More Bad News

Hopefully, most of you have been spared from having to deal with the phenomenon of “helicopter parents,” but if you spend any time working in Academia you won’t be able to avoid them for long; I even had some run-ins with them at the Extension at UCLA. The term refers to those individuals who insist on hovering over their offspring at all times, regardless of the situation – hence the name. It drives elementary, middle and high school teachers to distraction and occasionally results in kids with no concept of how to solve their own problems, but it really gets interesting once the children in question turn 18. As a college instructor, I’m legally prohibited from discussing anyone’s grades with anyone; if you’re a legal adult I can’t tell your parents anything, any more than I could a total stranger. But helicopter parents aren’t about to take no for an answer, even with legal backing; there have been cases of them calling their (adult) child’s employer and demanding to know why their offspring wasn’t given a plum assignment or a “deserved” promotion…

All of which is already causing massive problems for an American workforce which wasn’t doing that well against the rest of the world as it was, but the worst may be yet to come. A story from the AP by way of the SF Chronicle warns of a growing trend of colleges calling parents whenever a student under the age of 21 is caught with alcohol, or even just intoxicated. I’m not sure this practice is even legal in some jurisdictions; arrests are generally public information, but not always, and if the student isn’t actually arrested I’m not sure you can release their school disciplinary record. But even assuming this is legal, it’s still one of the most colossally bad ideas I’ve heard since giving Federal funds to “Faith-based” organizations without an audit procedure. It’s the first step onto an extremely slippery slope which NOBODY in their right mind wants to be on…

Now, I know a lot of you are thinking “That’s not so bad. Maybe it will cut down on the amount of underage drinking – and the resulting underage alcohol-related traffic fatalities.” And you may be right; some of the college administrators quoted in the linked story insist that this helps their students to learn better judgment, grow up faster, stop making silly mistakes, and so on. But the potential for abuse of such a system is almost unlimited; if school administrators are allowed to broadcast disciplinary record information there’s no logical reason to keep them from reporting on how much time their students spend studying, what other activities their students are involved in, who their students are keeping company with, and thousands of other details. College administrators will resist doing so, of course; most of them are over-worked now, and being required to function as babysitters and nannies will not sit well – but, as previously noted, that won’t stop the helicopter parents from demanding such services, if they get such an idea into their heads in the first place…

Even worse, though, is the effect this is likely to have on the students themselves. Some of them will probably just stop trying to solve their own problems, since they know that the moment word gets home their mommy and daddy will be on the telephone with the answer anyway. Even worse, however, will be the kids who went away to college to try to get out from under their parents’ thumb in the first place; they’re likely to take more extravagant risks and insane chances than college undergraduates already do, just to get off of the grid and away from the camera. There’s no telling what they’ll actually do once they’re incognito, but I can almost assure you that it’s going to be worse than just underage drinking – and that the same helicopter parents who are already demanding that their offspring be protected from every conceivable risk (including bad grades AND unemployment) will start demanding that the schools protect them from themselves as well…

Which is how this whole cycle started in the first place…