Do You Know Any Helicopter Parents?

Friday's Cincinnati Enquirer introduced us to the latter-day apron-stringing parents, beginning with the story of one helicopter parent:

There was once a freshman college student who could not find her classroom. So she fired up her cell phone and called her mom. Mom, miles away, called the college, retrieved the necessary information, then rang her daughter. Classroom found, problem solved.

James Slager is not making this up.

He's seen a lot of things in his 23 years at Miami University, where he's senior director of student health services, but what he's seen in recent years is an unrivaled closeness, even a dependency, between college students and their parents - a generation of children who are "over-cared for" and parents who are "overly involved," he said.

"Parents think they're doing the right thing," Slager said. Their children, though, "need to learn to grow up."

These parents are referred to - not always kindly - as "helicopter parents" because they, well, hover. At the college level, they demand to see their children's grades and learn when their children visit health services, information that's restricted without student permission. They chew out professors for bad grades and call to wake their kids for class.

They pay the bills, buy the groceries, make the dorm-room beds.

And their children don't mind.

How is it that some Baby Boomer parents who defiantly traversed the generation gap to get free of their parents now are reluctant to let their kids grow up? And how is it that their kids don't mind?

Although our son is temporarily back at home following college graduation and our daughter lives but a few miles from us after her 2005 wedding, neither my wife or I have any desire to micromanage their lives.

In fact, it's a relief not to have to be involved in their decision-making. We love being able to tell them when they ask where such-and-such is, for example, that we don't know and that it's not our job to know!

We'll always be there for our children, of course. But being there for them doesn't mean that we treat them like infants! I've always felt that parents had a few simple tasks:

• To introduce their kids to the God made known in Jesus Christ
• To prepare them for living as adults

Each of those two elements is based on the simple premise that one day, our kids will have to face God and the world for themselves. If we parents do our jobs right, they'll be okay in doing that and we can go on to the next phases and challenges of our lives with clear consciences and a sense of fulfillment.

It seems to me that Helicopter Parents have somehow fallen measure the worth of their lives on how dependent their kids are on them. But crippling our kids to salve our own egos and desire to be needed isn't parental responsibility. It's the opposite of responsibility!