by Alfie Kohn
But even if these studies can be taken at face value, they—and other research—have also disconfirmed certain beliefs about detrimental effects:
•The New Hampshire study found no association between HP and a sense of entitlement or exploitive behavior.55
•The Virginia study found no association with anxiety.
•A study of adults in their twenties discovered—“contrary to hypothesis”—that those who still lived with their parents “did not display a more dysfunctional dependent orientation” than those who were living on their own.56
•A Utah study found no connection between HP and students’ self-worth, sense of identity, or even the extent to which they felt like an adult, although there was a negative relationship with their reports of how reliably they attended classes and completed their assignments.57
•In an amusing example of unintentional debunking, an education periodical published an assertion on its front page that “Millennials have had helicopter parents who have protected them” from having to struggle, thereby depriving them of critical life skills, the result being that fewer students finish college these days. Three pages later in the same issue, another article (by the same reporter) carried the headline: “K-12 and College Completion Rates Set Record.”58
The case against HP isn’t particularly compelling, then, but what may be more surprising is that there’s a case to be made for it—that is, for parents to be actively connected and involved with their young-adult children, even to an extent with which many people are uncomfortable. The National Survey of Student Engagement, which included more than nine thousand students at twenty-four colleges and universities, didn’t find a lot of HP going on, but the students who did have such parents reported “higher levels of [academic] engagement and more frequent use of deep learning activities.”59 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 helicopter parents 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.”60
Nor is this the only finding of positive effects. In a preliminary data analysis, the researcher who conducted the New Hampshire study found indications that “helicopter parenting appears to be associated with young adults who have the capacity to love, feel supported, and who seek out social connections.”61 Another study revealed that the more contact freshmen had with their parents, the less likely they were to engage in binge drinking.62 As Stephanie Coontz, the director of research for the Council on Contemporary Families, summed things up, “In the majority of cases, this increased closeness between parents and kids is found among healthy students, not unhealthy ones.”63
You may or may not be surprised to learn that even when children are well into their twenties, parental involvement generally continues to be helpful. Here are the researchers who conducted that 2012 study of grown children: “Although the popular media lament parental dependency as detrimental to the current generation of young adults, the findings from this study provide a contrasting and more nuanced view. Frequent parental involvement, including a wide range of support, was associated with better well-being for young adults,” including “clearly defined goals and higher life satisfaction.”64
Support (not limited to money) from one’s parents may be helpful, if not critical, when students graduate with a crushing load of debt. Cultural norms, too, have been changing, with people less likely to marry and have children right away.65 When it’s a struggle “to figure out what it means to be an adult in a world of disappearing jobs, soaring education costs and shrinking social support networks,” a close connection to the people who raised you can be vital.66
Yet mass-media accounts continue to portray that connection as objectionable. A Time cover story in 2013 claimed “more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse,” and introduced that rather misleading statistic by declaring that “their development is stunted.”67 No evidence was offered to support this dire conclusion because none exists; it reflects nothing more than the personal disapproval of the writer. By contrast, Richard Settersten Jr., a professor of social and behavioral health sciences, argues that “the support of parents—emotionally and financially—is the single most important predictor of the success of young adults.” In fact, he adds, “if you want to see just how much involved parenting matters, track the lives of young people who don’t have it. . . . In obsessing about helicopter parents, we’re focused on the wrong end of the spectrum.”68
“Excessive” parent involvement—and attempts to spare children various types of unpleasantness at school and at play—are strongly condemned for reasons that go beyond the likely effects. Imagine, if you will, someone who rolls her eyes at a college student for checking in with a parent several times a week about minor matters, or who criticizes the student’s parent for e-mailing a college administrator in an attempt to fix some problem. (Such criticisms are more often heard from people who do not themselves have children in college.69) “Give me a break!” snorts our critic. “The kid is legally an adult! It’s time for him to learn how to make his way in the world. If Mommy or Daddy keeps running interference, how is he ever going to learn to solve his own problems? Parents who hover may think they’re helping, but they’re actually making things worse for their kids by keeping them dependent.”
Now let us suppose that we reply by pointing out that there’s actually no evidence to support that prediction of dependency, and indeed, there is reason to believe close contact and even intervention may be positively beneficial. Would that revelation be likely to silence this critic? My experience suggests not. While objections to overparenting are often framed as empirical predictions (here’s what will happen), they often seem to be fueled more by basic values (here’s how I think parents should act). As regards HP, the central conviction is that kids ought to become independent as soon as possible. A parent’s job is to give them the skills they’ll need to make it on their own and then strongly encourage them to do just that.
