You know how you wake up in the middle of the night, and you're struck by a thought that's so completely random but insightful that you vow to remember it no matter what? And (having no pencil nearby) you repeat it over and over in your mind, in the night, in the dark, like a mantra, until you fall back to sleep, only to wake up and wonder, "What the hell was I supposed to remember again?"
Well, today I remembered. And here's the revelation I struck upon:
Helicopter moms remind me of stage moms. A lot. And I don't like them.
For a long while now, I've been uneasy about this whole "helicopter parent" paradigm. HPs (for short) tend to hover over their kids in a protective way, much like a hen to her chick. Gotta protect the brood from the wild world. After all, there are a lot of foxes and stoats and hawks out there. Fair enough; I get that. Things aren't as simple as they were when my mom said "GO PLAY OUTSIDE" 35 years ago. And we did. All day. She hadn't a clue where we were. We always made it home in one piece. No problems.
But there's this vicious, twisted side of the HP that I see more and more these days, and increasingly in my role mentoring young women from their teens into adulthood.
To wit, I often get the sense that HPs are actually primping and preening their daughters or kids like stars - like they are deserving of star treatment and must be protected from the harsh realities of the world. Or from any realities (such as expectations or accountability) that I might try to instill in their kids, in my role. AND THAT BOTHERS ME, I cannot state how much.
SMs (i.e. stage moms) have this inflated extra-ego laminating their kids. Since I've had this thought last night, in the dark, repeated like a mantra, I can't stop thinking of the parallels.
Does anyone else see them? Does anyone else see a difference, as I do, between being a caring, cautious parent and one who's gone overboard, one who seems to be living vicariously through her kids? Just like a stage mom?
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Left Is Right
C Berg
Ian Curtis
David Sirota
Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Kathy Riordan
Salon.com
Comments
FERPA (Federal Educational Right to Privacy Act) is a wonderful educational regulation that protects me from the helicopter parents. I do hear from them. However, if a student is over 18 by law I cannot discuss grades or classroom performance with anyone other than the student or my boss. So I don't. This drives parents nuts since they are paying the tuition etc. but they have to get information from their kids.
I get students who have been instructed (wrongly in my opinion) by hovering parents on maintaining a sense of "entitlement." They have a programed script in their heads of priorities: what types of tasks are beneath them, the type of friends they should nurture, how to get the most from the system with little effort; the self-serving story goes on. This is disturbing because I see the crystallization of young minds before the age of 21. In my business, an open mind is the way to thrive, learning to re-see, from day to day,....I see less of that these days.
To be blunt, I don't think many kids today have anything like star power, star potential, star-ness, star-like-ness (Colbert word of the day?), etc. So the phenom of the SMs just freakin' freaks me out.