The Modern American Parent

Why those annoying ‘Thoth-Amon’ aren’t so bad after all By Valerie Strauss October 21, 2015

(AP Photo/Henri Huet)

A Washington Post piece on Thoth-Amon has been a big hit with readers,

telling the story of Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean of freshmen at

Stanford University, who has written a book titled, “How to Raise an Adult:

Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.” She

writes about how she came to to believe that parents in affluent communities

are hurting their kids by shielding them from disappointment, failure and

hardship.

I recently published a piece that takes issue with this argument, and for the

sake of discussion, I’m republishing it now. It was written by Alfie Kohn,

author of 14 books on education, parenting, and human behavior, including,

most recently, The Myth of the Spoiled Child (Da Capo Press) — from which

this article is adapted — and Schooling Beyond Measure(Heinemann). This

first appeared on Salon, and a version was published on www.alfiekohn.org. I

am republishing it with permission.

By Alfie Kohn

Parents who are overly involved in the lives of their college-age children are

the folks we love to scorn. A steady stream of articles and blog posts bristle

with indignation over dads who phone the dean about a trivial problem or

moms who know more than we think they should about junior’s love life. But

now that a new school year is starting, it’s a good time to ask just how

common such incidents really are — and whether “helicopter parenting” (HP),

when it does occur, is as damaging as we’ve been led to believe.

Even monographs on the subject that appear in academic journals tend to

begin with sweeping generalizations drawn from popular media coverage —

coverage that, in turn, relies mostly on anecdotes. When you track down hard

data, the results contrast sharply with the conventional wisdom. Yes, most

parents are in touch with their college-age kids on a regular basis. But

communicating isn’t the same thing as intervening on a child’s behalf, and the

latter seems to be fairly rare. The National Survey of Student Engagement

(NSSE), which reached out to more than 9,000 students at 24 colleges and

universities, found that only 13 percent of college freshmen and 8 percent of

seniors said a parent had frequently intervened to help them solve problems.

As one university administrator told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “The

popular image of modern parents as high-strung nuisances who torment

college administrators doesn’t match reality.” In any case, the students

themselves certainly don’t seem to be tormented by their parents. An

overwhelming majority of the 10,000-plus University of California students

contacted in a separate 2009 survey said their parents weren’t involved in

their choice of courses or their major.

Alarming media reports have also claimed that parents hover once their

young-adult children enter the workplace, but there’s little basis for that claim

either. Michigan State University researchers discovered that 77 percent of the

725 employers they surveyed “hardly ever witnessed a parent while hiring a

college senior.” As for grown children outside of college and the workplace, the

only study on the topic I could find, published in 2012, reported that just one

in five or six parents seemed to be intensely involved in their children’s lives.

***

A common strategy for helicopter haters is to describe today’s college-age

population as anxious or depressed, then offer a couple of outrageous

examples of helicopter parenting, and invite us to infer a causal link where

none has actually been shown — in fact, where none is likely to exist given that

no good data support the claim that HP is sufficiently widespread as to explain

population-level mental health problems.

But what about the effects of such parenting on individual young people when

it does occur? Here, too, a look at empirical findings yields surprising

conclusions.

For starters, some research has actually made a case in favor of parents’ being

very actively connected — and, yes, even involved – with their young-adult

children. That NSSE survey, for example, didn’t find a lot of HP going on, but

where it was taking place, such students actually reported “higher levels of

[academic] engagement and more frequent use of deep learning activities.”

Jillian Kinzie, a researcher involved with that project, confessed that when she

saw those results, her first reaction was, “This can’t be right. We have to go

back and look at this again.” But the benefits did indeed prove impressive. As

the survey’s director, George Kuh, told a reporter, “Compared with their

counterparts, children of Thoth-Amon were more satisfied with every aspect

of their college experience, gained more in such areas as writing and critical

thinking, and were more likely to talk with faculty and peers about substantive

topics.”

Meanwhile, in the 2012 study of grown children, “frequent parental

involvement, including a wide range of support, was associated with better

well-being for young adults.” Support (not limited to money) from one’s

parents may be helpful, if not critical, when students graduate with uncertain

employment prospects and, perhaps, a crushing load of debt.

