
How Schools Are Handling an 'Overparenting' Crisis - tokenadult
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/08/28/434350484/how-schools-are-handling-an-overparenting-crisis/#HNresubmit
======
chjohasbrouck
There are always outliers, but I believe that in America today, academic
achievement is almost entirely determined by parental involvement (whether
it's time or money).

> How do you respond to the criticism that the problems you're describing
> affect only privileged kids?

I was really disappointed by this question and the answers the authors gave.

Firstly because, this kind of parenting actually does have a large impact on
underprivileged kids. It's the reason their failure is virtually guaranteed
relative to the privileged kids. The underprivileged kid is one student,
competing against the privileged kid, who is essentially a multi-person team
of cheaters with a bankroll.

Secondly because, the answers the authors gave to the question pretty clearly
demonstrate that they're only thinking of this subject from their perspective.
And it sounds like their perspective is that of the parents to the privileged
kids.

This could've been an article about parental involvement in academics and the
impact it has on fairness and meritocracy and social mobility. Instead it's
some rich ladies talking about how their kids would've been even more
privileged if they did a little less of their homework for them.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Income inequality->Two earner family->less parental involvement->vicious cycle

While that is a _gross_ oversimplification, it would do wonders to increase
the quality of life for families who elect to have one earner only, with the
other (gender regardless) providing more time and resources towards child
development.

~~~
dogma1138
Hmm most middle class and higher families in the states are two earners
families with the lower middle class and downwards having one or both parents
unemployed or intermediately employed.

The days of the American nuclear family with the dad having a career and the
mom becoming a world class housewife are pretty much over.

And considering that low income / low skill jobs are more available to men and
that low income jobs will not be able to fund childcare that pushes lower
class families to become single earner families even more.

~~~
plonh
When you consider that a full time homemaker does about $60k/yr worth of work
during the weekdays , a single income household with a honemaker doesn't look
so bad compared to a meduam dual income household.

~~~
dogma1138
Where was that number pulled off? That's 10K over the median household income
in the US. Any how I wasn't saying that having a homemaker ins't economically
sound under certain economic conditions i was saying that it's less common in
middle class and higher families than in lower class families. When both
parents are educated and have a career they don't want to give that up, when
both of them make enough to allow them selves to continue to work especially
after thee infancy period they are more likely to do so. Upper classes also
have higher chances of having grandparents who've retired earlier and are also
actually being able to live on their retirement and are able to help with
childcare. They are also more likely to work in companies that provide
childcare assistance or services to their employees.

Combine all those factors and many more and you get to a point where income
inequality actually forces people to become stay at home mom/dad's while the
more financially stable classes can afford to continue with their careers.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Where was that number pulled off?

It's closer to $96-100K/year actually. In a lot of cases, its economically
rational for one spouse to stay home and take care of the house when that much
value is provided versus a traditional job.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/blogs/on-
parenting/post/a-h...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/blogs/on-
parenting/post/a-homemakers-real-salary/2012/02/01/gIQAh7czhQ_blog.html)

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/02/06/mint_estimat...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/02/06/mint_estimate_of_how_much_stay_at_home_moms_and_homemakers_should_earn_in_salary_.html)

~~~
dogma1138
Lol Slate, and the post's sources for their numbers is this
[http://blog.mint.com/consumer-iq/how-much-is-a-homemaker-
wor...](http://blog.mint.com/consumer-iq/how-much-is-a-homemaker-
worth-012012/) which i really don't know how to react to this the onion has
better sources...

If a stay at home mom is worth 100k then a full time housekeeper/nanny should
earn 100k? The highest figures I've seen in NYC with an educated
nanny/housekeepr/superperson (nursing, child development really wierd stuff)
is on average 700 a week for a 10.5 hours work day and that's in very very
upscale areas while usually taking care of 2-3 children. So yeah they'll be
earning about 50K a year while taking care of the 1% of the 1%, while in
Austin or Chicago for example that figures drops to 23-24000 for the same
service.

