Recently, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article by Hara Marano in Psychology Today entitled “A Nation of Wimps?“. The essential gist of this article is that hovering parents create children who cannot cope with the stresses of the real world. I have seen other articles to this effect before; one college administrator in another article referred to parents who must know about their child’s every action after they moved off to college as “helicopter parents”. This particular article gives a great deal of specific examples of how we have “softened” childhood for the coming generation.

Playgrounds are no longer a place for children to play together. Instead of allowing the child to figure out “how to play”, there is constantly a parent hovering around to make sure little Jimmy doesn’t fall and hurt himself. Parent-teacher conferences are more about making sure that the child has high grades, and what the teacher isn’t doing if the student doesn’t. I’m particularly fond of the 13-year old who has difficulty with “Gestault thinking”.

Sadly, I have seen this kind of thing first hand, as well as hearing anecdotes from friends. One friend, who was in college to become a teacher, was told by one of his professors that it’s easier to just pass a student who by all rights should fail, rather than deal with the storm that would follow failing the child. I have heard stories of outraged parents arguing with professors about the grade of their 18 year old son or daughter.

I myself worked in a tutoring center for two summers, and saw several bright students being pushed to do better by their parents. Frankly, the most common problem I saw with students was that they felt that if they didn’t understand something immediately, it was because they were “stupid”. Nobody understands everything on the first go, and some students take more than others. There’s no particular shame in this unless you associate not understanding something with a personal failing.

One of the most rewarding experiences I had as a tutor was with a special education student. I worked by giving him problems, and if he couldn’t figure it out, I’d nudge him in the right direction. We covered a year of math in a summer, and by the end of it he had the attitude that he could do math if he just worked at it.

That kind of self-efficacy is lacking in many students, including many entering university students. The article states that one of the leading problems with students in colleges nationwide is anxiety, and I can understand why. If you’ve never coped with failure before, going to a college or university (where the standards are exponentially higher than for high school) would be an incredible shock. Professors, unlike high school teachers, cannot be bullied into changing their grading scale by their students. As I have said jokingly with some of my friends before, “There is no animal in the world more dangerous than a provoked professor with tenure.”

Unfortunately, the only way to break 18 years of being told that you are a beautiful snowflake that can achieve whatever you set your mind is by “tough love”. This is where all this anxiety comes from; having your entire personality and worldview broken down in the course of a few months or a year is a jarring experience for anyone. Sadly, the only solution is with the “helicopter parents”, but I don’t see many of them reading this article and taking it seriously.