How Schools Are Handling an 'Overparenting' Crisis | Hacker News Reader

How Schools Are Handling an 'Overparenting' Crisis

npr.org

77 pointstokenadult85 comments

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.

>This could've been an article about parental involvement in academics and the impact it has on fairness and meritocracy and social mobility.

There are parents at all social levels who are very involved in their children's academics and view the school system as only one component of their children's academic achievement (and as a consequence their chances at succeeding professionally).

There are other parents who see the school system as _the_ only tool and the only institution with the responsibility to educate their children --that is a great mistake and to the detriment of their children. I've seem this parental attitude in both poor parents and middle class parents.

I've been places where every extra penny earned by a parent go to their children --they forgo any non essentials in their lives in order that their children have a better chance. They more or less see the escape from poverty as a multi-generational effort and are willing to put their part in wholeheartedly. In exchange, the parents have expectations from their children as the parents enter old age.

So, academic achievement can be reached even for the poor kids, so long as their society and the individuals accept other means of achieving this end.

It happens with some immigrant groups within the US as well, so it's not unheard of in the US. And it's not only the economically privileged who can achieve academically.

Well, good to hear that it's possible for two generations to destroy any chance at enjoying their lives they may ever have had to pursue money above all else. We'd better encourage more of that /s.

If you'd ever tasted poverty, you might think better about the pursuit of money.

Isn't Eli saying that it's unfortunate that parents have to make such a huge sacrifice just to dig their descendants out of what they're experiencing?

Yes.

I think it shows some societies and people are willing to take the long view. It's better than just hoping something good will happen. Or that a government in shining armor will come to the rescue. They understand that some sacrifice of more or less status symbols, do provide a vehicle to success for their offspring.

In addition, to many of them, joy comes in the form of seeing their offspring do better than themselves. So, to them sacrifice does not equate to not enjoying their lives. Their state of mind is different.

The flip side is that the fate of my kids future and my family's future can be thrown off track by random shit that happens in school.

When the world was normal, this stuff didn't happen. But it isn't anymore. Your goofy startup building Über for lawnmowers will only hire candidates who signal "A player, 10x rockstar". So what do you expect people to do?

"the fate of my kids future and my family's future can be thrown off track by random shit"

That's life.

Exactly. Don't expect folks to sit idly by and let life happen.

If their behavior seems bizarre, perhaps addressing the root cause would help?

Parental involvement, time or money? Well, the money can go to a mortgage on a house in a good school district or to private schools. In what observations I was able to make over the years as parent of any only child in private schools, there just wasn't that much of the helicopter parent thing. I don't think, once the kids were past the age of elementary school projects like "build an Indian village" or "science projects", there was even that much direct involvement in the work. (I can say that apart from a bit of harassment with language drills in 7th and 8th grades, I had no involvement in the work in middle and high school.)

There is the effect on children of growing up in a household where there are books around, where the effects of education show in the topics and manner of discussions at the dinner table. That I don't think you can get away from. It existed a hundred years ago, and will continue to.

The percentage of people who actually value fairness / meritocracy / social mobility over the personal outcomes of their own children is probably in the low single digits.

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.

This makes intuitive sense to me but doesn't match up with what I've seen anecdotally. I lived in some very wealthy suburbs of NYC, and nearly every family was a two-earner family. My wife and I also homeschool, and have met a bunch of other homeschoolers both in CT and now in CO. By your logic, you'd expect the primary earners in the homeschooling families to earn more than in the average family, but in my experience the reverse is true.

You're right that there's a level of income at which one parent staying home is just not a plausible choice. But it's a lot lower than I'd expected -- I've met some homeschooling families that are doing extremely well by their children at a substantially lower income level than I'd thought feasible. I think the issue here in most cases is less a problem of economics than of cultural values. (Before anyone reads anything pernicious into that, all I mean is that I think American culture overvalues possessions and professional accomplishments and undervalues family in specific and relationships in general.)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/02/06/mint_estimat...

Lol Slate, and the post's sources for their numbers is this http://blog.mint.com/consumer-iq/how-much-is-a-homemaker-wor... 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/ for a budge management application 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...

Most of the parents I knew at my son's (private, not inexpensive) schools had two parents working. It was sometimes the case that one worked less (as a substitute teacher part time, maybe). But the one-earner families tended to be outliers.

Yep its funny that all the folks who wax eloquent on social media about societal inequality balk at the idea of sending their kids to schools where they might have to mingle with kids from less fortunate upbringing.

This disgusting hypocrisy is not only normalized but is actually encouraged.

Want to end inequality? Go live in a non segregated communities, support/start/educate local businesses. Stop sending your kids to segregated schools. And for god's sake shut the fuck up on twitter.

There's absolutely nothing hypocritical about being concerned with inequality on one hand, and refusing to throw your children to the wolves on the other.

I'm very much disgusted by the difference in opportunity a poor kid has in a bad neighborhood versus a rich kid who get's sent to the best private schools. Education should NOT depend on one's socioeconomic status. But I don't insist that the parent with means should sacrifice their children to shitty schools to somehow "make up for it".

For some reason that totally escapes me, many people in America are opposed to voucher programs and other ways for concerned and involved parents to send their children to any school other than the shitty designated public school. If you live in a certain geographic area, you're doomed to whatever school has claimed it. I just don't get it.

At the end of the day, I will do whatever I can for my children, even if it doesn't fit with some social justice framework.

