The Middlebury Campus

Issue date: 10/18/07 Section: Focus

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College is one of those "big moments" in a person's life where everything seems to change. We ditch backpacks for messenger bags, swap a cozy room just outside of Boston for a cramped cinder block barrack and leave our parents for a stranger who may turn out to be our best friend or our worst nightmare. This last transition is often the most difficult. Leaving the home is one of the most successful themes explored in the modern narrative, and any family living with one of its members in college knows why this separation creates great drama. The child changes and the parents remain the same (or vice versa), and someone feels cheated.

However, some parents try and cheat this. A recent article on ABCNEWS.com discusses a new phenomenon in families with children in college - "helicopter parents." These parents are so named because of the two benevolent and malevolent functions of a helicopter - a beacon of hope and safety able to reach anywhere, and a missle-firing war machine ready to kill at a moments notice. The fact is that these parents hover and heavily influence their child's social, academic and personal lives.

The notion of tightening parent-student relations emerged at Middlebury in spring 2006 with influential research conducted by Elena Kennedy '06 and Associate Professor of Psychology Barbara Hofer, entitled, "The Electronic Tether: Parental Contact, Autonomy, and Self-Regulation in Emerging Adulthood." The study achieved national attention in May of that year in a Newsweek article as well as being presented at major professional conferences.

In recent years, Hofer and her students have also examined behavior at the University of Michigan - responding to notions that perhaps a small liberal arts school may provide only one sample.

"The data at Michigan was almost indentical," said Hofer, who found that students communicate with their parents and average of 13 times per week by telephone, chat or e-mail.

We boast of ourselves as independent spirits - but are we just present at college as Mom and Dad continue to swoop in and tackle any obstacle? The Campus delved into a first-year dorm on Fall Family Weekend, observing the parent-student dynamic in action and surveyed more than 100 students to better understand this dynamic in greater depth.

Continued...

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