Of Helicopters and Leeches

In fifteen plus years of teaching, I thought I had seen it all. I’ve watched a young man screaming at his dad in front of me at conferences. I have withstood the onslaught of a lawyerly mother trying to win a few more points for her daughter. I’ve had a student stand up in the middle of class to swear at me and ensure at highest decibel that everybody in the room hated me. I’ve thrown a few erasers, received a few crank calls, and have managed to sneak in a little Thoreau and sentence structure amid the cacophony of teen noise in front of me each day.

For the past handful of years I have been teaching junior high students, a strange world in which the players are facing major life issues like peer pressure, drugs, and identity, but who also vie for smelly stickers on their spelling tests. (A dichotomy I have yet to understand.) They still have trouble tying their shoes and bringing a pencil to class, but they are faced with decisions with social media or with controlled and uncontrolled substances that could literally ruin their lives. Or worse.

Despite my colorful past in the classroom, I have just recently begun to think that the world has gone mad: specifically the world of parents. I see it in my classroom and in my school and the schools of my friends. This world is changing fast and I don’t know how to hold on. Yes, I do believe that the majority of parents are sane, loving and appropriate, but I fear the pendulum is currently swinging slightly toward the crazy.

The term helicopter parent has been bandied around for the last several years and I do think it is an appropriate concept for the parents I see habitually running lunch up to kids that have forgotten them or hand-picking sports teams and friends. (There is a fine line between lovingly helping a kid out once in a true emergency and becoming an enabler.)

But it’s getting worse. I’d like to coin a new phrase: Leech Parent. More and more, I am seeing students who are having the life sucked out of them by parents who make every decision at every moment. Yes, there was a time for that, and I believe it ended when the kid’s diaper-wearing days ended.

Parents are doing homework for kids, picking out kid’s clothes, making the lunches and choosing the activities. And worse, they are calling the other moms to solve playground problems and calling teachers to defend the little ones from responsibility. Whether they are trying to live vicariously through their children or think they are “helping” by dictating every move, the Leech Parent causes some problems.

I give an open assignment and a student can write or speak about anything in the universe, and I get a blank stare because her parent has always made every choice and she has no idea what she feels passionately about. Or a student gets in a prickly situation and can’t handle himself because his parents always bailed him out. (Of course with the advent of cell phones, said parents can be there in a jiffy to continue the bailing).

I just worry about a society where the young are not taught to think and reason, where there are no consequences to actions, where kids are not allowed to feel uncomfortable or disciplined. Yes I want my children to enjoy life, but some of the best lessons come from mistakes made and consequences rendered. How will children learn this if never forced to choose, or lose?!

I know that I am a little more on the free-range side of parenting. My first and third graders make their own lunches (and my FOUR year old makes my husband’s so he doesn’t feel left out.) I let my kids ride their bikes down the street unaccompanied and expect them to remember their own backpacks and clean their own rooms and choose their own friends. I stay out of the way, not because I don’t love them immensely, but because I do.

As a mother, I feel I should be the soft place to land, the one at home with the band-aids and the hugs after a hard day. Unfortunately, some families don’t even NEED band-aids anymore because the children are never allowed the slightest bump in the road. (And the irony: the parents don't realize that the wounds from the leech marks will need far more than band-aids.)

And for my classroom and our future in this country, this makes me very nervous.