The latest headlines seem to all be about how the Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin spent a lot of money to ensure their children would go to good colleges. What they did was dishonest. I would call that helicopter parenting in the extreme.
I was not raised by "helicopter" parents.
When I was in middle school we lived about a mile from school. I was allowed to walk home from school if it was a pretty day, by myself usually. I walked to piano lessons by myself. My piano teachers lived in the neighborhood. My brother and I roamed around the neighborhood on our own. We drank from the garden hose. We built forts and rafts from mud and dirt and sticks and got our clothes filthy. We had to save our allowance for extras.
My mother didn't make any effort to keep us entertained in the summertime. She would take us to the library every week, and sometimes out to lunch or to the pool, but most of our time was our own.
My brother was always bored in school and my mom supervised his homework and made sure he did it every day up through 8th grade. When he got to high school she finally realized it was time to let him go. She told him he would have to be responsible for keeping up in his classwork and studying for tests. She was available if he needed help, but she wouldn't micromanage him. He had to motivate himself. He could choose to be a ditch digger or he could choose college. Either way, he would have to live with the consequences of his choices. (Just FYI, he did finish college and then went in the Army.)
I was always a comparatively "good" kid and did my homework and made good grades by myself.
What disturbs me most about the college cheating scandal is this notion that children have been so heavily monitored and directed that they didn't have to learn to motivate themselves and manage their time. Then they get into a college where they don't belong, due to cheating.
I've seen parents micromanaging their kids in the extreme -- although not much in recent years since my kids have grown up, thank goodness. I have also been heavily criticized by people I know because I didn't micromanage my kids enough, in their eyes.
My daughter never needed to be micromanaged.
My son always hated school and was bored. I helped him, but he still hated school. He went to a school which had once been one of the best public schools in Atlanta, but when he got there, it had gone downhill. There were lots of fights, teachers let kids get away with talking in class and even cheating, and he had lost respect for his school. I let him leave high school after his sophomore year. He really wanted to drop out. He went into a program called Gateway to College and started college, but unfortunately the program got canceled. He got a GED. He also went to college for two semesters and did fine, although he dropped out. I tried my level best to motivate him to finish college but to no avail.
My son's choices and personality were molded by his early experiences in Kazakhstan, his birth country. He came home at age 10, already a person in his own right. I could influence him somewhat but his personality was already formed. So yes, my parenting experience is different than it would be if I had given birth to him, or even adopted him as an infant.
I struggled mightily to NOT be a helicopter parent to him. I inherited my dad's control freak tendencies, unfortunately. Michael has always been his own person, however, and only allowed a little bit of managing. Forget micromanaging.
His stubbornness and intelligence served him well when he was small, with his alcoholic birthmom, but later, not so much. I had to learn to let go of trying to force him to do anything.
However, I was chatting with a friend this morning whose grown daughter just came through a medical ordeal and nearly died, and we agreed that prayer works. Secular studies have proven it. Diehard skeptics won't ever accept it, however.
I prayed a lot when my son was in school, prayed he would make good grades. He did, with some help.
I mention prayer because what strikes me about the cheating scandal is that those parents could not "let go and let God" when it came to their kids going to college. They were willing to cross the line, pay thousands and thousands of dollars, for their children to get into college and have some "guaranteed" measure of success.
What do you do to a child, though, when you show them they can cheat on the SATs or be listed as playing a sport they don't play, just to go to a particular school? Those parents are sanctioning cheating. They are saying do whatever you need to do and damn the consequences.
That doesn't teach those kids anything good. It teaches them basically win --whatever it takes.
I think as a society we are promoting this more and more. We are judging people whose children don't go to college, or who go and drop out. We are saying, in essence, if you don't go to college you are lesser than. That's appalling.
My son is working at a restaurant and learning to be a cook. He may never go back to college or even to culinary school. I am okay with that as long as he is happy. If I won the lottery and suddenly had the means to say to him "You can go to any college you like and I will pay all the bills," I still don't think his mind would be changed.
You see, HE has to want to go to college and succeed. He has to be willing to work hard. I can't go do his homework, or take his tests. No parent can do that. So in the end, whether a parent cheats or not, the child still has to do the work and motivate himself or herself.
Parents have to let go, and let the child learn what is most important about the college experience -- teaching oneself how to organize time and budget, and study. Balancing partying with studying. Choosing friends who boost you up instead of tempting you to screw up. So many things that were critical about my college experience had little to do with books and studying.
My parents were available to help me with homework but they pretty much left me alone when I was growing up. I had to figure out how to succeed in grades 1-12. That was on me. So college didn't come as a rude shock to me.
So what I would say to Huffman and Loughlin if they were sitting in front of me is this: your getting caught cheating is the best thing that could happen to your kids. Truly. They are experiencing the consequences of bad choices.
The Huffman and Loughlin kids will have to navigate a hostile world that is not gentled and softened for them unnaturally -- just like the rest of us. It's better for them this way. They will have to motivate themselves and work hard.
The embarrassment of what their parents did will haunt them. Learning how to deal with that will build character, however.
I just hope and pray they don't turn out like their parents... Beautiful and successful and unwilling to put their faith in their children, or in God...
