Illustration by Aleutie at Dreamstime

August 26, 2024

Today is the first day for my daughter Lucy, who is a high school senior at a local High School, to attend a college course at BGSU in person for the first time. She has already taken several classes at BGSU as part of the State of Ohio’s College Credit Plus (CCP) program, but all of them were online.

Last night I was unable to fall asleep. Before going to bed, I checked her schedule and realized that her classroom this morning would be in Building C, rather than Building L that she was familiar with. Building C is in the middle of campus, and it is not easy to locate.

Normally I would have suggested her to go find the building and the classroom in advance, at least a day before, as I would do every semester for my classrooms to teach. Yesterday I totally forgot to suggest her to drive to the university and find her classroom, in part because I thought her class would in in Life Science Building that she’d been going almost every day as a lab assistant for more than a year, and in part because I was focusing on editing a manuscript that my co-author had sent to me.

In bed, my mind chased thinking about several scenarios when we could go check her classroom before her class would start at 10:30 am tomorrow. Her morning schedule was packed: She would get up at 5 am, leave home at 5:30 am for the ice rink in another city that is 35 minutes away by driving highways for her skating lesson, and drive back to Bowling Green (35 minutes) to attend her class at High School before driving to BGSU to attend her microbiology class at 10:30 am. Might we be able to go in between her skating lesson and her High School class? Would it be better if I met with her at a parking lot on campus when she arrived BGSU for her class around 10:00 am?

This morning, I asked her whether she would like to go check the classroom with me after her skating lesson or when she arrives at BGSU before her class. She simply said “No”; she had checked (on the map, I think) where the building was located and that she would be all right finding the classroom.   

As a professor, I would be stunned by parents of my students who would call the office asking about their children’s classroom locations, or complaining how the campus map was hard to navigate for their children to find their classrooms. (It happens sometimes.) As a mother, I can completely relate to their actions.  

Clinicians and social critics call these mothers “helicopter parents”, who hover around their teens and young adults, trying to monitor and protect their children from making mistakes or getting into trouble. They say that these overly involved, protective parents are hurting their young adults, not letting them think and act for themselves, and maybe making them anxious. There are many books on this topic like Julie Lythcott-Haims’ How to Raise an Adult (2015).

For young children, however, experts, starting with Benjamin Spock and Berry Brazelton, have long emphasized that parents must act proactively for their children, realizing their unique talents, orchestrating their activities to cultivate their talents. How their children will turn out is, ultimately, their responsibility. Sociologist Sharon Hays called it “intensive parenting” in her book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1996).

Highly educated, middle-class mothers take this message seriously. Raising children has become a long-term project for mothers, especially highly educated ones, that involves careful planning and executions, which include researching, coaching, and investing money and time, all require resources.

As the transition to adulthood has stretched way into their 20s, high school seniors and college freshmen seem to continue to need some parental guidance. In her book, Parenting to a Degree (2016), Laura Hamilton concludes that it is inevitable that involved parents do help their children successfully navigate 4-year-university experiences with their knowledge and financial resources, although how they do so matter. Jess Hardie’s research, Best Laid Plans (2022), shows that young adults from families where parents have college degrees and professional occupations are more likely to be able to navigate the higher education landscape and launch a well-paying job as planned in part because they can rely on their parents as safety nets when things went wrong and needed some support.

The transition out of proactive, involved parenting is a process, too.

When I drove to campus at 8:30 am and saw 90% of the parking lot already filled, I worried that it would take longer than usual for Lucy to a parking space around 10 am. I asked myself: Should I text her? I thought a few moments and told myself, no; she should be okay. (And she was.)