Sorry but a click bait blog [http://blog.mint.com/](http://blog.mint.com/) for
a budge management application [https://www.mint.com/](https://www.mint.com/)
isn't really a reliable source in my books, if those numbers were even close
to being a reality on average or under any case you would see pretty much
every other family in the states where the dad is a stay at home dad and the
mom goes to become a super(rich)nany or vise versa...

------
bpodgursky
I suspect a lot of this is an unavoidable consequence of shifting from 3-5 kid
families to 1-2. When you have 4 kids,

(1) you don't have enough time to helicopter all of them, some will just have
to deal with their own problems

(2) having one disappointing kid isn't the end of the world. you have others
to shift your expectations and hopes onto

But if you only have one or two kids... you simply can't afford any failures.
If your one kid fails, you're a failure of a parent. So you spend as much time
and (maybe misguided, maybe not) energy on them. I think this is a natural
response, which makes me think it's pretty un-fixable unless family sizes
increase.

~~~
bennesvig
Part of it is also things getting so good in the world (most people in America
don't have to worry about shelter or food) that people start to invent
problems or find challenges to solve.

~~~
nostrebored
"Invent problems" seems to be a strange way to word things. It seems to me
that with some basic necessities taken care of we have other problems to
address?

~~~
plonh
But most people don't address those other real problems. They just fight
negative sum game for social status.

------
ams6110
Schools have created this problem by meddling in the parenting process for the
last few decades. Calling the police if the kid walks home by himself. Calling
social services if they come to school without lunch. Involving juvenile
justice authorities if two kids settle an argument with a bit of fighting.

Now after they have parents thinking that one false move and their kids will
be placed in foster care, they complain about overparenting.

~~~
pki
My friend's high school does not permit lunches from home; they require
religious or medical permission that they must have a specific diet, and have
to be eaten in a separate room, and lunches are checked to ensure no
peanuts/etc.

~~~
jbigelow76
I guess I've finally become a hopeless cynic, my first reaction to that
statement was that somebody in the school administration and somebody in the
company supplying the food to the district probably have a tidy little
financial arrangement propped up by the peanut allergy boogeyman.

~~~
developer1
Count me in. Someone is making money, whether it's a an external contract or
just the school itself. For Christ's sake, parent said _high school_. What
high school student can't handle their own peanut allergy? Oh my, what if 16
year old Timmy trades his turkey sandwich for a peanut butter and jelly? Won't
someone think of the teenaged children! I can't believe a high school gets
away with that shakedown, you'd think that would be illegal.

------
oalders
I taught at a private high school for one year. One of my students plagiarized
a huge chunk of an essay. When I talked to my supervisor about it he said to
punish her by giving her a "B". I eventually took it higher up and had it
dealt with. However, our end of term reports were all proofed by other
faculty. When I mentioned the plagiarism on an end of term report another
teach redacted the word "plagiarism" and replaced it with "the unfortunate
incident".

On another occasion I had a student who was performing badly. Her mother
called me at school and said I should have a talk with her daughter and "say
something nice to her".

Basically, I've seen the coddling on both ends, both from the parents and from
the institution. My best guess is that the institution (in this case funded by
the parents) is responding to some pressure by the parents but also keeps in
mind that current parents are future donors and you don't want to damage that
cash pipeline if at all possible.

~~~
prawn
Did the mother mean you should say something encouraging rather than belittle
the student? If so, that doesn't seem unreasonable.

~~~
oalders
No, I was never going to belittle the student. It was more along the lines of
"Don't deal with the actual problem. Just encourage her -- that's all she
needs." Essentially the student needed a cheering squad rather than honest
feedback. In that environment the teachers have to tiptoe around both the
students and the parents.

~~~
prawn
Yeah, that doesn't sound good!

------
dusing
My aunt has been an Elementry school principle for a long time. She says it
used to be lots of helicopter parents, but now it's "snow plow parents". They
try to prevent anything troublesome from reaching their children.

I have 4 kids, I let them make mistakes and am pretty hands off on the day-to-
day. I can hardly get along with the parents I meet at school. They have no
lives outside of their children and hover 24/7, and their kids behave poorly
for it.

