Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation | Hacker News Reader

Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

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147 pointswalterclifford188 comments

Dean complains about helicopter parents at Stanford and yet admissions essentially requires incoming students have helicopter parents. To get into a school like this you need to be exclusively focused on exactly the arbitrary criteria that will get you accepted into a school like this -- grades in the "right" classes, enough sports to talk about it in an essay but not too much, extracurricular and volunteer work at the "right" organizations, tutoring for the standardized exams. No teenager has a passion for SAT prep. If you stop pushing them and let them be human beings there are plenty of other children of helicopter parents who will be happy to take their place in the incoming Stanford class.

This. It is like that old adage, "Behind every great man, there is a great woman." For the modern era, it should perhaps now be, "behind every top-tier university student, there is a helicopter parent".

It takes so much to get into one of these schools now that it seems impossible for any child without extensive support.

Perhaps, following sentiments of Peter Thiel and others, it's not necessary to get into an elite school today, in order to succeed. If it was, then good education and success would still be scarce in today's world, as most people can't afford to go to Harvard, Stanford, etc.

Now we have MOOCs an schools can become centers for socializing, tutoring and testing. A great teacher can educate more than 300 people a year this way.

It's never been necessary to go to an elite school to be successful; it's simply much easier to get your foot in the door with employers if you have the words "MIT" or "Stanford" on your resume as opposed to "Coursera" or some random college. Moreover, employers COME TO YOU if you are at these institutions, you don't need to go out and beg for face time.

Depends on the major. I would say in many majors it's work experience that matters. I agree that the first job is easier to get when you're from Stanford, but that's it.

Yes, I agree. I should have specified that I meant the first job.

This is nonsense. Getting into elite schools opens up doors that are otherwise completely shut. At law firms, at prestigious graduate schools, in academia, in medical schools and good positions at top corporations. Every year information is collected on the various success rates for students coming out of America's universities and students from elite school make up the highest paying and most successful members of our society. This is as true now as it was twenty years ago.

All areas that are going to be increasingly disrupted by technology and digitalization. So sure for now but this will change.

Signalling and networking and group association and stereotypes are inherently human and have remained the same for the past 6000 years of human history no matter the changes in technology. You can't just throw out contentless buzzword bingo like "disruption" and "technology" and seriously expect anyone to believe it's going to change.

Thats not the point.

I am talking about when technology makes it obsolete to even have most doctors and lawyers.

If that happens, then social status shifts to other fields, and you're back to square one.

Social status will always exist. Life will always be unfair.

You just have to signal the right way to show other people that you're the right type of person. Hard to explain but if you experiment you can find that this will get you a huge amount of the way.

Signaling will become worth more at the very top (top 20 schools) and less below that tier, which ironically will increase competition for the top 20, but probably reduce stress on the majority of kids who were always looking locally or regionally to begin with.

The only problem with MOOCS is you can't be an engineer or a medical doctor by only doing the courses you're "interested in".

IT is one of the few "fields" where people can get away with a half assed academic background and the end product shows it.

What does the end product show? Doctors kill plenty of patients.

If you're a parent then, your decision looks like:

Let your kid be a kid and bank on society having advanced far enough to allow success without a big-brand school on your CV. Barring that, hope your kid will be driven/creative/wily enough to make do without that stamp of approval.

Or, take the "safe" route and go full helicopter-parent, and give your children the best possible guarantee of success in the world as it currently stands.

That's a brutal decision to have to make.

I'm left wondering why the parent would be compulsed to push the child agressively.

Maybe it's a US thing?

We are are engineer parents in northern Europe, we try to raise our kids so they remain curious and emotinally fullfilled, we wish every good thing for them - but it's really hard to imagine to go all helicopter on them. If anything, I imagine we will let them make all the right and wrong decisions about their education when the time comes - but we try to make them understand what options they have and what likely outcomes their decisions entail.

Elite schools in the U.S. are more competitive along arbitrary criteria than in Europe. To get into top schools in Europe, it's enough to do better on exams than everyone else. But since the U.S. public education system is so easy and perfect grades don't provide much of a signal, top schools are looking for proof that you're an "interesting person" in a lot of ways that seem a priori to be unrelated to academia.

So encourage your kids to be interesting people, don't create an artifical construction of interestingness.

Genuinely interesting people are unlikely to tick all the (arbitrary) boxes expected by the universities. They might even have an unapologetic C in a class or two.

It's true that the U.S. has a lot more arbitrary criteria, but purely having great exam scores is also a valid strategy. It's just extremely difficult.

If you have a 2400 on the SAT and a 4.0, but no extracurriculars or other redeeming qualities, you won't get in everywhere but you'll still get plenty of elite acceptances.

There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them. The SAT iant a hard enough test to distinguish elite students -- it is a high school level math and English test.

> There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them.

Citation needed. Only a few thousand students score perfectly each year, and there are far more than a few thousand students accepted into elite universities each year.

If you want a good education then an elite school isn't necessary. If you want access to people and an unparalleled network, then your best option is an elite school.

This is a serious misconception. I did the same mistake and never earned a degree. Now despite being successful and earning well most countries will not allow me to immigrate on my own.

And that's just one loss. Complete system is rigged in favor of credentialism than talent.

Unfortunately, his position as a Dean prevents him from getting "too real" in this article, because what he should be telling these over-stressed and over-worked parents (and kids) is that you don't need to go to Harvard, or Stanford, or any Ivy League school really, to get a good education.

Her. It's literally the first line of the article. And also she's the former dean.

Also, if that were true about how to get into Stanford, we would likely be heading for a crash in such schools' reputations as places that churn out top quality graduates because they are selecting for the wrong attributes. I don't actually think Stanford is going to let that happen.

This is in the article that the rest of us read:

"She urges families to think more broadly about what makes for a “good” college. There are excellent educational experiences to be had at schools that aren’t among U.S. News and World Report’s top 20, she says, and there are schools that will accept students who don’t have a perfect resume."

There is a difference between being a demanding parent and being a helicopter parent. A demanding parent sets high expectations and offers support, but the kid must bring their own motivation and effort. A helicopter parent not only sets high expectations but does the work for the student to make sure they are met.

The classic example is the parent who goes into the school and harangues the teacher when their student gets a bad grade on an assignment. A demanding parent communicates their disappointment with their kid, not the teacher. A demanding parent lets their kid fail and then delivers consequences. Overcoming failure is how people develop motivation and mental toughness.

Stanford (and Harvard, MIT, CalTech, etc.) have been hard to get into for many decades, and students got into them. Helicopter parents justify their coptering with the sentiment above, but that doesn't mean it's true. You don't need to helicopter to have a high performing kid.

And not every kid is going to perform at the top level, and IMO a good parent needs to be ok with that. I think when the parental expectations don't meet reality, that's when helicoptering can start.

There is a thin line between a 'demanding parent' and a 'micromanaging' parent, which seems to be just another form of a helicopter parent.

> A demanding parent communicates their disappointment with their kid, not the teacher. A demanding parent lets their kid fail and then delivers consequences.

What makes parent a problem is how high the demands he/she sets and how severe are the consequences.

I don't agree that helicopter parenting is anywhere near a prerequisite.

In fact, amongst my peers it seems to have been the reverse. The kids with over-involved parents were the ones who ended up seeming too "cookie-cutter" and ended up going to "second-tier" universities.

The hypothesis of helicopter parenting being a prerequisite for elite admissions also seems to be undermined by the consistent success of boarding schools in college admissions. It's a lot harder to be a helicopter parent when your kids are hundreds-thousands of miles away.

That actually supports my argument: boarding schools are just helicopter parenting by proxy and even more extreme. Parents send their children away to professional helicopter parents to socialize only with the other helicopter parented-children.

I don't think you have a good idea of what most boarding schools are like.

At least in my experience, we were afforded an enormous amount of freedom. Certainly there are not enough staff to provide each student with anything like the amount of helicoptering that many students receive at home. It's much more like college than normal high school, with nobody checking monitoring your every moment.

