Carolyn O
By Carolyn O’Laughlin
A new moniker, snowplough parents, refers to those who not only hover like helicopter parents but also plough ahead to pre-emptively eliminate any obstacles from their child’s path. These are the folks who would like to hand-select their young child’s classmates, or who bribe coaches for more playing time, or who encourage teachers to pay extra attention to their child at the expense of other students. For those of us who work with college students there are tales of parent calls for notes from a missed class, daily requests for lists of salad-bar ingredients and parental involvement, via Skype, regarding a dispute between roommates over a missing jar of peanut butter.
As a student affairs administrator, I’ve worked with my share of snowplough parents. I hear the concern in their voices. Often such calls end with a better understanding — for me, of their kid; for parents, of our policies. Sometimes the calls are more frustrating and sound more like a scraping ploughing than an invested parent.
But I feel for these parents. The passing agonies of the everyday are shared quickly and easily — texts about a disappointing grade, photos of a roommate’s overflowing garbage, tweets about the heat in a dorm room. The instantaneous nature of the complaints can give the impression that only an immediate solution will do. And some students relying on their phones, with their parents at the other end, are losing the opportunity to stop and think, assuming that their parents are more capable. Perpetuating this belief is a disservice to their development and may contribute to the increasing amount of anxiety students experience about small inconveniences.
Some years ago as a college student in Milwaukee, I had a run-in with a more traditional type of snowplough. I’d brought a car to campus for the weeks between Thanksgiving and winter break and had parked at the end of a neighbourhood street. I studied and drank and danced on couches as snow fell. The college grounds crew shovelled walks across campus, creating waist-high tunnels wide enough for only one person. On the day the dorms closed, I found my car encapsulated in snow and ice, ploughed in under chest-high, dirty, gray snow. Orange parking tickets were frozen in layers of ice like papier-mache.
I called my mom from a pay phone in a gas station parking, to announce that I’d be late. Car trouble, I told her, and she responded with the expected balance of sympathy and concern. I didn’t mention that I was completely at fault, or that it was entirely preventable, or that the number of unpaid parking tickets may have been plentiful enough to justify my arrest. I just told her, truthfully, that I’d been able to handle it. (Years later, she confessed that she’d fished parking violation notices out of the mailbox for months after and sent checks to pay them before my dad found out — a vintage snowplough parent of my very own.
WP-BLOOMBERGBy Carolyn O’Laughlin
A new moniker, snowplough parents, refers to those who not only hover like helicopter parents but also plough ahead to pre-emptively eliminate any obstacles from their child’s path. These are the folks who would like to hand-select their young child’s classmates, or who bribe coaches for more playing time, or who encourage teachers to pay extra attention to their child at the expense of other students. For those of us who work with college students there are tales of parent calls for notes from a missed class, daily requests for lists of salad-bar ingredients and parental involvement, via Skype, regarding a dispute between roommates over a missing jar of peanut butter.
As a student affairs administrator, I’ve worked with my share of snowplough parents. I hear the concern in their voices. Often such calls end with a better understanding — for me, of their kid; for parents, of our policies. Sometimes the calls are more frustrating and sound more like a scraping ploughing than an invested parent.
But I feel for these parents. The passing agonies of the everyday are shared quickly and easily — texts about a disappointing grade, photos of a roommate’s overflowing garbage, tweets about the heat in a dorm room. The instantaneous nature of the complaints can give the impression that only an immediate solution will do. And some students relying on their phones, with their parents at the other end, are losing the opportunity to stop and think, assuming that their parents are more capable. Perpetuating this belief is a disservice to their development and may contribute to the increasing amount of anxiety students experience about small inconveniences.
Some years ago as a college student in Milwaukee, I had a run-in with a more traditional type of snowplough. I’d brought a car to campus for the weeks between Thanksgiving and winter break and had parked at the end of a neighbourhood street. I studied and drank and danced on couches as snow fell. The college grounds crew shovelled walks across campus, creating waist-high tunnels wide enough for only one person. On the day the dorms closed, I found my car encapsulated in snow and ice, ploughed in under chest-high, dirty, gray snow. Orange parking tickets were frozen in layers of ice like papier-mache.
I called my mom from a pay phone in a gas station parking, to announce that I’d be late. Car trouble, I told her, and she responded with the expected balance of sympathy and concern. I didn’t mention that I was completely at fault, or that it was entirely preventable, or that the number of unpaid parking tickets may have been plentiful enough to justify my arrest. I just told her, truthfully, that I’d been able to handle it. (Years later, she confessed that she’d fished parking violation notices out of the mailbox for months after and sent checks to pay them before my dad found out — a vintage snowplough parent of my very own.
WP-BLOOMBERG
