Graphic by Kinsey Couture ‘22
BY MIMI HUCKINS ’21
When arriving at Mount Holyoke my first year, I finally felt truly independent. It was a time for me to have more responsibility and be more confident in my own abilities. I have always been taught the importance of advocating for myself, but I have come to realize that not everyone has this experience.
The first time I heard about the Mount Holyoke Parents and Families Facebook group was when my mother brought it to my attention. She believed that many parents in the group used it as a means to be overinvolved in their children’s social and academic lives. At further observation, I completely agreed with her.
Looking through the group, I came across countless posts of parents attempting to solve their children’s personal issues with the help of the group members. The purpose of the Mount Holyoke Parents and Families group is “to support parents,” but with multiple posts a day, the majority of them seem to be parents’ concerns about mundane issues that are not theirs to solve.
Recently, a parent posted about their child’s academic advisor. The advisor, an athletic coach, could not meet on a specific date due to travel. This Mount Holyoke parent then reached out to the group and proceeded to ask how her daughter could get a new advisor because her current advisor hadn’t rescheduled the meeting yet. The parent was asking if she should get directly involved. Another parent advised this one to call the school. Another told her to email the first-year dean. Suddenly, it seemed as if Mount Holyoke Parents and Families turned into Helicopter Parents Enabling Helicopter Parenting.
Although the post about advisors may have been one of the more extreme ones, there are dozens of other posts with parents obsessing over minor problems their child should solve, like applying for a job on campus or attending an org meeting.
A healthier solution may have been for the daughter to schedule a new meeting with her advisor, or to email the first-year dean herself if the concerns became too much to bear. These are basic tasks that a college student should be able to complete. Luckily, a few parents offered different approaches to the situation and recommended that the student navigate the problem herself. Yet the intensity of some of the more aggressive comments still overshadowed the reasonable suggestions.
The conversation shifted gears when the advisor in question made an appearance in the comments section. She stated that the situation was never something the student wouldn’t have been able to handle and that the issue had been blown out of proportion. In response to many parents’ advice on the post, she added her observation that employers are increasingly worried about this generation’s inability to advocate for themselves, primarily due to helicopter parenting.
This generation is more vulnerable to overinvolved parents than ever before. Parents now have much more access to their children’s lives with the rise of certain forms of media and communication. If their child has a problem, it takes only moments for them to contact anyone they believe could fix it, often going over their child’s head to do so. This takes the situation completely out of the child’s hands. It’s unfortunate that to so many parents, a moderate loss of control over their child is something from their nightmares. The Mount Holyoke Parents and Families group is just one more form of media that allows parents to be too involved in every aspect of their children’s lives.
There is seemingly no solution to this frightening epidemic of helicopter parenting, no matter how much evidence there is that it could be detrimental to children’s futures. For the Mount Holyoke community, possibly a more authoritative force could be introduced into the Parents Group, such as more faculty and staff. Their advice, which would be more credible on these issues, could soothe some of parents’ intense worries and tension. But for now, parents will keep looking for answers in the form of phone calls to the school and airing their children’s personal problems on the internet.