Remember, helicopter parenting and privilege are not the same thing (though they are related). You can have very wealthy and disengaged parents and you can have overly involved poor parents.

How do you think it would even be possible for staff to constantly helicopter children at the level that parents typically do?

No teenager has a passion for SAT prep.

I grew up in the generation when no one in my region of the country (the Midwest) had heard of test prep. The students who did best on standardized tests (my friends and I) simply enjoyed reading for fun. Really, it's that simple. Read books and articles that are not assigned by school and that you choose for your own reading pleasure. Students who score high today on standardized tests are still avid readers. Nothing has changed about that at all. This even works for the math section of the tests.

To learn how to score well on a standardized test reading section, the number one piece of advice is READ, READ, READ, and READ. Read about what you like to know more about. Read things that are fun for you. Find books and magazines about interesting topics and read them. Turn off the TV and read. Put away the video game controller and read. Read hard things, and read easy things. Read a lot.

For years, I wondered why it came so readily to mind to write "READ, READ, READ" in all capital letters like that when I give advice on this subject, as I have frequent occasion to do. Recently, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). Yes, that works for Chinese, and it works for English too. By practicing reading, you gain reading comprehension and reading speed, and speedy reading with good comprehension gives you time to complete standardized test sections with time to spare. That reduces the pressure and lets you relax and think while you take the test. Try it. You may like it, and anyway reading is fun.

Your knowledge is out of date, I'm afraid. Simply being a geek is no longer sufficient. Teenagers today are competing in a much larger pool of increasingly sophisticated candidates; there's an entire class of businesses dedicated to getting students into colleges.

That's not true.

I just went through the college admissions process a few years ago and being a smart and geeky teenager without obsessive parents is still a valid strategy.

What college did you get into?

Many. Dartmouth, Brown, Williams, etc.

Not to be a dick, but none of these are top ten schools, and you don't get the same connections or the same signalling power of being in the top 0.5% of the bell curve by going there.

Yes, they do have some prestige, but for good or bad, when an HR rep has to choose between the average Stanford/MIT/Harvard/Yale/Princeton grad and the average Dartmouth/Brown/Williams grad, you know the outcome.

Wow, way to be an asshole. First of all, I didn't apply to larger universities but I'm pretty sure I would have gotten in.

Secondly, Williams is literally the #1 liberal arts college. LACs are ranked separately from large universities. [0]

Thirdly, if you think acceptance rate is the most important indicator (which I'd argue it is for this thread), Brown is #7 and Dartmouth is #12. [1] I'm not really sure why you think they're somehow second-tier. Do you really think the 80 basis point difference in the acceptance rates of MIT and Brown (for example) means that MIT requires intensive prep but Brown will just accept anyone? Give me a break.

> when an HR rep has to choose between the average Stanford/MIT/Harvard/Yale/Princeton grad and the average Dartmouth/Brown/Williams grad, you know the outcome.

No, I really don't. They're pretty much equally competitive and are recruited to the same prestigious companies.

[0] http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

[1] http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

You don't need to get into a top-10 school to succeed at life--and succeed wildly by any measure.

This is part and parcel of the helicopter parent mentality: that if my kid doesn't get into a top-10 school, they are a failure. It's just not true.

To name just one example: http://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top...

I did just fine because I liked to read too, but I talk to younger students and that is something that has fundamentally and seriously changed. Things are MUCH more competitive now than they have ever been, and everybody is studying the system and learning how to game it. People who focus on the things the metrics are supposed to be measuring (like reading) will lose to the people who game the metrics themselves, every time. Putting a college education up on this pedestal like we've done as "the thing you MUST HAVE to succeed" or "the key to any future besides gas-pumping" is like throwing a chunk of meat into a pit of rabid hyenas.

I agree that competitive college admissions are a driver of "helicopter parenting". However, from what I've seen, that behavior doesn't work nearly as well as you imply.

I'm lucky to have great parents. Not "helicopter" by any stretch. I was just a nerd in high school: I took nine APs, went to science fairs, did an engineering internship, & was on the math team. I never took test prep classes, took the SAT and ACT only once, and I wrote & edited the application by myself. It worked. I went to Stanford, class of 2012.

What I did have were some really excellent HS teachers esp in STEM subjects & supportive parents who gave me a lot of freedom. I had some peers whose parents kept pushing them & who burned out.

By contrast, I had fun & felt free both in high school and at Stanford.

Aggressive parent involvement may help some people get into a good college, but it's certainly not necessary & is often harmful.

Your last sentence is especially wrong. Micromanaging your near-adult children and refusing to "let them be human beings" is bad advice. Your children should be driven by their own ambition, not yours.

>supportive parents who gave me a lot of freedom

This is the difference between successful students and students who crumble when they get a B. Parents insist on getting their children in the very best universities, when cheaper options like state universities or local colleges are viable alternatives. They push students who are not intrinsically motivated, and when these students leave their parents and go to college, they are completely lost.

As someone with children and living in NY, my wife and I are very aware of not trying to push our kids in a specific direction or to interfeer too much if they are having trouble solving something themselves.

The problem once we start coaching our kids in an early age is that we are denying them to find a lot of subtle things out on their own.

It's very easy to think you are helping your kids to learn by removing what seem like unnecessary obstacles and of course sometimes you are. But a lot of the time it's those obstacles that build some sort of character in the kids and allow them to find out things by finding out things. By being too proactive as a parent we can take a lot of motivation away from them.

Our kids have bruises all over their body because they are allowed to do things other kids aren't. Of course we watch over them and make sure they don't do completely crazy things but they are capable of much more than one might think. By allowing them to find that out they will hopefully learn that themselves too.

Raising kids isn't a science it's an art. The art of creating a canvas for them but not decide what they want to do with it.

I think this comic shows one of the big differences between our parents generation and ours (I am 41)

I am always reminded of this http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg

I grew up with parents who worked all the time and barely took part in their childrens lives. We cook dinner by ourselves a majority of the time. My 10 year old brother has to mow the lawn and do his own laundry. We get yelled at all the time like in the first column of the comics. At first I felt mad for it but now I'm realizing the benefits. I can take care of myself so well. I can cook, I keep my room clean, and I am on track to a great career that I like. Not to mention my brother and I have both solo travelled to some crazy places like Nepal, Peru, Norway.

My 21 year old friend has had his parents take a big part in his life. He has upper middle class parents who watch his every move, sign him up for SAT tutors, force him to take piano lessons. Has no clue how to cook, found freshman year comp sci too hard and switched to communications and now philosophy major, has not really gotten good at anything in life. If I majored in Philosophy my parents would probably yell at me and not help with tuition. Probably will depend on his dad's connections to get an office job.

On one hand having a nice, loving parent would be nice. I am not as socially capable as some of my other friends who had loving parents. I am not as loving or caring as them. On the other hand, my parents' harshness and indifference helped me get used to the grittiness of real life and I'm glad for it.

Exactly. There are always drawbacks no one persons background can predict the outcome of their lives which is why I believe it's an art – almost performing arts — more than a pedagogic or scientific enterprise.

What you wrote makes no logical sense. It's simply confirmation bias.

> My 21 year old friend has had his parents take a big part in his life. He has upper middle class parents who watch his every move, sign him up for SAT tutors, force him to take piano lessons. Has no clue how to cook, found freshman year comp sci too hard and switched to communications

Having parents who take a big part of your life has no bearing on whether or not you'll do well at Comp Sci 101.

> Probably will depend on his dad's connections to get an office job.

After your first job out of college, subsequent jobs are found based on your "connections." That's networking.

Also learning to cook isn't difficult. It just takes practice.

Most things just take practice especially being a human being.

The point — I think — is not that you become superman by being able to cook yourself. The point is that helicopter parents are wrong in thinking that they are doing their kids a favor by being constantly there for them.

Whatever their motives are they are not putting them in a better position in the long run. It's more an attempt to control the destiny of their childs future by controlling it for as long as they can.

