These days, the break looks different. And in some cases it doesn’t look like a break at all.
A new term has entered the lexicon of college administrators: the trailing parent. These are the mothers and fathers who follow their children to campus—not just metaphorically, with daily texts about grades, outfits, or friendship drama, but physically. They rent an apartment in Atlanta, Austin, or Boston for four years, a pied-à-terre to facilitate frequent visits. They buy a condo in Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles so that their sophomore can have a place to crash—and so that they can drop by their kid’s place with soup when the sniffles arrive. Some parents trail their study-abroad kids across the world, moving for a semester to Florence or Barcelona to be close by “just in case.”
College administrators and other education colleagues in my circle have told me that although such stories used to be noteworthy, they’re now so common as to barely raise an eyebrow. One recalled that the mom of an Ole Miss first-year stayed in the family’s new campus-adjacent apartment last fall to provide logistical and moral support during sorority rush, lending her daughter a hand in fixing hair or nursing a hangover. A Colorado couple whose daughter had a rocky freshman year told the Associated Press that they bought an apartment in Portland, Oregon, and moved there to live with their daughter while she attended college.
The paradigmatic helicopter parent hovered from a distance and in most cases didn’t follow their child to college. The trailing parent touches down. Danielle Lico, who spent two decades working in student affairs at George Washington University, told me about a mom who several years ago rented a downtown-D.C. condo near campus to live with her daughter, whom she even walked to class. “We had to tell the mom that she wasn’t actually permitted to sit next to her kid in class,” Lico said. “She would sit outside of the classroom, and then they would walk back to the apartment together every day for four years.”
Not all college students love having their parents close by. The administrator of a study-abroad program told me about a mom who moved to France for proximity to her daughter. For weeks, the mother phoned the program’s office, asking to arrange a visit. The daughter refused and didn’t return her mother’s calls. Eventually, the mother gave up and flew home to the United States. Reddit is full of similar accounts: One commenter shared an anecdote about a kid who transferred colleges to get away from his parents, after they bought a home next to his campus.
Some colleges appear to be subtly trying to head off parental overengagement. Brie McCormick, who runs residential life at Northeastern University, told the campus publication Northeastern Global News that she encourages families not to let their kids visit home early in the school year. An overseas-study program on whose board I serve asks moms and dads not to visit until the winter holidays, explaining that children need to establish roots in their new country, uninterrupted. Jason Campbell-Foster, the dean of students at Boston University, wrote in a school publication that he urges parents to trust the scaffolding they’ve built, to “have confidence that you’ve chosen a place that cares for your child, that wants them to be successful, and that will give them the space and support that they need to learn from mistakes.” (...)
Every generation finds new ways to parent, and every generation frets about it. Maybe the trailing parent is simply the next logical step in an era when adolescence stretches longer. Or maybe it’s something more worrisome: an inability to let go, to allow children the gift of separation. An important step toward adulthood is the experience of stumbling—sometimes badly—and discovering that you can stand on your own. It might be hard for an undergraduate to develop independence if their parents are constantly available, helping them navigate every crisis. “We would certainly have parents call anytime we did sorority or fraternity rush and somebody didn’t get into the chapter they wanted,” Danielle Lico told me, and parents would hire “high-powered lawyers to get their kids out of trouble.” If a student is in a spat with a roommate or doesn’t get into a class they want to take, that’s a chance for them to learn to cope with conflict and setbacks—which they won’t get to do if they jump to asking for direction from home. (...)
An unspoken message from the trailing parent is: We don’t think you can handle college on your own. A 20-year-old who grows accustomed to dropping off laundry with a parent each weekend might conclude that they’re not yet ready for the world. But college is, among other things, an exercise in independence. As much as it’s important for students to learn Russian history and statistics, it’s even more important for them to learn to be adults.
by Russell Shaw, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Jon Lovette / Getty[ed. This was a significant issue in my last relationship before the term "helicopter parent" ever existed. I couldn't understand why my partner couldn't see how she was creating a sense of learned helplessness in her child, and an impediment to her fledging. When her daughter eventually left for college it only took a couple weeks before she started complaining about her roomate and rooming issues (like smoke outside her window aggravating her asthma) so my partner (the girl's mother) somehow convinced the administration to allow a freshman off-campus exemption (I don't know how she did it), then set her up in an apartment of her own, furnished it, and even bought her a cat. So there she sat, alone, totally divorced from college life. She lasted two sememesters. The girl, who's probably now in her mid-thirties, is still living at home with her mother as far as I know, and both are probably completely happy with that.]