While I won’t argue that this view is flat-out wrong, I think it needs to be defended rather than treated as a self-evident truth. If parents are overly involved because they’re unwilling to let go—if, that is, they’re cultivating a child’s dependence to meet their own emotional needs—then, yes, that’s a problem. But if that’s not the case, then the “kick ’em out of the nest” view merits our skepticism for three reasons.
1. Attacks on helicopter parenting sometimes reflect a scornful attitude about young people. Those who demand that emerging adults hurry up and emerge already often seem to regard them as self-indulgent slackers and moochers. Their opinion isn’t really driven by what young people need, in other words, but by a particular belief about what young people are like (specifically, what’s wrong with them). There’s always a receptive audience for media coverage along these lines, such as the cover of yet another issue of Time magazine, this one depicting a young man sitting in a sandbox. The accompanying headline lamented, “They Just Won’t Grow Up.”70
2. Maturity isn’t the same as self-sufficiency. I argued earlier that many people define healthy growth in terms of how much progress a child has made at separating from parents. That’s particularly true where adolescents are concerned; it’s widely believed that this is the stage of life whose main business is individuation. But the field of developmental psychology has moved toward adopting a more nuanced view. It’s now understood that the quality of relationships, including those with one’s parents, continues to matter, even past childhood. To insist that college students “handle difficult decisions and unfamiliar environments on their own . . . minimizes the importance of family connectedness in ea
rly and middle adulthood.”71 There’s more to growing up than just going out on your own, and parents must walk a fine line, supporting self-sufficiency but also maintaining connection. That means responding to what one’s child needs rather than applying a simple, single-minded principle—“promote independence”—which is the essence of most advice on the topic.
Within the field of motivational psychology, meanwhile, some theorists draw a distinction between independence and autonomy. A child whose autonomy is supported is one who is allowed “to act upon [his or her] true interests and values.” That’s quite different from encouraging separation from parents or freedom from their influence. Some very healthy, autonomous young people aren’t particularly independent.72 Conversely, not all independent young people are—or are helped to become—psychologically autonomous. Parents may push their children to be self-sufficient despite the children’s need for continued guidance and support. One group of researchers points out that if, for example, parents insist that their college-age child “discuss academic problems with [his or her] professor,” that might promote independence but could be “perceived as unsupportive or even controlling.”73
3. Not everyone shares “our” values about growing up. Independence is closely connected to an individualistic worldview, and that worldview is far from universal. It’s more commonly endorsed by men than women, and more commonly found in the West than the East, in industrialized than nonindustrialized societies, and among professionals than working-class people. Regarding college students in particular, “traditional understandings of parental involvement presented in education are based on the practices of White, middle-class parents,” ignoring the “cultural values of many ethnic minority groups, which focus on centrality of the family and interdependence.”74
The cultural bias that seems to fuel the popular condemnation of HP—and perpetuates norms that favor independence over interdependence, particularly at the most selective colleges75—has a very real impact on students’ well-being. “Levels of parental involvement that may be considered ‘excessive’ for some students could for other students represent an important source of academic and social support.”76 Surveys confirm substantial differences by class and ethnicity in how much contact and intervention kids want from their parents as well as how much they get.77
A fascinating series of studies published in 2012 by a multi-university research team revealed that “predominantly middle-class cultural norms of independence that are institutionalized in many American colleges and universities” are particularly ill suited for young adults who are the first in their families to attend college. These norms “do not match the relatively interdependent norms to which many first-generation students are regularly exposed in their local working-class contexts prior to college.” The result of this mismatch is to create a hidden academic disadvantage for these students, one that adversely affects their performance.78 Given the expectations of self-sufficiency that permeate our institutions—“learn to do for yourself”—connections with, support from, and maybe even interventions by parents become that much more important to help students persist and succeed in a challenging environment. Simplistic and sometimes unpleasant denunciations of HP are particularly unfortunate, in other words, when no attention is paid to differences among students and their backgrounds.