You know what. Those parents got those kids into Stanford. Obviously helicopter parenting is working for them.

90% of the decisions people make are based on the environments they are in. Today's environment is extremely competitive and the margin for error is lower. Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista... Get them into Stanford, then they have the rest of their life to "fail"

That was my thought as well. The parents are making the rational decision that they can't afford their kids to fail, so they take every measure to make sure they get to a good start. A good start in this case meaning getting admitted to Stanford. It might have something to do with low-qualification jobs disappearing, which in turn means you have to have a college degree to be self-sufficient.

Once upon a time, you could be on your own when you were as young as 12 (yes, I mean ancient times). Not too long ago you needed only high school education to get a good job, so you're staying with your parents until 16-18. Now you need college.

This is only true in a world where being an electrician, plumber, heating and cooling technician, etc. -- all jobs that are in-demand and pay $100K+/year -- have a negative stigma attached to them. Mike Rowe gave a great Ted talk about this: https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs

Getting your kids into Stanford has nothing to do with helicopter parenting and I think you are missing the bigger point.

The failing that you do when you are 6 is very different from the one you do when you are 16 or 26, they all accumulate and you can't redo your childhood.

The things you learn when you are 6 and 16 are closer to the competition you are in when you are out of Stanford. Getting in to stanford is nothing compared to making it through life in one piece and with success.

So, what happens to those kids after Stanford, e.g., the ones who get CS degrees but were helicopter-parented? How do they compare to the kids who were equally interested in computers but "allowed to fail," e.g., did not have sparkling resumes and were rejected by Stanford?

In ten years, one is homeless, the other gainfully employed in the tech field?

Honestly, we don't know. And while your choice of university matters for the first few jobs out of university, it quickly gets pushed to the back of the bus in favor of experience. Mental stability and the framework to deal with real life, though, matters much longer.

They are competing against those who got into Stanford and wasn't helicopter parented.

In my experience, going to a prestigious university gives you a head start. In 10 years, it will matter most what you have done after you graduate than where you graduated from.

Of course, you still have a network of connections... but again in my experience those do not translate well if you want to do top of the line work. If you eventually want to get an MBA and boss nerds around, ivy league is the way to go... but if you are committed to be a lifelong technologist, is matter little if at all.

> Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista

here's an important question to ask yourself: if you had to choose, would you rather your children be kind, or smart?

A kind idiot probably isn't of much use to society

Neither is a smart asshole. How useful to society are those who try to leech money off it in the most efficient ways possible? (I'm talking charlatans and certain branches of banking)

Sticking to the context, a smart person with ill intentions may damage the society. For a reference "smartness", assuming being kind or misogynistic is equally likely, the expected worth of a person is still zero, i.e. "isn't of much use to society".

Whereas unkind people are actively detrimental to society.

Sure they are. They won't be inventing new devices or running successful businesses, but they will probably enrich the lives of anyone in their social circle

Both would be best, but if I had to chose I'd go for smart.

I've seen smart, but unkind people learn to be kind over time. I doubt a kind halfwit can learn to be smart. That's presumably the case because smartness defines your general ability to learn, change and adapt.

Which one is more employable? If Hacker News is any indication, I would say Smart.

What makes you employable today may or may not make you so in two or three decades. For example, if an increasingly large fraction of cognitive employment is taken over by technology it is possible that the skills related to direct human-to-human interactions become the best bet.

If this happens being kind may indeed make you more employable than being smart.

(Caveat: as I argued in another post, smart person still has an advantage: she can generally learn other skills including being kind easier than a not-so-smart person)

That's just stupid. What good will an Stanford education be for someone who puts a bullet through their heads within one year of being thrown in an hyper competitive corporate environment where there is no safety net to ensure that your every step will eventually lead to success?

I specially disliked the part about having the rest of their life to "fail". That's tautological of course, but it takes on a whole new dimension if the "rest" is measured in months instead of decades.

The college admissions system has encouraged the arms race mentality. The SAT has been repeatedly reworked such that test prep works better. I really doubt involvement in the summer activities they apparently value indicates anything about qualification other than parental resources and involvement.

So now getting into a top college is more important than being a functional person? Failing when your an adult is more than getting a bruised knee: It's getting stuck in a job you hate, ending up in a bad marriage and becoming sick/obese because you don't know how to take care of yourself. All of those things happen because people don't know what works for them. The reason they don't know that is because other people have told them how to live their entire lives.

It's not evident that so called "helicopter parenting" and getting into a top college causes any of the above. First and last are anti-correlated with it, and I wouldn't be surprised if the second is too.

Obviously some people overdo it, but superior life outcomes and being a functional adult seem to go with heavily involved parenting.

Heavily involved parenting doesn't mean helicopter parenting and thats something thats very important to understand.

Involved parenting is not about controlling ones child (well, not directly, most of the time), nor protecting them from lifes bad outcomes.

Survivor bias. The students accepted to Stanford could be a representative sample of the larger upcoming student population in other universities, with regards to helicopter parenting.

Exactly so.

Only a name-brand school will actually deliver career benefits commensurate with the cost of attending. If you can't get in to a Harvard or Stanford, one might do better to learn a technical trade independently than go into debt to attend a UCSD, Washington State, or god forbid a second-tier private college.

Second tier schools are not worth the money they're asking in the present environment.

This is such bullshit. Smart, motivated kids will excel no matter where they are, and there's almost* nothing a Tier 1 state school won't be able to provide that will make a substantive difference in their career. Even Tier 2 public schools will be a-ok, and a lot of those kids will receive large scholarships at tier 2 privates... and they'll end up just fine, also. I think I'd separate your statement into two parts: 1) if you can't get into a decent school, consider trades. 2) god forbid anyone pay list price for a private college education. You & I apparently just disagree on the definition of "decent".

* In all honesty, the only thing I can think of OTOH is if you want to go directly from undergrad into investment banking or elite law, where the vast majority of new hires still come from Ivy League (plus a few others: Duke, Georgetown, Stanford, ...) pipelines.

What a false dichotomy: Stanford or life as a service worker. Both Google and YC have stopped focusing on college prestige in their hiring/acceptance, because it wasn't a particularly strong indicator of success.

I would much rather send healthy kids to a state school or liberal arts college than unhealthy kids to Stanford.

Better to be a Harvard dropout (Zuckerberg) than have a CS degree from Humboldt State.

And to combine that with an upper middle class background (like Zuckerberg)

Conflating one spectacular success with all [Harvard] dropouts is a silly comparison.

Is it? We know of two notably successful Harvard dropouts: Zuckerberg and Gates. While their success most likely hasn't been anywhere near as spectacular, I'm willing to bet you know dozens of successful people who graduated from state & small private universities.

Both also had very upper middle/upper class backgrounds.

Better to win the megabucks than the $5 scratch-off ticket.

What's your point? That being an enormous outlier is sometimes a great thing?

Its like law school-its better to graduate from Stanford at the bottom of your class, than from Santa Clara University at the top. Prestige matters.

I think Zuckerbergs upbringing has more to do with him as a person rather than the university from which he did not graduate.

His Facebook unicorn success was hugely dependent on the Harvard classmates who hired him to start the project he branched from, his Harvard cofounders, and his Harvard employees. He couldn't have done that at UMichigan.

>>Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista... Get them into Stanford, then they have the rest of their life to "fail"

What a terribly insulting thing to say. Arrogance at its peak.

I'm pretty sure it was a comment on the state of the education environment, not a personal opinion.

you've entirely missed the point. the article is making a claim on an entire generation of students and using stanford merely as an anecdotal sample

> Today's environment is extremely competitive and the margin for error is lower.

The margin for error is enormous, compared to previous generations. The probability that a mistake in life will lead you to die of starvation or cold is smaller than ever.

What I think is happening is that global communication is leading to increased status neurosis. Before, you could compare your kids to the neighbors'. Now you can compare them with everyone's kids, filtered through the lens of social media.

