The growing backlash against overparenting

[merithyn]

Thank god! Finally, some sense is found.

The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting

[jimmy olsen]

No shit, I'm sick of running into young people who can't function away from home.

Some of the examples are hilariously sickening.

employers like Ernst & Young were creating "parent packs" for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.

Why the hell would you hire someone who needed their Mom to negotiate their salary?

[CountDeMoney]

Pretty funny coming from you.
You're such a hovering Helicopter Mom, we can hear "Ride of the Valkyries" as your minivan approaches the beach.

[merithyn]

 

I've had PTA parents talk about me for years because I "made" my kids walk to school on their own once they hit 3rd grade and refused to bring a forgotten coat to school when the wind picked up a bit.

Many things I do poorly as a parent, but helicoptering is not one of them.

[HisMajestyBOB]

Overparenting had been around long before Douglas MacArthur's mom Pinky moved with him to West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, supposedly so she could watch him with a telescope to be sure he was studying.

[merithyn]

Why the hell would you hire someone who needed their Mom to negotiate their salary?

Carter and Jak's German teacher got the job because her daddy called in and talked to the Principal about hiring her. No, I'm not kidding. The "woman" is 22 years old. She can't pick up the phone or drop by the school on her own??

[Fate]

Why the hell would you hire someone who needed their Mom to negotiate their salary?

Carter and Jak's German teacher got the job because her daddy called in and talked to the Principal about hiring her. No, I'm not kidding. The "woman" is 22 years old. She can't pick up the phone or drop by the school on her own??

There's nothing wrong with that. Are you angry at your own father?

[HisMajestyBOB]

There's nothing wrong with a parent keeping an eye out for job openings for their kid, or telling them "Hey, you should apply here". But actually calling the principal for the kid is too much - that's what the prospective employee should be doing, not their parent.

[Camerus]

Unless the principal and the woman's father had some sort of previous connection or friendship.  That kind of connection / string-pulling is entirely commonplace. 

[HisMajestyBOB]

Unless the principal and the woman's father had some sort of previous connection or friendship.  That kind of connection / string-pulling is entirely commonplace.

Okay, yeah. Though even if there is a connection, her father should have made her call the principal and talk with him, saying "Hey, I'm so-and-so's daughter."

At least, that's what my parents would have done, and what I would do.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Over parenting is a pet peeve of mine.  One example is a friend of mine who doesn't work, and his wife doesn't work.  He was involved in an IT startup during the dot-com boom that got bought out for like $400m by Microsoft.  He got a very small slice of that (enough that he doesn't have to work again), his oldest kid is 13 and his youngest kid is 9.  He still has "story time" at 8pm with all three kids.  His primary "job" is essentially doing whatever his kids want whenever they want.  He also spends 3-4 hours a night working on his kid's homework with them.

There's probably a lot of stuff I'll mess up in my daughter's life but one thing I'm sure I won't mess up is her education.  To me, a parent spending that much time helping his kid's with their homework is essentially being destructive.  Firstly, by and large I think that up until at least High School homework is really more "going through the motions" and typically isn't any sort of intellectual challenge.  It's really just providing a structure to make kids go through the motions of learning a subject independently.

Note that last part independently.  Home work exists because while a teacher has the responsibility of teaching the core fundamentals and the concepts, to truly learn something a child needs to work alone and needs to learn how to apply the concepts to solve problems.

For example in say, High School level Calculus the teacher is going to show you how to do something, and then he'll assign several homework problems that can be solved using those concepts, but the problems are different enough from the examples given in class that the student has to think to figure out how to apply them.  When parents hand hold all the way through the homework process, starting at a very young age certain things never happen:

1.  The kid never learns to take responsibility for sitting down and working on their homework on their own initiative.  I think it is valuable to give kids the opportunity to slack off on their homework and get bad grades, enforce consequences for that.

2.  If you're always providing help, they never struggle.  If you never struggle, I question if you're really learning.  If the subject matter is so easy you aren't struggling then you're not being exposed to subject matter at your level.  If the subject matter is hard and forces you to invest time and effort to learn it (or even to fail at learning and be shown how it is done later by a teacher) then you're actually learning something.  When your parents are pulling all the answers down off the internet for you, you're learning nothing.

I won't even get started on parents who think every child has some sort of fundamental learning disability and thus can't be held responsible for doing anything on their own.

[Berkut]

Thank god! Finally, some sense is found.

The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting

I agree, glad you have come around Meri!

But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million.

[CountDeMoney]

No shit, I'm sick of running into young people who can't function away from home.

Some of the examples are hilariously sickening.

employers like Ernst & Young were creating "parent packs" for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.

Why the hell would you hire someone who needed their Mom to negotiate their salary?

Not every 22 year old knows the ins and outs of employment benefits.   For most, it's the first time they encounter bonus structures, short term vs long term disability, and what exactly constitutes employee healthcare.  Give em a break.

[Martinus]

Pretty funny coming from you.
You're such a hovering Helicopter Mom, we can hear "Ride of the Valkyries" as your minivan approaches the beach.

Not to mention Tim, the poster boy for immature childishness.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Meh, Tim might be a puppy but he's a bold puppy. Sold all those encyclopaedias to the rednecks and now he's in Korea 


Unless.....unless.........Tim.........you haven't got your mom with you have you  ?