How helicopter parents are ruining college students

[CBHagman]

8. That's a different issue.

Loss of aid is the sort of problem that is meant to be handled in administrative offices.

The story here is that some parents are taking extreme measures to manage their grown children's day-to-day challenges and adjustments at colleges and universities, to the point where the parents are inserting themselves in situations an 18-, 19-, 20-, or 21-year-old can learn to handle on his or her own. It's partly a boundary issue, and the overinvolvement is no favor to the young people, who are going to have to learn to deal with work, school, or social problems without Mom or Dad sitting in on meetings.

[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2014/09/02/how-helicopter-parents-are-ruining-college-students/[/url]

A study published recently in the journal Education + Training found that there is an important line to draw between parental involvement and over-parenting. “While parental involvement might be the extra boost that students need to build their own confidence and abilities, over-parenting appears to do the converse in creating a sense that one cannot accomplish things socially or in general on one’s own,” wrote the authors, two professors from California State University Fresno. The authors of “Helicopter parents: An Examination of the Correlates of Over-parenting of College Students,” Jill C. Bradley-Geist and Julie B. Olson-Buchanan, go on to detail how over-parenting can actually ruin a child’s abilities to deal with the workplace.

Bradley-Geist and Olson-Buchanan, both management professors, surveyed more than 450 undergraduate students who were asked to “rate their level of self-efficacy, the frequency of parental involvement, how involved parents were in their daily lives and their response to certain workplace scenarios.”

The study showed that those college students with “helicopter parents” had a hard time believing in their own ability to accomplish goals. They were more dependent on others, had poor coping strategies and didn’t have soft skills, like responsibility and conscientiousness throughout college, the authors found.