> What I think is happening is that global communication is leading to increased status neurosis.

A thousand times this. There is also a growing body of research[0] that shows that social media make you feel worse cause you are exposed to a selection of what's good in other people's life. I suspect the same often applies to TV.

[0] which I have not read further than the news reports, so might be total bullshit, caveat emptor, but I am inclined to believe it based on my anecdotal experience.

And the information era triggers an addiction to know more all the time which is knowing nothing. Schooling, parenting ... sometimes I even wonder how could my parent let me play outside without a cellphone, when in fact, all previous generations did fine.

It's all global media. Even colorful lifestyle magazines. Those celebrities you read about are carefully selected top N of 7 billion people. The chance of meeting any single person like that in one's neighbourhood is practically zero for a normal human being, yet you treat them as next-door neighbours in terms of comparing yourself to them, because media hijacks the availability heuristic. That effect is a reason why I start to think mass media is doing more harm than good to humans (a lot of ways in which general population turns batshit insane can be attributed to availability heuristic).

Margin of error: go to Stanford, make the right connections, become a billionaire in 8 years versus go to a state school and work for the billionaires while making 1/5000th to 1/150000th as much as they do, yet you're doing all the work that makes them richer.

> go to Stanford, make the right connections, become a billionaire in 8 years

In my scenario I was implicitly alluding to the real planet Earth.

We're talking hopes and dreams and aspirations and delusions here.

How many billionaires has Stanford generated versus the entire state of Ohio in the past 20 years?

>become a billionaire in 8 years versus go to a state school and work for the billionaires

If the only thing that matters in life is how much money you make, this might be relevant.

Otherwise, working for those billionaires as a college grad isn't that bad.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Nothing wrong with having no ambition, but step to the right so better people can pass you by.

Gross. What a shallow and pathetic way of viewing the world and the people around you.

Stanford has 27 billionaire alumni. At any given time, there are ~15,000 students studying at Stanford.

Getting the top 10 schools for creating billionaires, it accounts for 206 total. (Though this number also includes Cambridge, and I'm not sure if the 11 billionaire alumni from there are part of the same 500ish US billionaires)

Out of the 500ish billionaires in the US, nearly 100 of them have no degree at all.

So, these top schools produce about double the amount of billionaires that zero degrees do, and roughly the same number as the rest of the schools combined.

This is such a relatively small sample size and there are so many factors in play here that it would be silly to draw any sort of strong conclusion from this, but even going with shoddy science on this and playing fast and loose, we can see that while, yes, you do gain an advantage in the 'become a billionaire' game, it's still a ridiculously insignificant chance, and the population of billionaires without a degree or with a degree from a school not known for producing billionaires is still higher.

All of this to say: There ain't no easy path to billionairehood besides being born one, and getting in to Stanford or any other school does not increase your chances of becoming one to a statistically significant number.

nearly 100 of them have no degree at all.

Because many of them dropped/stopped out of Stanford after being accepted.

You can ask the same of NYC. How many supreme court justices are from NYC versus Idaho? Location matters. Location changes you. Peers change you.

relatively small sample size

Outliers can't be analyzed using aggregate methods. Powerlawpeople.

>Because many of them dropped/stopped out of Stanford after being accepted.

Really? There's obviously a few well known cases of this, but I doubt you're looking at any hard data when you make this claim.

>Outliers can't be analyzed using aggregate methods. Powerlawpeople.

Sure you can. When you're comparing 500 billionaires, they're no longer the outliers in the data set. They're the norm for the data set.

He's not really talking about mortal survival but social/career success, the consequences of error meaning you don't get to climb as high.

> Before, you could compare your kids to the neighbors'. Now you can compare them with everyone's kids, filtered through the lens of social media.

This is also a big factor in the "impossible beauty standards" syndrome.

Being the prettiest girl in the village was tough but humanly possible. Competing against photoshopped versions of the most attractive women on the planet is not.

>Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista

This is a very American problem and the cause my (20's) generation's unhappiness.

No one is happy with just being a stable person.

Being a stable person is a great goal. Most people aren't.

As noted in the article, the observed issues with mental health problems would indicate that pushing toward such an "achievement" extreme carries with it significant baggage.

Yep.

We have lost half a generation to Starbucks jobs, and people know that they are lost. It's ruining their mental health, and not building any kind of economic health. I don't blame the helicopter parents for this, though.

I've have worked in the restoration business in Europe and would absolutely hate doing the same jobs in the US. Here, it is tactically accepted that even people that faces the public can have a shitty day, specially if the pay is not-so-great. You know you are not 100%, your clients know it, your boss knows it, but as long as it doesn't become a regular problem, it's ok.

Now, besides having a shitty day, knowing that my pay and lifestyle is in danger if I give the client a less than perfect experience would do nothing good to my mental stability.

> Those parents got those kids into Stanford.

Correlation/causation fail.

The worst part of parents functioning this way is that they assume they are dictating results.

If it didn't work, this former Dean wouldn't be complaining about it.

I see her complaints as more sinister. She comes from a privileged background, and she's concerned that people from her social class are getting pushed out of her university by kids whose parents made them work hard.

The article implies (but does not state) that these students struggle once they're in. Getting in to Stanford has only marginal value on its own, the majority of value is in graduating and receiving a degree. If parents are optimizing for success at step N-1 at the cost of success at step N, that is self-defeating.

As a parent, I would a thousand times rather my child be a mentally stable barista than a questionably stable Stanford student. In fact, having recently interacted with the Standard undergraduate body, I feel quite sorry for most of them because it's such a terrible pressure cooker stress environment. My primary goal for my child is for her to be a whole person. If she can do that at Stanford, fine. If she can do that at Starbucks, fine. Instead of helicoptering her into an Ivy League depression, I'm focusing on making sure we're financially stable enough to be a cushion for the inevitable times when she fails while trying to find her own way in life.

I say this from experience, coming from a family where ivy league tier educations are normal--and so is depression.

Congratulations - and any tips on staying out the way, gratefully received :-(

> ivy league tier educations are normal--and so is depression

Similar background and I have always suspected they are correlated.

There are plenty of depressed baristas too.

Specific occupation is not the point - rather what the child thinks what his/her family thinks of her career choices and that this does not drive them into places they would not naturally go to. I.e. that their important life choices are not made because of extrinsic but of intrinsic motivations.

I'm always wary of upvoting a comment like this , but being from India and experiencing the difference getting into a good college makes , he has a point.

Ofcourse it's not a stark choice between getting into a Stanford and serving coffee at Starbucks but still . And I can't digest the snobbery in saying that a Starbucks worker is devoid of any dignity . But the comment still somehow resonates with me.

Perhaps it's a reflection of my own inferiority complex of not being able to study at an elite institution. It's a little hard to get over such feelings.

You should check out this podcast about impostor syndrome and cultural conflicts that occur when two opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum meet.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/550/t...

It isn't about dignity of the job. It is about health insurance and living wages.

Exactly. Our society is quickly bifurcating into haves and have-nots, and the middle class is disappearing. If the trend continues, by the time my daughter is college-aged, middle class lifestyles will be all but gone. Her only shot at not living in poverty will be an education, although already we're seeing a good education does not guarantee anything. If it takes "helicoptering" to help get her into $PRESTIGIOUS_SCHOOL you bet your ass I'll be firing up the rotors.

>Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista... Get them into Stanford, then they have the rest of their life to "fail"

Surely you are joking.

"Do everything for them during THE developmental phase of their life, then throw them to the wolves once your have produced a helpless little Stanford graduate" is your vision of good parenting?

The whole of life before the age of 21 is irrelevant to you because it is just a means to getting into Stanford? Have you thought about the implications of your viewpoint?

A parent's relationship with a child is determined by the place where the child works?

Words fail.

I am so grateful to my parents for putting so much trust in me while I was seemingly going out of control during my teenage years.

Seriously, it took me years but I now realize how much self-control and discipline it took them to stick to their philosophy and let me explore things on my own.

