Helicopter parents

My day job is in marketing and PR for higher ed. Not only does my team try to reach prospective and current students, we also spend a lot of our time communicating with parents. Parents of college students are often an interesting breed. I hear horror stories from my colleagues who tell me of parents calling professors to argue about grades, parents demanding medical information about their (adult) children from our health center, and parents insisting on joining their students on their first post-college job interviews.

While I certainly hope that I won’t get to be that bad, I sometimes have to put myself in check as I quiz Boo and her teachers about her progress and interests. Where does the line fall between being engaged and concerned and becoming an obsessive-compulsive nut job who’s only purpose in life is bubble wrap her children from the perils of this world and to manage them into a lifestyle that I idealize?

Here’s some interesting video for your local helicopter parent support group.