An online op-ed that I can't find now pointed out that one source of the so-called "snowflake" tendencies seen in many youth and young adults is parents who are competing in the arena of Extreme Coddling.
But I don't need to find the column, because this story in the New York Post illustrates its point clearly. Parents who fill out kids' college applications and call bugging admissions counselors, even for graduate school? Parents who call claiming to be the children themselves? Sheesh.
The topper, if it's not apocryphal, is the claim that a woman called asking to be able to do an internship in place of her daughter, since her daughter had so much anxiety about doing the internship herself. As a non-parent, I know that I don't fully understand how much parents love their kids and want to help them. But anyone -- anyone -- should be able to see that doing something in place of someone else robs them of whatever benefits that person wants from the experience. Part of me thinks that the internship business should have agreed, and then when the mom showed up help the daughter escape so she could learn how to actually live her own life.
I remember the time a mom and grandma in my office got into an argument while I was advising their daughter/granddaughter (this was before we tightened up so much on FERPA; now I'd have to either ask the young woman to sign the paperwork then and there or tell mom and grandma to leave).
ReplyDeleteMom wanted the student to take the bare minimum of classes, because "She can't handle more and anyway, she won't have time to come home on the weekends then." Grandma was all, "She's smart and she can handle it and she needs to take a slightly heavier load."
I dunno. I remember all the times I called my dad up in tears over something when I was a college student and his response was to sigh and say, "You're smart, you'll figure it out." I did, and I suppose it made me more resilient....but it also gives me less sympathy for parents who want to totally run their 20 year old kid's life, and, by extension, the lives of the professors teaching them.
When I hear some of these stories I flip Elvis's request end for end in my head: A little more conversation, a little less action.
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