One last point. In any consideration of what sort of parenting role best serves a given student, we shouldn’t forget to ask, “But what does the student want? How do things look from his or her perspective?”—a question that appears in remarkably few discussions of the topic. “It’s only helicopter parenting if parents are more involved than their college students want or need them to be.”79 If kids balked at how often their parents were in touch with them, or objected to how much their parents were involving themselves in academic and social decisions, then critics would (with some justification) complain about these folks who ignore their children’s desire for distance. But in fact the majority of kids don’t mind. Most students say either that they’re happy with the level of their parents’ involvement or that they’d like them to be even more involved.80 Some critics simply pivot, however, attempting to turn that preference for connection into the basis of a new complaint: Look how dependent they’ve made their children!81
With most issues involving parenting and education, the impact of what we do is a function of how the children think and feel about what’s done to them, not by the behaviors themselves. It may be easier to measure behaviors (how we act), but it’s the perspective of those on the receiving end of those actions that determines the effect. The key variable that predicts whether parental support will prove beneficial isn’t how much of it is offered but whether that support is welcomed by the recipient or viewed as an imposition.82
CHAPTER 4
Getting Hit on the Head Lessons
Motivation, Failure, and the Outrage Over Participation Trophies
Not long ago, several elementary schools took a fresh look at the game called dodge ball and decided that their physical education programs would be better off without it. Many p.e. teachers had been unenthusiastic about an activity that doesn’t teach useful skills or offer a good workout; most players at any given time are just standing around. The more compelling objection, though, was that kids are required to hurl an object at one another as hard as possible. “Dodge ball is one of those games that encourages aggression and the strong picking on the weak,” as one professor of health and physical education put it.1 Is an activity that turns children into human targets really consistent with the values that schools say they’re trying to teach?
People who favor keeping dodge ball in schools might have replied that the game isn’t all that different from other competitive sports (although perhaps that’s less a defense of dodge ball than a reason to rethink those other sports as well). Or they might have tried to make a case that the problems aren’t inherent to the game and could be addressed by changing how it’s played. But efforts to get rid of dodge ball, which received considerable media attention, produced a response that relied less on reasoned opposition than on incredulity, rage, and sneering contempt, even from normally equable writers2 and mainstream sources.
An editorial in the Los Angeles Times was fairly typical. It ridiculed people who wanted to protect children’s “hurt feelings” or make them include everyone in their games. For adults to try to minimize the nastiness that kids may experience—not only deliberate exclusion but also physical aggression—is to fail to prepare them for the real world, the editorial declared. It’s never too early for children to learn that “someone always gets picked last.” To protect their “tender egos”—a phrase used facetiously, not compassionately—by barring dodge ball is to deprive them of an important lesson about what life (in the editorial writer’s experience) is really like.3
Something about the issue hit a nerve, but it wasn’t because of a deep attachment to the game itself. In fact, that same white-hot anger shows up whenever anyone proposes to minimize unpleasantness for children, especially if it involves moderating the impact of activities that pit them against one another or questioning the usefulness of punishment.
Consider a Florida school board that was asked by its own curriculum specialists to eliminate the practice of giving zeroes to elementary school students for individual assignments. When averaged in with other marks, a single zero can drag down a child’s overall grade disproportionately and irreversibly. Moreover, as the superintendent pointed out, “after a few zeroes, a child can ‘shut off’ and not recover.” But as soon as this idea was floated, board members received a flood of mail, all of it excoriating the proposal. Some members didn’t even wait to hear from their constituents; they instantly announced their opposition on the grounds that tempering this punitive policy would lower standards. “The kids need to learn to study and do their homework and earn the grades they deserve,” one member declared. The zeroes remain.4
In Massachusetts, meanwhile, a middl
e school principal became uncomfortable with the tradition of holding a special evening awards ceremony to which only students who made the honor roll were invited. “Honors Night, which can be a great [source] of pride for the recipients’ families,” he said, “can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade-point average.” He didn’t propose eliminating the honor roll or even the public recognition of students who were on it. He suggested only that the event be folded into a daytime assembly that included arts and athletic awards, which the entire student body attends. (Indeed, part of the principal’s reasoning was that students who weren’t on the honor roll might be “motivated” by watching their classmates receive recognition.) But even this modest change elicited furious opposition from parents as well as unpleasant coverage on Fox News and conservative websites. One parent’s comment was typical of the reaction: “I think the school should be committed to excellence and not mediocrity. . . . They shouldn’t cancel [Honors Night just] because somebody’s feelings could be hurt. Life is a competition, and they should start competing.”5