I come from a very middle class background, but I had the chance to experience a lot of things. Some I regret, some I don't. But the important is that I know how it feels, and I know what I don't to be. That's also the very way I found my calling in Computer science, and what drives in life.

They have trust me, when empirical evidence was screaming them not to. That's, I believe, the most beautiful proof of love they have ever gave me.

When my turns come, I hope I will be as good as a parent, as they were to me.

My parents were the same way, but I'm glad they forced me to go to college, at least. At the time it felt like a waste of time, and I had to take a job clerking in a warehouse when I got out because there were no jobs, but I was lucky to have met the person who got me that job, because within four years I was an engineer. I couldn't have done that without an education and a ton of luck.

"Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista." - I believe you speak correctly for much of the population. But not for me. I would much rather have my three children work at Starbucks (or in construction, or as plumbers, or whatever) and be good human beings - full of love, justice and mercy, faithful to their families and loyal to their friends - than get into any Ivy League and fail in any of those much more important areas. It's not even close.

It's much easier to be full of love, justice and mercy when people don't have to worry about money. Studies show a low threshold for that dollar amount but that number is multiple times higher for US major cities.

Perhaps. Certainly it's easier to be conventionally happy with enough money. And conversely, I think that folks who have a strong moral foundation find it a lot easier to make enough money. The arrow of causation quite likely runs both ways. But I know that the strongest sense of community and loyalty that I've seen are from working-class folks who may not have much money but who happen to have a strong underlying moral foundation.

I do agree that some parents feel that way, but they're wrong. A graduate of Stanford (or Harvard, etc.) can still fail, and fail hard. A job environment is far less forgiving than even "hard" schools like Stanford. A top-school diploma gets a kid in the door, but then it's up to them. A boss is not going to give a bad employee a break because their mom dropped by.

At the same time, the range of available jobs is huge. The idea that it's "Stanford or Starbucks" is not reality.

This is so true. However, I don't think it should start after you have children. When I decided to settle down and have children, I only dated very intelligent women based on their profession and if they were in MENSA. At the time when we decided to have children, we took our best eggs and sperm to produce the best genetically intelligent children we could.

So, for these "vintage" parents who are just getting their kids into Stanford, I applaud them. But because it's getting more and more competitive, I pity parents who don't start their helicoptering before the child before it is in the womb!

You know what's sad? I can't tell if sarcastic. I could easily see an elitist power couple doing this :(

Assuming "getting into Stanford" is the gold standard of parenting success. Plenty of billionaires who didn't even go to college. I refuse to make the admissions committee of Stanford be the judge of my parenting. By the plenty of graduates from 'good' schools working as baristas. Barista status has zero to do with your school accomplishment but with intrinsic traits such as motivation, ambition and creativity.

What makes you think one can make up for freedom lost during childhood? Our brains become rather rigid as we get older. One axiom for success is that it requires a thousand failures. Learning how to cope with failure is arguably the most important thing you can teach a child.

And personally, I'd be proud to be the parent of the world's most mentally stable barista because life is about more than status.

Honestly?

> What makes you think one can make up for freedom lost during childhood? Our brains become rather rigid as we get older.

If this was true in a practical sense, we'd have the government raising up kids, because parents pose too much a risk of producing a suboptimal generation.

> And personally, I'd be proud to be the parent of the world's most mentally stable barista because life is about more than status.

That's what those of us who didn't get to the top spots like to tell ourselves so that we may sleep better at night. Life may not be about status and money, but having the two makes it an order of magnitude better. Trying to tell yourself something else is denial, really.

Don't get me wrong - I definitely don't encourage turning kids into zombies and making them jump arbitrary stupid hoops that one needs to get to a top-tier university or otherwise gain status. But that's the world we live in - rewarding bullshit instead of actual value. There is no point in pretending otherwise, and seeing things for what they are is (almost) always helpful.

>You know what. Those parents got those kids into Stanford. Obviously helicopter parenting is working for them.

Is getting kids into Stanford the end goal? If it is, that's pretty short sighted. Congratulations! You got into Stanford. Now what?

Going to a top tier school is not the end. You don't win the moment you get accepted. College is the start of your adult life (or usually - based on this article perhaps some of the students are still in the childhood phase...), and where huge amounts of your actions and decisions start to have real and lasting consequences.

> Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista... Get them into Stanford, then they have the rest of their life to "fail"

I would take a well adjust, mentally stable, happy kid working a non-prestigious job than one that is unstable, depressed, etc. with a good one. Because, you know what? When you fail to raise an adult, even if they get to Stanford, a lot of them are not going to be good at jobs that require responsibility and personal judgment.

This sort of short sighted idea that getting a kid to a good school is winning and anything less means you're relegated to baristahood is ridiculous. Even ignoring the fact that a college degree is not a requirement for success in life, there are multitudes of schools that will give you the proper education needed to succeed in a field that does require college without the insane demands of Stanford, et al.

"Today's environment is extremely competitive and the margin for error is lower."

The number of poor in the world is steadily declining. To fuck up ones life in a western country basically requires a mental or health problem. I am left wondering what one is competing about.

>Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista... Get them into Stanford, then they have the rest of their life to "fail"

What a terribly unfortunate conception of "failure" and "success" this mindset represents. One that is all to common, but certainly not the only option.

I believe there are two different things at work here. One is being an active parent and the other is helping your child develop grit[1] and I don't think they are mutually exclusive.

At what age can I let my child walk to school by himself? It all depends on the child, neighborhood, and other characteristics. But if my son never walks to school by himself (elementary and middle), that doesn't mean he is going to fail in the face of adversity.

Grit is about not saying "good job" all the time and instead saying thing like "you worked hard". You need to teach your children to embrace failure as the best way to learn.

I see this in myself. I walked to school by myself, wasn't really helicopter parented, but found school very easy and breezed through everything and was never challenged. When I faced real challenges, I had a hard time learning how to overcome them.

I don't know what kind of parent I will end up being, my son is only 3, but I can see myself being very involved in his life and decisions and making sure he is safe. It will be hard to balance between being involved and being a helicopter, but I think helping him embrace failure is the greatest thing I can do.

[1] http://mindsetonline.com/abouttheauthor/ - It is ironic that the leading researcher in this field is at Stanford.

The conversation about grit needs to be balanced by a careful critique of the work we're asking students to engage with. If a school has a great climate and academic rigor, then by all means develop resilience and grit in students. But if a school is giving largely meaningless busywork, that needs to be addressed before telling students to work hard.

Here's a great critique of the current conversation about grit:

- http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_fer...

Great, thanks for sharing.

The idea that "today's youth" are more fragile than the youth of yore seems to be a growing meme. I do believe that there is a rise in mental health issues among young adults, but there are many potentially interacting causes. I haven't read the book in question, but I hope that anyone who tackles this subject addresses all the possibly relevant social phenomena before pinning it all on one root cause. Some things I hope would be factored in are:

- The tightening economic climate and increasing difficulty of staying in the middle class. Especially when it relates to the panoply of difficulties young people face: student debt, high cost of housing, the gateway of unpaid internships, the declining number of professions that can support a middle class existence, the clustering of opportunity in a few high-cost urban areas to the detriment of the rest.

- All the new systemic and political sources of anxiety - climate change, destabilizing politics in North America and Europe, mass migration, ambiguous wars, extremism, etc.

- Increasing diagnosis of mental health issues and occasional pathologization of everyday troubles.

- Decreasing stigma of mental health issues resulting in more young people seeking help.

- Weakening of existing family structures and modes of monogamous relationships, along with the appearance of a multitude of new family and relationship structures.

- "Helicopter parenting".

- The decline of the "traditional job" and all the security that came with it.

- All the various information overloads, distractions, and paradoxes of choice that come with the internet.

I'm sure there are plenty of things that could be added to this list. But generally, I think we are exiting a period of relative postwar stability and returning to a more chaotic status quo. But now a majority of people of all socioeconomic brackets yearn for a middle-class existence, and without the support of old rigid-but-secure (for some) social structures. The millennials-and-forward generations are going to manifest the stress of all these things in many, frequently-unexpected ways. Pinning it all on "helicopter parenting," IMO, is cruel and facile.

