Posted on 08/20/2005 2:28:58 PM PDT by MississippiMan
Parents have long suffered the pangs of separation when a child ventures out of the nest and onto a college campus. But college and university administrators say that parental overinvolvement, from overcalling a student to overcontacting administrators, has become a pressing issue. Schools have even adopted measures to keep parents from intervening unnecessarily.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
That said, I also smell a wift of fear here. Fear that watchful parents might interfere with the liberal indoctrination that takes place in so many of our colleges and universities. Some of the things they rail against are simply none of their business. If a kid and parents want to talk regularly and maintain closeness, what business of that is the university's? None IMHO.
Anyone else sense a severe dislike of plain old close family ties "hovering" just beneath the surface here?
MM
I think the best way for them to become conservatives is to hear all the drivel from the professors. Only by hearing both sides can they know for sure they were raised right!
What exactly are they trying to hide from parents, hum? One more thing to be wary of Teddyland for. Any university that has a hand out for my dollars will have an ear to lend for me.
When the kid pays his own way HE can tell his parents to buzz off. When I slap down $$$,$$$.00 to put my four through college - darn straight I'm going to make sure we get what we pay for.
As far as I'm concerned, if the parents are paying the 20,000 to 40,000 dollars required to send their kid to any given college, they can be as involved as they damn well want to be.
We got our daughter a cell phone and a head set so she can talk with us 24/7 if she wanted.
I noticed that fear too. Interesting point is that the kids don't mind the intrusion, that must gall the administrators.
I work on a college campus so I do have to say, parents sometimes do things the students should do and sometimes are amazingly unpleasant and entitled. Not just involved.
I don't think we should necessarily make this into a "liberal indoctrination" argument. There are a lot of parents these days who seem to be overinvolved, to the detriment of the child. I work in a public library and I see parents come in all the time looking for books for their child. This "child" is not in elementary school or even high school. This "child" is in college. The parent will come in with a vague idea of the "child's" college term paper assignment and want to find books that pertain to it, which is often difficult because they are not clear on the topic (not surprising since they are not the one taking the class). When asked whether the "child" has tried the college library, they will shrug and say he doesn't have time or he doesn't know his way around it.
I see this all the time and it's not doing the kids any favors. My parents weren't even aware of what my term paper assignments were in high school, let alone college, and I never expected them to find my books for me.
Anyone else sense a severe dislike of plain old close family ties "hovering" just beneath the surface here?
In certain Boston universities during the shoot em up 80..and 90 the kids would be getting a primer on how to walk the streets of Boston safely while mom and dad were bored by yet another lecture.
I think the universities are a little afraid they have to explain certain policies. For years I have been screaming to no avail that the abandonment of residence halls to students has terrible consequences. I think a little in loco parentis is needed on campus. The residences halls are incredibly horrible, noisy, party allnite, drugs, sexual assaults, kids having roommates having sex in the bed next to them. They are jungles.
When parents start to demand better supervision of dorms, profs who keep office hours, classes that don't contain 500 students, inability to get into a class when a senior thus being unable to graduate,,,hell will be raised and rightfully so.The university has been remarkably free in an administrative way to screw students. Note, they don't screw the football team, no way. But the students,,,they simply don't really care from what I see.
Except for the last point, these rules are a little ridiculous. Parents aren't allowed to email or call their children? How is the university supposed to even regulate such a thing? If a parent and a child are having "issues" over separation then that is something they need to work out amongst themselves. Having the college admin get involved with it does the exact opposite of fostering independence in the student.
I graduated from college fairly recently, and while I was there, I did notice some students and parents having trouble adjusting to separation. Things were OK in my own family - I couldn't wait to get out of the house and be out on my own but my parents were quite sad after I'd left. But we all got used to it and by the time my younger sister left for college 3 yrs later, my parents were happy to finally be empty-nesters. Other students I knew had problems with calling their parents too much at the start of freshman year, not the other way around.
