So I read this Salon article yesterday: Parenting secrets of a college professor and it keeps on a nagging me in an annoying way. Much to my better judgement I wanted to see if anyone in the comments had tried to argue with her, but instead there were a whole bunch of self righteous parents who agreed! Wha?
I understand the critique of the parent-professor. Her argument is that parents today are too over protective (as the “helicopter” metaphor suggests), which, according to her pop-psychology, leaves kid-adults too inept to deal with the world. Its not that I disagree with this argument in theory, but it just doesn’t match up to reality and it paints parent-children relationships in a very one dimensional (American-centric) manner.
First with “reality”:
Parent-Professor has all these great examples of over bearing parents who devote their lives to clearing the paths before their children, while also observing them. This is a epidemic, she seems to indicate. Parents are making it impossible for their children to learn! But as a teacher, working in the university system 6+ years, I have never actually come across any students who seemed to have this problem or at least told me about it. I have never had a parent contact me, except for the fact that many of my students are parents themselves. As a professor, Ms. Parent-Professor is taking the examples of a hand full and applying them to the whole. I seriously hope she doesn’t do her research like that! Instead she denies the probably more complex realities of varying degrees of parental involvement.
Second with one dimensional family characterization:
Parent-Professor seems to have this idea that there is one “best” way to interact with ones children. Her “hands off” approach is very white, very American, and very middle class. The idea that two parents raise a child and then that child severs ties with the parents to realize their own separate destiny is a relatively new ideology. World wide and historically, various familial living arrangements and interactions between family members have been the successful norm. People often went to live with their spouses’ family (or stayed with their own) when they got married, because the consolidation of resources and work makes sense. American society idealizes self reliance, but not everyone going to American universities is American or raised with the same self reliance norms.
I challenge our ideology of self reliance. I have a tiny immediate family, but I am probably a lot closer to them than a lot of families. My parents have been very helpful in supporting me with my education and I have helped them when they need it. Support is not always just them giving me stuff, but it is a relationship of generalized reciprocity, in which we help when we can help, in the ways that we can help. It is my job to take care of my parents when they are ill or recovering from surgery, just as I believe, it is my job to take care of them in their old age (avoiding retirement homes, unless they are severely incapacitated). Talking to my mother one day a week wont make my relationship with her stronger nor will it make my life better. I call her to say hi, to ask for advice and recipes, she is a resource. She usually knows what classes I am taking and my grades (even though those have not really changed for the past 15 years) not because she “has” to know, to keep me on track but because I am interested in sharing my life with her and it comes up in conversation. Its not about dominating or control, but about mutual caring.
I realize that some people might find my relationship with my family too overbearing. But that is their life, their family not mine. I get to choose how I want to live and I think by sharing and helping in my way, everyone in my family wins. Every family and relationship is different, some more than others, and maybe Parent-Professor has found a good balance for herself, but it is not necessarily “better” or the required norm. I do get that she was trying to suggest that parents need to give room for children to grow beyond their parents and to learn to survive in a world without them (they wont always be there), but I feel like her article went beyond that, maybe to dramatize it, and by doing that she denies the ways that parent-children relationships post-high school can be meaningful and close without being overbearing. On an ending note, I was reminded by reading her article, that in my undergraduate, I was thrilled that for the first time I was able to have a closer relationship with my father. He worked in the same town as I went to school and would get together for lunch every few weeks. In this case, going “away” meant that I could get to know my dad better.
I did, however, start a pretty much daily blog called the 