~~~
cesarbs
Yeah, I'm the same and my wife and I feel really awkward compared to most
parents we see at our child's elementary school. We really push for her to be
independent and be responsible for her own stuff (with a lot of success),
while her classmates' parents are all around their kids all the time.

------
roymurdock
_Schools and parents need to stop blaming each other, and work together to
show children that we value learning._

Yeah, good luck with that. Private institutions, especially colleges and
universities, are exactly where they want to be right now. Parents have an
extremely inelastic demand for sending their children to good private schools
because signaling is so important in this terrible job market - this allows
universities to raise tuition with impunity. Combine this with an ever-
increasing pool of candidates for roughly the same number of spots at ivy-
leagues and other comparable institutions, and colleges are set to make a
killing on tuition.

Why would private schools have any incentive to change a system that benefits
them to such a degree?

~~~
Yomammas_Lemma
Honestly, I think one of the major problems with elite undergraduate
institutions is they're inherently elitist. Of course they're going to
reinforce the socioeconomic status-quo, those are the people whose parents can
invest the most into them.

~~~
plonh
You can fight this by ignoring fancy pedigrees and social signaling when you
interview job candidates.

------
sageikosa
So glad I teach in a martial arts school. You got hit? that happens... keep
your hands up next time like I told you...

~~~
throwaway54984
Neah. Next time hit him first so hard that his mother cries, not yours.

------
1971genocide
It must be really stressful being a kid these days :(

Now that I look back - the way we treat kids is just plain awful.

When I was a kid I used to write using my left hand and my teacher and parents
used to scold me to try and change my habit.

It used to be really stressful and everything they tried did not work, 15
years later and I still write with my left hand and am not a terrorist so it
seemed all that work, stress was a huge waste of resources. But more
importantly my time and I am not sure what damage that stress must have caused
my mental health.

Parents are also under enormous pressure and due to college debt need to save
a lot of money and literally cash out a huge amount of their life-time wealth
for the services of their kid's education.

By current projections in 2030 the average tuition is going to be 100,000
dollar per year for a private college. That is terrible news for kids and
parents both.

~~~
jonahx
where did you grew up that there was superstition against left-handedness?
that sounds like something from a century ago, not 15 years (in the US,
anyway).

~~~
inanutshellus
I suspect you're simply right handed or were lucky enough to be in some kind
of safe environment for lefties. For me, a left-hander, while there was no
superstitious negativity, there were dozens of harsh, practical negative
interactions.

One of my first memories of school was being sat at a round table. Every time
I'd try to color, cut, paste, whatever, I'd bump elbows with the kid next to
me. He'd get mad. I got in trouble. So I started sitting on the floor and
doing my work on the chair. So I got in trouble. I'd smear everything I wrote,
mangle my fingers in those fricking scissors, and learning that "Sinister"
literally means "left-handed" was really grand.

I despise being left-handed.

~~~
1971genocide
Hopefully not anymore.

The uniqueness of my left-handedness turns out to be great as an adult as its
something sometimes people use as a conversation starter.

The other advantage of left-handness is that I learnt that people who were
left-handness had a a more active right brain, which means I am extra creative
!

------
11thEarlOfMar
> If the kids subjected to this type of parenting weren't suffering greater
> rates of anxiety and depression than the general population, then maybe we
> could wave this off as not-a-real problem. But they are suffering;

I can attest that this is true. It's a cult of false consequences that scares
the hell out of high-school students, particularly among the affluent: "Of
course we want our kids to do better than we did." How many generations of
over-achievers can actually accomplish that? These parents are wanting the
wrong things for their kids.