The most extreme case involved a woman in my year. She was an only child and had grown up 500+ miles away from the college. When she was accepted, her parents bought a home in the college town and didn't tell her this until a month before freshman year started. She was not thrilled. She was allowed to live in a dorm the first year but after that, her parents made her live at home. They were extremely paranoid people; they looked at her email and grilled her constantly about all her activities. It was really sad because she was a very good person. She studied hard, she wasn't having sex, she wasn't drinking or doing drugs, she hung out with a good group of people. I was at one point part of her circle of friends but eventually her parents forbade her from having any contact with me. As far as I know, she is still living with them 2 yrs after graduation. It's a very dysfunctional situation all around. The parents were able to get away with some of this behavior with the help of some people in the administration. But I don't think anyone at the school was aware of just how whacked these people were and even if they knew, there's not much the school could've done to remedy the situation.
Well, that I agree with. But from what I've read and heard, that's not really the thing parents are complaining about. In fact, they'd probably be screaming that their child was being discriminated against if there was adult supervision of the dorm that penalized students for those activities.
Except for the last point, these rules are a little ridiculous. Parents aren't allowed to email or call their children? How is the university supposed to even regulate such a thing?
I don't think it's so much a "rule" as a guideline to not overburden the student, especially in the beginning, with constant calls from home while they're trying to adjust to college life. Let the student call you, for the most part. As for not contacting the university president over a roommate situation, that's just common sense. The student should be learning to handle these things himself. If he can't get satisfaction through the normal channels and there's a bad situation, then of course mom and dad can get involved. But mom and dad sometimes have a tendency to get overinvolved before the student has even tried to handle it himself.
My 17 year old has been taking classes for the past two years at our local CC. I've never been on the campus (other than to drop him off when he wasn't old enough to drive.) We figure if he's old enough to take the class, he's old enough to deal with the profs, grading requirements, campus layout, scheduling, etc., otherwise he doesn't belong in a college class (I do have to contact the dual credit office on occasion, but that's their rule since the student is a minor.) Class choice has been easy since he was just moving through the Gen Ed requirements.
Anyhoo, they've renovated one of the campuses this term and advised that students attend an orientation to learn their way around the new layout of classes, admin offices, etc.
So he went to the orientation last week and said he was really surprised to see parents there with their kids. It was the first time he's ever been in an orientation or other type of school meeting where parents attended with their kids...he thought it a little odd.
Another friend who's an engineering prof at a major university said the pressure from parents to adjust kid's grades is intense.
Our son went 3,000 miles away to school. We expected him to call everyday -- even for five seconds -- just so we'd know he was alive. That was one of the stipulations for letting him go that far.
Believe me, even at $40,000 a year, they don't keep track of a kid who may have gone missing or worse.
This all started with the "privacy" right -- you aren't even permitted to see your child's grades. Doesn't matter who is footing the bill.
I agree with the posters above about the underlying agenda -- all part of families aren't needed. Just ask Hillary -- ony this time the village must be the college!
Rant over!
Parents have a right to be as attentive or inattentive as they want. The school has no right to tell them how to interact with their children.
Yup, I'll agree that there are extremes. Plenty of them. That's not who/what I sense this article is about. I think this is exactly about it taking a village. Not a family.
MM
Long story short, the main reason colleges find parental involvement annoying is that teachers (professors) hate having to talk to kids parents and deal with them, as does school administration officials.
My old dean told me he wanted the parents to just leave him alone and stop calling him with complaints (he used a few other words that are not free republic friendly, to describe these parents).
The other gripe is roomates who hate dealing with the parents of another roomate.
Back in college, I had guys in my frat who lived in the dorms, a few them had roomates who had alot of parental involvement and concern, and it became a source of friction and irratation that usually got the school involved.
The guys in charge of the dorms got annoyed with petty squabble involving roomates but became infuriated when it started involving family members.
I knew one of the RAs who got to the point of just hanging up ony parent who called him or calling security on any parents who came and knocked on his door to complain to him.
The school encouraged his behavior.
I think the schools real problem is they don't want the parents bothering them.
At least that was the reasons I knew, they hate and loathe taking calls or meeting or have to to deal with parents.
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