Helicopter parents are raising fragile children, writes Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former Stanford dean. Colleges are seeing a wave of depressed, apathetic students who can’t make their own decisions. In How To Raise an Adult, she tells parents that good parenting means preparing children to take responsibility for their own lives, learn from their mistakes and . . . grow up.
In a 2013 survey, 95 percent of college counseling center directors said the number of students with significant psychological problems is a growing concern on their campus, writes Lythcott-Haims. One fourth of students who visit counseling centers were taking psychotropic drugs.
It’s not just a problem for high achievers at elite colleges, she adds. In a survey of nearly 100,000 students at 153 colleges, 84.3 percent said they’d felt overwhelmed in the last year, 60.5 percent felt very sad and 51 percent felt overwhelming anxiety. Eight percent had considered suicide.
When seemingly perfectly healthy but overparented kids get to college and have trouble coping with the various new situations they might encounter—a roommate who has a different sense of “clean,” a professor who wants a revision to the paper but won’t say specifically what is “wrong,” a friend who isn’t being so friendly anymore, a choice between doing a summer seminar or service project but not both—they can have real difficulty knowing how to handle the disagreement, the uncertainty, the hurt feelings, or the decision-making process.
Overinvolved parents deliver a “soul-crushing” message to their children, writes Lythcott-Haims. “Kid, you can’t actually do any of this without me.”
With her husband, she’s raising teen-age sons in Palo Alto, which may be the epicenter of involved and over-involved parenting. It’s where I raised my daughter, who grew up to be a literary agent for the book.