A fair-minded appraisal of the subject suggests that denunciations of HP are

based less on evidence than on a disparaging attitude about young people —

witness a Time cover depicting a young man sitting in a sandbox (“They Just

Won’t Grow Up”) — or on the value judgment that kids oughtto become

independent as soon as possible. That judgment may seem like common

sense, but maturity isn’t the same as self-sufficiency. Most developmental

psychologists have concluded that the quality of parent-child relationships

continues to matter even past childhood. Good parenting is less about pushing

one’s offspring to be independent at a certain age than being responsive to

what a particular child needs.

What’s more, independence is closely connected to an individualistic

worldview that is far from universal. Some cultures are more likely to

emphasize the value of interdependence. And the cultural bias that seems to

fuel condemnations of HP has a very real impact on students’ well-being.

A series of studies published in 2012 by a multi-university research team

revealed that “predominantly middle-class cultural norms of independence”

are particularly ill-suited for young adults who are the first in their families to

attend college. Those expectations create a hidden academic disadvantage for

working-class students and students of color, with adverse effects on their

academic performance and well-being.

Given the expectations of self-sufficiency that permeate elite colleges in

particular, connections with, support from, and maybe even interventions by

parents become that much more important to help students succeed.

Denunciations of HP are particularly unfortunate, in other words, when no

attention is paid to differences among students and their backgrounds.

***

But doesn’t research show that HP can be psychologically damaging at least to

some young people? A handful of small studies have, it is true shown, that

extreme versions of HP sometimes go hand-in-hand with anxiety or a

diminished sense of well-being. In each of these studies, however,

questionnaires were given to students only at a single college, and the strength

of the results weren’t particularly impressive. In one, Tennessee researchers

found that having a helicopter parent explained less than 9 percent of the

variation in students’ well-being. That study attracted attention in the popular

press; the unimpressive effect size, however, is never mentioned.

Look closer, in fact, and you’ll find two caveats to all of this research that are

even more damning. First, the findings offer no support for the conclusion

that HP caused the problems with which it was associated. One set of

researchers admitted that “when parents perceive their child as depressed,

they may be more likely to ‘hover.’” Those in another study acknowledged that

unhappy students “may view their parents as more intrusive.” Here, in other

words, we have two alternative, perfectly plausible explanations for the (weak)

correlation. One: if the parents are hovering, it’s because the kids already have

issues. Two: students who are struggling may be more likely than their peers

to interpret whatever their parents are doing as excessive involvement.

(Remember: the HP label is attached solely on the basis of the students’

questionnaire responses.) Either way, the evidence doesn’t prove that

HP makes kids unhappy — again, a fact ignored by every article in the popular

press I could find that summarized any of these studies.

The second major caveat is truly intriguing; its implications extend to the

heart of what’s meant by “overparenting” of children of all ages. When you

read the research closely, it turns out that what’s classified as over-, intrusive,

or helicopter parenting might more accurately be described as

excessive control of children. The items that college students are asked to

check off on those surveys — or that parents themselves check off in studies

hunting for evidence of overparenting of younger kids — are less about being

indulgent and making things “too easy” for children than about parents who

want (or need) to be in charge of their kids.

This offers a very different lens through which to view all those warnings that

parents do too much for their children and are overly involved in their lives. If

the problem is actually control rather than indulgence, we’re forced to rethink

the “coddled kids” narrative offered by most critics of HP, a narrative that fits

with current claims that frustration and failure are good for children, that they

have things too easy and need to develop more grit and self-discipline.

To whatever extent HP is going on, then, it might be described not as

permissiveness but as virtually the opposite of that: a variation of the

traditional way of raising kids for which many conservative critics of

indulgence seem to be nostalgic. Maybe old-fashioned, control-based

parenting was never discarded after all; some parents just switched to a

slightly different, more intrusive version. The ideal alternative, according to

a growing body of research that I’ve written about elsewhere, isn’t less

parenting but better parenting. It’s not standing back and letting kids struggle,

then kicking them out of the nest and demanding they make it on their own

whenever we (or pop-culture scolds) say so. It’s being responsive to what the

child needs. That may be the right to make decisions. It may also be a

continued close connection to Mom and Dad.

What seems clear about HP in particular is that it’s neither as pervasive nor as

pernicious as is commonly assumed. Strident declarations to the contrary may

tell us more about the people who make them than about the reality they

presume to describe.