In a facinating article, O Magazine recently examined the roles of parents in their children's high school, college, and even adult lives. In "Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's... Supermom!" (July 2008) Amanda Robb reported that the trendline is on the rise for "helicopter parenting," a term coined in 1977 by Jim Fay and Foster Cline, cofounders of the Love and Logic Institute. The term labels parents who "hover" over their children so much as to be involved in the minute details of their lives.
Robb notes that "In a study of 60 public universities and colleges... 40 to 60 percent of parents engage in some type of helicopter parenting, such as helping with academic assignments, and as many as 10 percent actually write their children's papers for them." I find this amazing, as my parents were thrilled to have me away at college and certainly never offered to do my homework for me. And yet, the parents discussed in the article drove hours to do their college students' laundry, grocery shopping, and cleaning. They contacted teachers and possible employers to discuss assignments and benefits. They emailed and phoned daily to advise, and found ways to be assured that their student was taking their advice. One parent even had the password to her son's email account so that she could read any emails from professors and ask her son about why he missed appointments or failed assignments. On another strange note, the students studied in Robb's article did not mind, and even appreciated their parent's uberinvolvement.
George Kuh, PhD, who conducts the annual National Survey of student Engagement to measure what conditions make for the most eneficial college experience, admits that students with involved parents tend to succeed more, but states that there is "a tipping point between beneficial contact and the kind that stunts personal growth." Not to mention how the people around these spoiled students must just want to pound them...
I share this story for two reason: First, I really am just facinated. My parents were involved and accessible while I was in college, but certainly did not hover. In fact, I'm pretty sure I helped with laundry in grade school. It's hard for me to imagine wanting to stunt your child's development by doing everything for him or her. (But then, I do have background as a teacher.) But second, as I pondered the article, I began to make the easy connections between writing and parenting. And I began to wonder if this phenomena doesn't exist in publishing, and especially in Christian publishing.
Helicopter Authoring
I have lost count of the number of authors who correlate submitting their work to Relief with "sending their baby out into the world." Before I sound too pretentious, I'll admit, I've had similar feelings. You work so hard to shape a story (or a poem or essay or picture or...) but eventually it has to make it in the big world and you just have to hope you've done enough. But there does come a point when you just have to let go, and trust the story to survive without you.
And after that point, some of us just keep on writing.
We explain to the reader exactly how to read the story. In doing so we smother any subtlety in the piece and insult the reader. We're so afraid that he or she will miss the point or that the story isn't good enough to make the point on it's own that we throw in the "here's the moral" section toward the end.
Here at Relief, this "helicopter authoring" is probably the fastest way to get a rejection note. Former fiction editor J. Mark Bertrand once mused to me that every once in a while a story can pull off the moral-at-the-end trick, but it better earn the right to do it. So, like a parent who's not quite ready to trust her child in the big world, when we feel the urge to hover, we might ask ourselves if we're really helping the story, or just trying to reassure ourselves that we've done a good job.
Kimberly, your thoughts on helicoptering inspired some meditations on my blog about how I try to rescue my writing. It's a natural part of the first draft to moralize and then we need to scratch that stuff out and let the action and the images float on top. But so much easier to just rest on our morals! (sorry, it's late and had to indulge bad puns).
And as for the cultural phenomena of helicopter parenting, one can only hope that like politics and educational reform movements, the pendulum will swing back -- and I hope toward sanity! Best, Lyn
Hi Lyn,
I have to admit that I do love a bad pun every once in a while
The whole story reminded me how much we can try to "help" and yet do the opposite. I think as authors, especially as Christian authors, it can look like a good idea to "rest on our morals" , but it's better to trust the story out in the big world.
Helicopter Parenting
, but it's better to trust the
