and chose to spend more time on their children as they grew up, according to says Elizabeth Markson, a BU College of Arts and Sciences adjunct professor of sociology. But the way families communicate has also changed drastically. These days, it’s very easy for parents to check up on their “investments” via a mobile phone — “the world’s longest umbilical cord,” as it’s known to some college administrators.

“I think that what has changed most is the ability to easily communicate,” says Jim Boyle, president of College Parents of America, a national advocacy group. A recent publication of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA), Connecting to the Net Generation, surveyed 7,705 college students and found that 94 percent own mobile phones and 76 percent use some form of instant messaging, and that 15 percent of those users remain logged into their accounts 24 hours a day.

Many students want to be electronically tethered to home. Jerri Patlyek (SMG’08), who in high school was accustomed to coming home each day and telling her mother about school, says that during her first days at BU, she’d often call her mom more than once a day to report on classes or friends or her extracurricular activities. It’s a long way from the days when her father, Jim Patlyek (SMG’78), lived in Myles Standish Hall; back then someone used to answer the pay phone at the end of the hall and take messages for an entire floor.

When Daniel Solworth (CAS’06), who works in the BU Office of the Dean of Students, arrived at Boston University in 2002, he knew that he would be close to his parents — Falmouth, Mass., his hometown, is only 90 minutes away. He taught his mother to use e-mail so they could communicate every day. She called him regularly during his first month and came to Parents Weekend and Terrier home hockey games. “Any chance she got, she wanted to come up and be involved,” he says. She even put up a profile on Facebook.

Solworth says he was delighted that his mother was so involved in campus events, although he acknowledges that when the daily phone calls became too much, he simply stopped picking up.

Chelsey Waldman (COM’10), whose father, Richard (CAS’75), is a BU alum, says that being able to reach her parents instantly — by e-mail or mobile phone most of the time and by text message for something urgent — helped her make the transition to college. “In the beginning, I was calling them all the time, because I have always been incredibly close with my parents and it was difficult for me to be away from home,” she says. Now in her sophomore year, she feels it’s important to stand on her own. “I am striving to become more independent,” she says. “We are so accustomed to sharing every little detail with each other that it has been hard to pull back and ask for some space.”

In fact, students are often equally culpable when it comes to the increased contact between parents and their children and colleges, says College of General Studies Dean Linda Wells, who communicates extensively with parents when their children are first admitted to CGS, but finds that the calls diminish when the semester starts.

When parents do decide to take action, there’s often a gap in the information they’ve received from their son or daughter, says Virginia Sapiro, who was the vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin before becoming dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences this past summer. “Long experience with parental phone calls tells me that their students have often not filled in the whole story for them,” she says. “I can’t tell you how many times parents have called to tell me that we have to bend some rule for their child because no one ever told the student the requirements, or because the advisors gave them misinformation, or the like. Just about every time I pursued the issue, the fact was that the student didn’t see an advisor, didn’t do so in a timely way, or didn’t follow the advice.”

In this age of closer parent involvement, colleges and universities across the nation are adjusting their resources, beginning well before move-in day to build a collaborative relationship. For example, BU offers several two-day orientations for parents of freshmen, covering a wide range of topics, from student safety to health issues.

There’s no doubt that the close connection can be beneficial, enabling colleges to help struggling or troubled students, says McCoy, who is also regional vice president of NASPA. And family researchers point out that parents have always tried to get the best for their children.

Yet concerns remain about the long-term effects hovering parents have on their children. “What happens to these parents and children later?” asks Nazli Kibria, a CAS associate professor of sociology. “The main problem that I see is this sense children might develop of ‘I’m entitled to have people take responsibility for me, make decisions.’ That might be something real.”

It’s too soon to tell how these relationships will affect millennials, who are just beginning to enter the marketplace. Initial research shows that when it comes to making career decisions, they’re standing on their own: in a 2006 salary survey of new graduates of 200 colleges and universities conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, only 6 percent of respondents said their parents were “very” or “extremely” involved in their job searches.

Still, letting go seems to be getting harder on both ends, despite what some graduates report. A Collegiate Employment Research Institute 2007 survey of some 750 companies found that parents are hovering after graduation: 41 percent of them, the survey reports, gathered information on prospective employers for their children.

Ultimately, the greatest challenge helicopter parents have to face may be getting their children to break away. But just as a parent’s natural instinct to aid and protect can kick into high gear when a child goes to college, the child’s impetus to strike out on his or her own comes through eventually. It may just come a little later.

“Recently, I’ve felt more like I need some space than I have in the past — I think it’s important for me to gain my independence,” says Waldman. “Maybe next year, talking to my parents every couple of days would be better.”

Click here to read the first part, “The Really Long Good-bye, Part one: Buyer, Be Aware.”

Jessica Ullian can be reached at jullian@bu.edu.