BOSTON (CBS) — Chances are you’ve heard about helicopter parents who hover protectively over kids all through the teen years.
Psychology professor Peter Gray of Boston College, author of “Free to learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life,” says we’re now reaping the bitter harvest of years of helicopter parenting, with students swamping campus counseling centers for help with emotional crises over once-routine issues like a bad grade or a harsh word from a classmate.
“It appears that students are becoming very much used to the idea that if they have a problem, the way to solve it is to go to some adult to solve it,” says Gray, who lays out the extent of the situation in a blog post in Psychology Today. “They haven’t had the experience of solving their own problems.”
Gray claims that deficit starts at a young age, when “kids are not being allowed to go out on their own playing with other kids, exploring, getting into trouble, figuring out how to get out of trouble…Walking to the store alone, walking to school without being driven or being bused, playing in the park without an adult present – all these things that just used to be part of a normal childhood are no longer being allowed.”
A once unheard of but now not uncommon sight on campuses, Gray says, parents in the dean’s office or that of a faculty member “coming to solve their children’s problems.” Parents want their kids to go to college and do well so they can get a good job, and thus pull all the strings they can to protect their child from disappointment or risk. But, says Gray, “here’s the real irony: the work world today doesn’t need the kind of person who doesn’t take risks, the work world needs the kind of person who’s willing to take risks.”
After talking with Gray, we went to the Boston University campus in search of students who disagreed with his analysis. We didn’t find any.
“Kids today are spoiled,” said one young woman. “Our parents babied us, and when you get to college you get in the real world and it’s not like that, you get a little bit of reality,” added another.
And several students pointed to lives lived online as a complicating factor in developing social resilience. Said one young man: “When you have that much social interaction online, you kind of lose touch with more people-based things.”
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