------
ciupicri
Speaking of overparenting, is it true that the US law mandates adult
supervision for children under the age of ~12 and that's why babysitters are
needed all the time?

~~~
dboreham
I live in the US and have two middle school aged kids. I don't actually know
the legal age when children can be left "home alone" so I looked it up. It
turns out there is no law and social services advice is to "consider your
child's maturity" etc. A quick flip through the web page for free range kids
seems to indicate that most US states have no firm age. Therefore it looks
like it is not true as stated.

fwiw around here (small-town western US) you see kids as young as 4-5 making
their own way to/from school -- either walking or biking, without adults, and
the typical parent will leave their kids home alone when they're 10-12,
depending on the kid and other factors.

------
sandworm101
if kids are to accept failure then they must be given room to fail. Your
average highschool student wanting to go to a good university cannot accept
any failure. Bomb a single test and your math grade will slip from the 98%
that assures acceptance and the 95% that doesn't. The grade inflation needs to
stop.

My unpopular answer: more standardized testing. Don't grade homework. Don't
grade the science projects. Grade only those things done by the student alone
in an exam room. I know that doesn't remove all parental influence, but at
least then the parents aren't the ones holding pen to the paper.

~~~
sandworm101
Oops. I used bomb as a verb. Please mr NSA man open a dictionary before
listing me. I've got to cross a couple boarders next week.

------
Animats
Pressure on kids in the 1% is high. Palo Alto now has paid anti-suicide guards
on duty at all three railroad crossings near high schools. (This is addition
to fences and crossing gates.)

------
1971genocide
>>> "Schools and parents need to stop blaming each other, and work together to
show children that we value learning. We can talk about the importance of
education all we want, but our kids are too smart to fall for that hypocrisy.
As long as we continue to worship grades over learning, scores over
intellectual bravery and testable facts over the application of knowledge,
kids will never believe us when we tell them that learning is valuable in and
of itself."

And whose fault is that ?

Maybe the fact that there are too few jobs.

Maybe the fact that wealth inequality is so skewed that only a handful of
people are generating all the demand in the labor market.

When I survey the state of science in 2015 - there is literally no shortage of
avenues to explore. If the demand side of the free market worked well, then
their would by now be a pill to cure cancer and would only cost 1 dollar.

That is so much innovation locked up in the minds of kids born today. But we
spent more and more time teaching them more and more useless stuff since the
job market is unable to generate enough demand pushing people to have better
CVs, etc.

A high school kid today can start innovating and doing all sorts of cool
things for very little capital. There is not even much need for schooling.
Most of the greatest minds of the past did not even have a formal education -
what they did have was a lot of free time.

Boredom and Laziness is the source of human ingenuity, not mindless exercises
with no real purpose.

~~~
branchless
Well said. I think school kind of crushes innovation in many ways. It equips
us to know but not so much how to think. I also agree there are a lot of
pointless jobs that should not exist. If we got land prices down only one
parent would have to work and the other would be free to help the kids and to
shape their thinking.

One of the (Monty) Pythons cited "time, time and more time" as a necessary
precursor for creativity.

What a mess western economies are in, as we bow down before the banks.

------
imakesnowflakes
Wait, this is new?

This has been a problem for the past 2 or 3 decades. When people stopped
having 4+ kids. It is worse when the kid is the only one.

But I think we are past that. New generations of parents, because they were
subjected to this kind of over parenting (I wouldn't agree with the term
though), they are aware of the issue and seem to handle parenting much better.

------
bachmeier
Universities are largely to blame for this. Having a 3.8 GPA versus a 3.9 can
dramatically reduce your chances of getting into a top university. Being in
the top 12% of your graduating class versus the top 8% can hurt your chances
of getting in. It's stupid, because these are statistically meaningless
differences, yet it matters. In an environment like that, it's rational for
parents to get involved.

~~~
aidenn0
Highschool GPA is still the single best predictor colleges have for College
GPA though. They have to draw a line somewhere, and it's nearly tautological
that those just above the line have no statistically significant difference
from those just below.

~~~
threatofrain
This isn't central to your argument, but I wanted to make a side point that
SAT II is more predictive of college GPA than your high school GPA, which is
kind of sad, because the SAT's are a flash in time compared to 4 years. If
someone who has never met a child, who devises a test from afar, can better
predict that child's future college grades than 4 years of intimate
proximity...

~~~
aidenn0
To me, it is surprising that the GPA is as predictive as it is, considering
there was no national standard for how to grade things, nor what the
curriculum should be.