EDIT: Formatting.

> The tightening economic climate and increasing difficulty of staying in the middle class... > But now a majority of people of all socioeconomic brackets yearn for a middle-class existence...

There is no middle class. This framing is itself toxic.

There are only people who have to work for a living (i.e. the working class), and people for whom paid labor is optional due to accumulated capital of various forms (for simplicity, let's call them the rich.)

Focusing on distinctions between substrata of the working class mainly benefits the rich.

Although it's certainly subjective, I don't think what we call the middle class is such a fine-grained entity, and I do think the distinction between "working class" and "middle class" is useful.

I would define "working class" as people who are resigned to whatever paid labor they can find on pain of hunger and homelessness. Anyone in this class wants to get out of it.

The middle class, on the other hand, expect to get to pick the labor they perform, and in return expect a comfortable and secure existence as well as a good amount of leisure time and luxury to be attainable through their labor. Many in the middle class hold no ambition to climb still further, but are desperate to not fall out of it.

The distinction is useful for shaping policy - we want to help as many people as possible into the middle class and out of the working class (as defined above), and then do everything possible to keep them there.

This is a great comment, and succinctly states a point I've been trying to make for a long time. You either have to work for a living or you don't.

The term "middle class" simply means you're N+M paychecks away from ruin rather than N paychecks away from ruin. When we say the middle class is disappearing, what we really mean is the percentage of working class people with a savings cushion is disappearing.

Economics isn't responsible for lack of resilience. There have been plenty of severe economic climates before, and we haven't seen the same issues from those. Having all your money go on shelter and food, and having to share housing... these things are not new. They're also seen all over the world right now. It's really not harsh economics - more likely it is the lack of resilience from things like helicopter parenting that makes life stressors like economics have more effect.

And even though there are problems like climate change, every generation has it's problems. Billy Joel got so sick of his generation being blamed for everything by the next generation, he wrote a song about it - way back in 1989! "We Didn't Start The Fire" is a song listing scandal afteer scandal, issue after issue, showing that this stuff has always been happening. Climate change wasn't the issue back in the 80s - instead it was things like Mutually Assured Destruction. There's always something. We need to stop making excuses like "it's current affairs issue X".

>There have been plenty of severe economic climates before, and we haven't seen the same issues from those.

And there was a lot more poverty then than we have now. There also wasn't the widespread expectation of having a "good life," and probably a much smaller pre-existing middle class all attempting to hang onto their position. Furthermore, the whole notion of "middle class" and all the expectations that come with it probably weren't as firmly rooted as they are now, so people just... expected less.

>Climate change wasn't the issue back in the 80s - instead it was things like Mutually Assured Destruction. There's always something. We need to stop making excuses like "it's current affairs issue X".

Just saying "there are bad things now and there were bad things then" does not mean that circumstances are always equally good or bad. The economic/social/political climate CAN be better or worse at different times. Life was certainly very hard for the generations living through the great depression or WW2, and the burdens those people carried should not be diminished by people living in more fortuitous times.

Universities love to complain about needing to react to what parents are saying, but this seems like something they bring on themselves. With such expensive tuition, a student's choice of college often cannot be made independently, and parents feel like they are buying their right to hassle higher educators. I would love to see a world where students truly decide on their own university and the ability for parents to affect the day-to-day of a university is drastically reduced. To me, this is the most interesting aspect of the push for free college.

I don't think it has as much to do with parents paying for college as it does the fact that it's an almost-requirement to have a parent paving the way for the vast majority of kids to make it into a Stanford. Normal human beings don't exhibit the level of dedication required, but parents know they can set their kids up for life if they remove a lot of the obstacles. It's not surprising to me that pattern doesn't stop.

This is the result of the society the US built.

To get a 'good' job, you need to have attended the 'right' school. To get 'good' investors as an entrepreneur, you need to know the 'right' people (which is also influenced strongly by where you went to school).

To get into the 'right' school, you need to optimize for that result. If you're working full-time and trying to pay your own way, good luck. Kids that have 'helicopter' parents who have the means to support them and encourage (or force) them are already a leg up on the poorer competition.

All of these factors of course just serve to entrench the upper classes, and reduce social mobility (which, while it exists, it's very difficult to move up). Poorer students have much less time and money to do the 'right' things, and while there are always outliers, they don't determine the direction of society.

We could always build a more egalitarian society (basic income, free health care and post-secondary education), but equality doesn't always appeal to our perception of 'fairness'. And the benefits of equality (a happier, less stressful society) aren't something that we can necessarily quantify, especially when it's 'our' taxes that pay for it.

Anyhow, my point is, this trend will continue, because it's nothing more than a reaction to institutions already in place.

I grew up in the kind of area that specializes in what this article is talking about. I had a lot of friends in high school who were forced into honors and AP classes by their parents. Who were forced to do anything and everything to set themselves up for college. Who would stay up til 1am on a Tuesday just to make sure they got all of their homework done and had studied properly. I can tell you that "helicopter" parenting has not ruined any children and it never will. What it's done is it's pushed children into schools where they don't belong. Meanwhile it's pushed a lot of smart kids out. What this dean has experienced isn't kids becoming less self-sufficient, but instead less self-sufficient kids getting into college because the kids who are pushed by their parents have a higher likelihood of getting in.

The term "helicopter parent" is more than a generation old. Here are some examples:

1994 - "Helicopter parents" make excuses for their children, rescue them from the consequences of putting off their chores, ... - https://books.google.com/books?id=kXkT2dXGjtYC&q=helicopter+...

1991 - "'Those helicopter parent of mine' ... Translation: a nosy grownup who is always hovering around" - https://books.google.com/books?id=AfQDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA6&dq=hel...

Ahh, the Wikipedia entry traces the metaphor to the late 1960s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent .

Of course the underlying concept is even older. The grousers of yore just used different phrases. Here are Google Book Search snippets predating 1970 for search "expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter": https://www.google.com/search?q=expect+everything+to+be+hand...

This includes from a 1960 PTA magazine:

> 'I've known a lot of kids who were treated like little heroes. Afterward, they expected everything to be handed them on a silver platter— and it wasn't. They couldn't adjust.' "Beyond any doubt, the boys in Williamsport last week were treated as ...

A Boys' Life article from July 1937 at https://books.google.com/books?id=agt7vyGWtXoC&pg=PA14&dq=ex...

> We want to teach them not just to sit back and expect things to be handed to them on a silver platter but with confidence, based on their training, to go out and get what they want. We need to stiffen a moral flabbiness that has been affecting our youth.

Life Magazine, March 29, 1949 at https://books.google.com/books?id=b00EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA6&dq=exp... :

> We have reared a bunch of weaklings in our young marrieds of today. Too much has been handed to them on a silver platter without their having had to work for it, and they lack the intestinal fortitude to meet life as a challenge.

It seems a bit rich for the Dean of an educational institution that demanded, during her tenure and after, the sort of qualifications and CVs that encourage this behaviour to protest it. If you don't want it around, stop providing the incentive for it.

Of course it's not quite so binary. The dean wants a strong applicant pool as well as to dissuade helicopter parenting. I don't believe it's a contradictory stance she's taking.

if "strong" applicant is defined by things that are not possible unless they have an helicopter parent it is fairly binary...

What teen would be able to have the breadth and variety of experiences that seem to be required nowadays to stand out in a university application unless they have a set of parents that make them possible?

A very small number of teens do, which is fine with them.

The Dean can of course want whatever she likes, without contradiction or with hardly matters since our wants are not rational. But the chance of getting it seems unlikely to lie with preaching to parents that they should let their children fail. Especially not in a nation with a very high culture of ambition where so many perceive failure as catastrophic.

If you are a gatekeeper to an area of high value, and if you set demanding test standards, then people are going to try to teach the tests. All the talking about good parenting in the world seems unlikely to change that.