As the original article says the difference is not in the opportunity. Successful parents impart a culture of success in their kids. Culture is not something separate from us, it is us, it is our actions/decisions that we take every minute of our life. No amount of govt funding can make up for "culture of success" that a rich/middle class kid experiences.

Throwing money at the problem is never the right solution in situations like these.

What do you even mean? A personalized so-called "culture of success" cannot be substituted for by factors such as better teachers, more advanced classes, a higher proportion of peers with the same culture and the resulting increased social value placed on academic success, material resources, etc., but that doesn't mean they don't matter. Ideally you want both.

> might have to mingle with kids from less fortunate upbringing

considering how much damage this has done to my own vision, focus, and inspiration; I don't have the slightest bit of problem with this. I'm well out of university btw, and still learning how to protect myself from it.

can you expand a bit on the damage you've felt?

I can't speak for the parent commenter, but from what I've seen some communities and social groups are like a bunch of crabs in a bucket -- if one tries to climb out, the others pull it back down. Anyone who is smarter, more ambitious, or more dedicated than these groups will be ostracized and ridiculed until they conform or drop out. The vicious, vile harassment of which some people are capable is disgusting.

Anyone who begrudges a parent who wants to live in a good community has never felt the brunt of living in a bad one.

prejudice like this is, I feel, a little easier to filter, because it's so obvious and in your face. Much more dangerous is the subtle, nonchalant shrug of the shoulders at the suffering of other members of humanity; the faces with muscles evading the responsibility of a shape; the halfhearted passion that exposes you to a toxic awareness of the pointlessness of their own life-- where only a bit of interest remains, shrouded behind friendliness, in smoothing over yours.

the more of them I meet, the more I understand why my mother made the sacrifices she made to put me in a good environment, push me into a good college, etc. I owe her so much.

Which specific "communities and social groups" are you referring to?

11th grade welding class in a mixed rural/suburban area, as an example. Too specific?

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.

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.

"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?

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

I don't doubt those factors are intertwined, but I think it's a disservice to the human conscience to declare it unfixable except by somehow overloading our attention. Actually the answer is remarkably simple though obviously not easy: Stop pinning your self-actualization on your kids and recognize your role to help them discover their own personhood. There's only a short window where you know better than them anyway, so focus on preparing them to make their own decisions.

So I'm not discounting that that's healthier from a personal perspective, but I doubt it's a realistic change across a population.

I guess I'm mainly trying to say, I don't think this overparenting trend is society collectively going insane, it's a natural consequence of a different change, that of family size. So I suspect if you took a bunch of parents from 1900 and dropped them in 2015 with smaller families, you'd get roughly the same outcome.

The average parents in 1900 spent most of their time on manual labor, if I had to guess I'd say that had a larger impact on obsessing over their children than the number.

...because if there's one factor that correlates positively with national economic strength, it's population growth. /s

Um... population growth is very strongly positively correlated with GDP growth. It's well acknowledged that Japan and Europe's economic problems are mainly driven by aging and shrinking populations.

But I also don't see how this relates to my point. I'm not making judgements, I'm hypothesizing about the reason for a trend.

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.

I think that the schools where kids show up without lunches and the schools where parents are doing their children's homework are very different places. The article even concedes that the issues that the authors are trying to fight against are very much "first world problems" at the end of the day.

I think that the schools where kids show up without lunches and the schools where parents are doing their children's homework are very different places.

Maybe that holds in segregated urban areas, but the vast majority of the country is not near a city. Certainly my small-town high school had both of those groups, because when there's only one high school around, that's unsurprisingly where everyone goes.

I think the majority of the population (of the US) lives in urban areas.

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...

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.

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.

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.

Where does that peanut allergy thing come from suddenly? When I was a kid no one had any allergies and now every other kid seems to due from a peanut.

It is caused by American parents not feeding their babies peanut butter like other cultures do.

Isn't the US basically the only country where peanut butter is even a thing? There are some others but not many. Mainly English and Dutch speaking countries, Indonesia and the Philippines.

To be fair, the people making those decisions are (probably) parents themselves and those policies exist to protect the school or appease parents (or just make them feel superior, but that's a bit cynical).

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.

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

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.

Yeah, that doesn't sound good!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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 !

My wife is Chinese and her family is still of the mindset that right-handedness is correct. I had to come down kind of hard for a while on attempts to "correct" our daughter into writing with her right hand. I think they're over it, but it's definitely the sort of attitude that still exists among some.

It was in an english school in dubai.

It was seen as not similar to other kids, since everyone else I knew were right-handed. I am not sure what the reasoning was to them - I never asked my parents about it anyway -

Isn't this an Islamic prohibition of sorts? In Islam, the right hand is used to do clean things, the left the impure. You eat with your right hand and perform toilet actions with your left. Could be wrong, but that's my recollection.

I have a relative who went through the same thing in Kansas in the late 60s... But 15 years ago? Yeah that's nuts.

> 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.

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?

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.

The law varies by state. Here in Maryland, it is illegal to leave a child younger than 8 alone, and their supervisor must be at least 13.

Most states don't have a law that specifies an age, but there is an organization lobbying for 12.

[edit]

To clarify, all states have vaguely worded laws against leaving young children unsupervised, but most do not list a specific age.

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.

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.

More standardized testing will mean more parents pushing their kids into test prep.

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.)

>>> "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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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