What effect do helicopter parents have not only on their college-aged children but also on the colleges themselves?
The answer may be found in a study performed by Laura Hamilton, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California. She observed 41 families and their children as they attended an unnamed public university. The college attendees were all women, and all started their college experiences in the same dorm. Hamilton observed them during their freshmen year and interviewed them each year after for five years.
She ended up separating the types of parents she encountered into four groups, and each group led to different outcomes for the children. The first group, comprising two-fifths of the observed families, were labeled “professional helicopter parents.”
These were the parents “who test the patience of school officials, meddle with university affairs, and raise a generation of ‘coddled,’ ‘entitled’ and ‘under-constructed’ youth.” She told the story of a young woman whose wounds from wisdom-tooth surgery went septic, so her mother went to her classes for her and took notes. While these parents may be made fun of or reviled, all the students from this group graduated and all but one began a professional career or graduate school soon after (we don’t know what happened to the one who didn’t).
The second group, labeled “pink helicopters” by Hamilton, were those parents concerned with ensuring their children had active social lives and connections. The students in this group tended to have GPAs around 3.0 or below, because they focused on their social lives instead. But the students in the group also chose majors that reflected their lifestyle, such as sports marketing or communication. The students in this group all graduated, but only those with wealthy, well-connected parents obtained jobs after college.
The third group was called the “paramedics,” because they didn’t meddle in their child’s life unless it involved an emergency. I believe this would be the category my parents would have fallen into while I was in college. They left me on my own, but if I really needed help, they were there. Hamilton found that these students were the most self-sufficient right out of college, having learned how to advocate for themselves and handle a work-life balance. There were, however, a few women from this group who didn’t graduate.
The final group was called the “bystanders.” These were the parents who were either too poor or not knowledgable enough of higher education (having not attended themselves) to successfully navigate the institution for their children. The children in this group often had to work their ways through schools, which led to higher rates of those failing to graduate. Some of the students in this group were forced to transfer to more affordable schools.
The other big takeaway from Hamilton’s study is how reliant schools have become on helicopter parents. It seemed the more wealthy the parents, the more involved they were in their children’s lives — and that meant big money for the university.
“Universities now rely, in part, on parents, particularly those with money, time, and connections, to meet their basic needs. Solvency is the most pressing one — net tuition now accounts for 47 percent of all public higher-education revenue, so schools necessarily prefer applicants who don’t require financial aid,” Hamilton wrote. “Most public institutions, like the one I studied, are not need-blind, and take student funding into account. They particularly value out-of-state and international families who pay top dollar.”
There are some obvious flaws in Hamilton’s study. It was a small group of families — just 41 — and she looked at only one school. The results could be wildly different at an Ivy League or private school. They could be different at a community college or even a school in a different part of the country.
The big issue I have with the study is that it focused only on women. Hamilton wrote that she did this because “the majority of college students are women; they enroll in and complete college at higher rates than men.” Women make up nearly 60 percent of four-year college graduates, but that shouldn’t exclude men from being studied as well. Don’t male college students have helicopter parents? Don’t they act the same way as women’s helicopter parents? I don’t see why this study had to be gendered.
Other than that, it was an interesting, if very limited, study, and you should read her article in the Atlantic and her full study, titled “Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College Women’s Success.”
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