In that position, one can either change the standard to support that which one desires, (Have a discussion that goes something like, “If we are interested in educating young men and women of resilience, how do we encourage and/or test for resilience?”) or one can complain. I've yet to seen any indication that complaining will improve matters in a situation where the majority of the incentive seems to lie on the side of those who act contrary to your desires.

As a parent of 3 boys, the biggest challenge today are personal electronics. Every parent I know has immense challenges setting guidelines on screen time. In this new tablet/smartphone era we are really in new and unfamiliar territory. Yes, we had our nintendos and our handhelds. Yes we had tv. No we didn't have networked devices in our pockets and incredibly addictive games like clash of clans, etc.

I don't know what it all means - I just know it's a big factor of discontent in most families I see.

Helicoptering of course has it's issues - but I think it's secondary to this new tidal wave of screen time.

"Lythcott-Haims said many parents ask how they can unilaterally deescalate in what feels like a college-admissions arms race. How can they relax about getting their child into Harvard if every other parent is going full speed ahead?"

Uh, I think there are other schools ... and by the way they all use the same textbooks. Maybe the problem is American credentialism?

Perhaps obviously I resonant with her message, not letting your kids stand on their own, gives them weak legs. But as a parent I am viscerally aware of how hard it is to watch your child make bad choices.

From the parents perspective looking backwards through time they "see" how something today will have huge repurcussions later. Nobody can stand by and watch their child turn down a dark alley filled with hazards.

So what to do? Find ways to teach your kids failure is the step toward success early in life. Let them work out things for themselves, talk with them about how they went about it. And most importantly start early. As kids get older their ability to completely screw up their life goes up exponentially.

I don't think anyone who is not a parent can internalize how hard it is to do.

Which is why it's important to build that trust with your kid early on. The longer parent wait with letting go of their fear of any harm to their kid the more damage they potentially inflict on them later on.

Just like in the entpreneurial world. Making mistakes when you are young is much safer than later on in life.

But yes as a parent I understand exactly what you are saying.

> From the parents perspective looking backwards through time they "see" how something today will have huge repurcussions later. Nobody can stand by and watch their child turn down a dark alley filled with hazards.

> As kids get older their ability to completely screw up their life goes up exponentially.

If one reconciles those two points one can see that a lot of what parents obsess about is without any real consequences. An example of utterly irrelevant worry is breaking an arm as a kid - it will hurt for a while, but you'll be fine. Nothing one can't recover from. As you note, it's important to let a kid fail and learn from that failure.

I know at least one recent graduate of Stanford University who is an exception to this generalization. He is a childhood friend of my oldest son's, and graduated with Stanford class of 2013. If the general observation at Stanford is that Stanford students are highly dependent on their parents and unable to take care of themselves (as it may be, for all I know), then all I can say is that Stanford has an unusual intake of admitted students. For information on "a generation of children," I'd ask college officials at community colleges and military officers who deal with new recruits, as well as big employers of first-time employees. (What employer employs a lot of first-time members of the labor force these days? McDonald's? Some other kind of employer?).

This article sparked a lot of discussion among my friends on Facebook, where I shared it after reading the article from the submission here. A friend there commented, "I am so tired of colleges and universities whining about the students they chose to admit. Maybe they need to take a look at their admissions policies." Yes, I think college admission officers, especially at the most selective colleges, have to grow up and take their own responsibility for the incentives that their admission requirements set up. I note as a teacher at a private school that students today can certainly have issues of overdependence on others as they face life challenges. That has probably existed in all previous generations of students. The way to change the incentives, of course, is for admission officers to figure out reliable signals of life independence as they decide whom to admit. Parents will get that message loud and clear if admission officers figure out the reliable signals. Meanwhile, it is always permitted for parents (although sometimes difficult for parents to achieve) to encourage young people to develop self-reliance and independence as they grow up. That is what I have attempted to do as I homeschooled my four children, two of whom are now quite self-reliant adults, and two of whom are now very responsible adolescents who are well regarded by other adults who know them.

Just went through the whole application & admissions process with my older daughter. It was horrible. It's a mess. It's sinister in the way it affected our family.

Pursuing a high school diploma should start with an exploration of:

- "What am I good at, really?"

- "What do I love, really?"

- "What matters to me, really?"

But what we saw all through high school was simply:

- "What can I do today that will improve my chances of getting into Harvard?"

Humans are prone to wanting the wrong things, and especially so when misperceptions lead us to believe they are the right things. I don't know how to ultimately fix the college-chasing-helicopter-parenting-test-prepping-personality-skewing of today's admissions process, but I've started by reinforcing to my younger daughter that what matters is her, not the the university she goes to.

I don't know if this is more about helicopter parenting, as some of the comments might suggest, but coddling kids, and keeping them away from anything which might make them feel bad, uncomfortable, etc. I feel like universities are removing discourse and uncomfortable topics to the detriment of students. College should not be daycare, where everything is padded, safe, and you're protected from anything which might make you uncomfortable. It should be the place where you face those uncomfortable topics, ideas, and people, so you can learn to deal with it in the real world...

While it is easy to mock helicopter parents, it also dawns on me that there are literally twice the number of kids today competing for the same placements first in school and then jobs as say 20 years ago.

I would like to see objective numbers. I know it feels good to think that individuals who make it into Ivy League because of helicopter parents are somehow undeserving or damaged or whatever.

But I am pretty sure that getting into an Ivy League leads to statistically better live time earnings and more career success (in part because of the connections.)

I would like to see some objective numbers rather than a story that resonates because it jives with how we want to feel about those with success.

I agreed with most of Dean Lythcott-Haims' ideas except the following one:

> perhaps top-tier schools could agree to limit the number of such schools that each student may apply to, she said.

This would put financial aid candidates at a disadvantage, limiting any given HS senior's ability to collect scholarship offers and use them as leverage in getting the best possible deal at the best school they get into.

I dunno. Whilst I don't endorse the idea of helicopter parenting I think it is hard to judge how it affects kids. Helicopter parenting could have been fatal for some one like Richard Branson. But most people are not Richard Branson. That kid who is going to be a middle manager will have a hard time competing with his fellow students when there is no parent helping him to the same extend as other parents do help their kids That is, s/he has to work harder as everyone else. Up to a degree that might be considered character building but at one point we might have syllabi that are involuntarily designed for students with helicopter parents so that grades are more normally distributed again. The student who is on his/her own will note make it.

My wife and I just had our first baby and were having a similar discussion, re letting our kid fail to learn to succeed and not being helicopters.

Historically speaking, most of the really successful people now aren't successful because they went to an Ivy League school (though maybe those connections help), they succeed because they TRY despite the chance of failure and learn from the failures (and smaller mistakes) to not repeat them.

So how many students get into Stanford with the attestation that their parent's didn't helicopter parent them? I challenge every student to put as their first sentence on their essays, "I am not the product of helicopter parenting." followed by a list of all their accomplishments, goals, and dreams and see if it gets them into $top_school.

The criteria for entering top universities causes this behavior, just do like [citation needed] proposed: set a public set of pass/fail requirements for admissions, then do a lottery from the candidate pool that passed the criteria.

I first heard complaints about 'helicopter parents' a full twenty years ago.

Parents doing their best to help their children, thinking if they didn't work so hard to help their children end up being criticized for being good parents. Got it.

In many cases failure to helicopter parent is a crime. If a minor under, say, 14 or 15 is caught without an adult their parents can be cited for neglect.

This ia a bit like making sure you don't get sick until your 20s and not letting your immune system develop robust responses to disease agents.

A self-correcting problem, since the next generation of kids will be left to fend for themselves by their helpless, helicoptered parents. :)

Yeah, there was a time when parents didn't even necessarily default to liking their children. Children were just additional labor for the family business, not the parent's hopes and dreams and failed aspirations and regrets walking around outside their body.

Or it will extend to the previous generation, like in this Portlandia skit: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BLW0MnqH0r8

please don't post these asinine articles here. there is not even an attempt to furnish data to back up any of its claims, including: (a) are parents today more involved in student's lives? where's the data besides anecdotal? (b) are children today less prepared for life? where's the data? and (c) are these causal?

> please don't post these asinine articles here

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So I fit right between Generation X and Y, depending on which timeframe reference used. I mention this as context because it feels as though I've had a first-hand view of public and private education trends. Also, a chance to see how the parents of friends and other students behaved.

Is there some logic and basis for this person's perspective? Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of anecdotes from her career - but I also categorize Stanford as an outlier of access. As in, to get in typically (but not always) entails much parental investment and, well, access to resources. Could a person who worked at a troubled youth center tell stories of a lack of parental involvement or outright neglect? Probably.

Both are significant issues regarding the health and future of society in the US: each group needs to find a place in the working world. If neither is prepared, then what will happen to the traditional relationship between employer and employee? Can new hires adapt, or will they commit career suicide?

To me, "helicopter parenting" is an indicator of the selfishness that pervades a select cohort of parents. Successful. Relatively affluent. A sense of entitlement that comes from not having to do without as a baseline, and furthermore, is used to being able to bend the will of those with less power. How did I come up with this perspective? I've worked for them.

This cohort is full of Senior Vice Presidents and Managing Directors. They work for "important companies" doing "important things" and therefore feel they are, well, quite important! Even when I was in charge of projects, their projects and in turn them, I was frequently rebuffed, ignored, or otherwise minimized by certain personalities. Those who had a different mentality? Gracious, collaborative, and, no lie, would sometimes send thank-you notes in gratitude. For many years, the self-centered outlook has been rewarded, and framing it as such in a child development process is consistent with the behavior noted in the article.

It's one thing to have high standards. It's another thing to be so afraid of failure or short-comings that the worry gets manifested in mental health issues. Looking good on paper is actually quite easy to do with the right means. Becoming a well-rounded individual with hobbies and stories of learning from life by working, getting perspective, and occasionally screwing up - hopefully not on the scale of jail - isn't easily quantified in a "how to raise a kid in the modern US" book...cough Tiger Mom cough...there's no manual except the one each family writes for themselves. That might sound wishy-washy, but it's a reasonable outlook when considering the haves, the have nots, and those who "overcome" their environment, whether over-interested or completely disinterested upbringings.

As someone who went to a top ranked school in Engineering , I have an interesting anecdote that reveals perhaps a disturbing trend my friends and I have noticed in these engineering schools as we talk to more and more peers about it, which I think is important because this issue impacts more areas than just how these kids do in college, it effects every area of their life.

Me and some of my other female Engineering friends, just got out of long term relationships with boys we went to college with in Engineering, and while anecdotally its a coincidence that in this case I'm speaking from the perspective of three females (because the genders could be reversed with potentially the same problems), after much discussion we've realized the biggest issue with our exes is that their mothers practically ran their lives, even at the age of ...25.

Two of us came from a poor background with uneducated parents, so getting into a good college was completely of my own motivation and that characteristic of mine continued to play out and earn myself a role of success in life, and hers as well. The other had a mother that came from a very poor background with uneducated parents but paid her way through college and become a high end Executive on Wallstreet, and pushed her daughter to have the same ambition she did.

All three of our ex boyfriends however came from multigenerational inherited affluent wealth with stories about their grandparents creating legacies at fancy boarding schools and their parents played a role in everything they did. While this did print them a resume to get into a good college (and they were also smart and did actually perform well in school but that's ALL they had to do, was show up to classes chosen for them and do well). Once they got there, academically they were unmotivated and did poorly in classes while playing video games. When they graduated all three of them had "no idea" what they wanted to do post college. They all got ok jobs making entry level salaries but have sat in those positions for going on 5 years, miserable.

Meanwhile the three of us females were, in college: doing graduate research, taking grad classes, working part time jobs and had both started, taught ourselves investing etc etc. and now going on 5 years post college we are all age 26: one is the director of Marketing for a top ranked Bank, One of the cofounder of a trending tech startup, and I work in Engineering for a nonprofit in energy resources setting precedents in the Supreme court and free market economics for challenging resource monopolies and making energy resources more competitive, and all have surpassed our ex boyfriends salaries years ago....

All three of us one night discovered that not only had we all done our boyfriends resumes in college and updated them since college, all three of them asked us to do it for them, because their parents were sick of doing them as they had created them for their college admissions as well. Hmm...interesting...

Our exes were sitting at home in dead end jobs they admittedly hated, but couldn't stop playing Halo to update their resume unless their mothers called them and told them to do so, or their dads offered to look around for an opening in their respective companies. It boggles our mind but more importantly..

this same lackadaisical "wait for somebody else to swoop in and solve this problem for me" attitude became a problem in our interpersonal relationships. All of them had a hard time expressing their emotions or even being in touch with them, or knowing what they wanted or even verbalizing their own perceptions of problems because all of those things? someone had been doing that for them their whole lives.

This left all of usfrustrated with emotionally disconnected exes sitting at home not even knowing how to work on their own problems, much less adequately address issues in a relationship that involves two independent humans. All three of them kept running back to their estate to take time "off" and pout whenever a problem occurred at work or personally and hide from their problems while their mothers doted on them.

It also caused us to decrease our sympathy for them over time because they had everything handed to them yet still had excuses about why they hated their jobs and life so much. But we came from a world where excuses were not a luxury we had if we wanted not even a successful life but an even slightly comfortable one.

Meanwhile, we are traveling the world, doing well in our careers and also trying to figure out how to verbalize their perspective and then ask them if what we said was what they were feeling. Like, we had to present multiple choice options for them because they had no voice of their own.

Needless to say, these relationships did not work out. Everyone has issues and we were willing to admit to our own and take constructive feedback, but there was no constructive feedback, because they had never had to do that in their lives.

The most heartbreaking part was, in their careers and in their personal lives, they wanted a good career and they didn't want us to leave them, but they had burned their bridges and were left clueless on how to go about to their next phase of life. It was sad but we did not have time to raise children as 25 yr old females busting our tails in the tech environment. There's a reason we don't have kids right now, because we don't have time.

We each loved them dearly but we needed emotional equality and people who supported our ambitions and also had their own.

I'm not sure if these issues were also paired to be more likely outcomes with their personality types, or what the true root cause is, as I'm an Engineer, not a psychologist, but being able to talk to someone else going through the same thing, we saw some eerily similiar trends, and it always related back to their parents effectively babying them in areas of their life, that were embarassing from the perspective of highly independent and motivated people we had to be to effectively reach the same socioeconomic status they were born into.

Moral of the story: While having an Engineer Degree is important for Engineering (but not so much coding if at all)

the MORE important factors in success are 1. Knowing what you want and going after it

2. Being self motivated

3. Being able to clearly communicate your position whether its emotions, needs, or negociating a raise or why you feel you are up for the challenge of a new job position, etc

4. independent ability to not only a. identify b. define, but c. solve problems on your own

Sorry helicoptor parents but your missing the point. As someone else said earlier (whom I completely disagree with) he said "helicoptor parenting is working, get them into stanford and then they have the rest of their lives to fail"

woops, college is not the ends to a means, its a means to an end and if the means is handed to them, then they will not be able to fish in the real world by themselves. Teach them how to fish.

Classic PR.

PR for what/who?

"Lythcott-Haims argues in her book “How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.”"

Here are some similar articles in suitably similar publications:

http://time.com/3910020/the-over-parenting-trap-how-to-avoid...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-lythcotthaims/helicopter...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/books/review/how-to-raise-...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-how-to...

It reads like PR, focusing on one author and their opinion (expressed in a recently released book) rather than a spectrum of writers / researchers. This is unfortunate given the historical references to 'helicopter parenting' and other writing that has covered the issue.

I'm not saying it wasn't an informative and interesting read, on the contrary, it was. I was merely pointing out the PR nature of the article.

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