CHAPTER 6: THE LONG ARMS OF OVERPARENTING

Even when parents are trying their best to kick back, the deluge of appealing electronic tracking and communication devices significantly increases the risk of overparenting at all ages, but especially as our children become adolescents. In fact, new technologies continue to be made available that can provide parents with sophisticated options to improve—and increase—the monitoring of their children. Many child psychologists believe that keeping electronic tabs on our kids can quickly backfire and make things worse. Children often become angry, resentful, and hostile toward parents who don’t trust them to stay out of trouble and excessively monitor them. Statistically, kids also are safer on the streets and in schools than ever before, which means that in reality, parents should be breathing a sigh of relief rather than putting their sons and daughters on electronic leashes.1

Easier said than done.

The Technology Trap

Parents in the United States are not the only ones who are constantly violating their children’s boundaries in their quest to monitor and supervise, if not police, their children. This type of excessive parental behavior is happening all around the world. The Australian Journal of Guidance and Counseling reports that schools are struggling with the demands of overly enthusiastic parents. “Experts are saying that the school then becomes responsible for the child having a charmed life,” says Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane) PhD researcher Judith Locke. “This is having a huge impact on schools. Not only are schools responsible for teaching students, but they have to manage parents’ extreme expectations as well.”2 In essence, parents expect the school to fully monitor and train their children and hold the school accountable if there is any issue with a child.

“In Russia, we have ‘The Golden Generation,’ children that get everything they point at and then some,” says University of Southern Utah student Nikita Ryaschenko about pampering parents in his home country.3

According to a 2010 World Economic Forum report on gender equality, sons in Italy are still called mammomis, the Italian version of “mama’s boy,” as they often live at home with their mothers until they turn thirty.4

In Hong Kong, private detective Philic Man Hin-nam is seeing a huge increase in the amount of parents hiring her to spy on their children, fearing that their offspring are involved with drugs or trading sexual favors for cash. More often than not, their fears are justified, as Man provides evidence of middle-class, privately educated daughters taking drugs at yacht parties, or thirteen-year-old twin girls from a low-income family engaged in “compensated dating” to buy designer label clothes.

While official figures in Hong Kong suggest that drugs and compensated dating offences have decreased, Man’s experience suggests otherwise. She says that her company handled 298 investigations of children in 2011, a 68 percent rise from the 177 cases in 2010. Only twenty-three cases were found to be false alarms.

“Children are more careful now,” Man says. “They carry out these activities at home or in a rented room. So they become more ‘invisible,’ and it’s harder for police to catch them.” Man also says that her clients are mostly anxious parents who are having difficulty communicating with their children, so they turn to her. She added that in most cases, the children do not know that they were being spied on, and many will never know how they were caught. Man asks her clients not to disclose her evidence to their children and instead refers them to social workers or psychologists on her team.

Social worker Lam Yeung-chu, of the Society of Rehabilitation and Crime Prevention, says that she has reservations about hiring detectives, as it could damage children’s relationships with their parents if they ever found out.

“Before they hire detectives, parents should look back and think if there is anything they can do to improve themselves. It is always a bilateral problem,” she says.5 A novel approach might be to try to talk to their children or bring in a third party, such as a counselor.

Similar strife is driving parents to make the same choices in Singapore, where eight out of ten private eye agencies report a rise in parents hiring them to undertake surveillance on their children.

David Ng, director of the private investigation firm DP Quest, says that his company has seen a 20 percent year-on-year increase in requests from parents to check whether their children have gone astray, sometimes even overseas.6

“Parents get worried when they see changes in their children’s behavior. For example, if they get a tattoo, or start staying out late,” he says, explaining the reasons his clients usually cite.

Private eyes usually follow their adolescent subjects for three to five days to glean a pattern. Often, the parents’ suspicions are proven right. Their children have been discovered to be involved in illegal activities, such as drugs or gambling. Other times, they are also found at Internet gaming shops late at night without their parents’ knowledge.

Video or photographic evidence is then presented to the parents, who decide what to do next. Private investigators say that they start tailing the children as early as when they go to school in the morning.

Joe Koh, from Justice Investigations, says that usually both parents are working and too busy to monitor their children.

For some parents, there is even more reason to track their children when they are studying overseas.

“Parents send us overseas to see how their children are spending their money, and whether they are in relationships,” says S. M. Jegan, a private investigator.

Dr. Carol Balhetchet, director of the Singapore Children’s Society Youth Service Centre, says, “It’s the biggest fear parents have. What is my child up to? But it’s very bad for a relationship that’s already been contaminated by distrust.”7

Not to be outdone, private investigators in the United Kingdom are also staying busy tracking teenagers. Belinda Rowlson, of R and L Investigations Services, said there had been “a definite spike in the number of parents wanting their children tailed.” She said parents were desperate to find out what their teenagers were getting up to without adult supervision. Often the parents’ primary concern is to ensure their teenager avoids violence in nightclubs.

“With the concern about teenagers and alcohol getting out of hand,” she said, “we’ve had parents calling and saying they don’t want their children involved in that. They want to make sure their children are safe, and once a parent makes a call to us, word gets around and we get plenty more [cases].”8

In Russia, parents often describe themselves as “overprotective” of their children and offer many reasons to explain why. First among these is the general instability of life in a country that saw the powerful state in which most current parents grew up, the USSR, collapse amid social chaos and political strife in the early 1990s.

“Cases of missing children and pedophilia are now covered on TV, and parents’ alarm has grown sharply,” says Tatiana Gurko, head of family sociology at the official Institute of Sociology in Moscow. “Hyper-protective parents are everywhere. There is a big social discussion going on about whether a law should be passed requiring teenagers to be indoors by a certain hour.”9

Russian children aren’t allowed much freedom. Parents generally accompany their children to school until they’re at least twelve, don’t let them play on the street or use public transport, and monitor their social lives very closely.

“My daughter Ksenia was twelve when she declared she wanted to go to school by herself and be more independent,” Natalya, a single mom who lives in central Moscow told The Christian Science Monitor. “Her school was nearby, but she had to cross a busy street to get there. I was worried sick at first, but it worked out. Later I allowed her to go out in the evening with her friends, provided, of course, that I always knew where she was.”

Many Russian families also have live-in grandparents, a legacy of Soviet housing shortages, who reinforce the attitude of protectiveness and also provide another layer of supervision for the children.

“Russian parents who consider themselves to be good parents are usually very protective,” says Marina Bityanova, head of the independent Tochka Psi psychological center in Moscow. “They have deep-seated fears, which they consider very well-grounded,” she adds. “Possibly their surveillance is excessive, but this is the typical Russian reaction. Parents worry that their children may not be able to cope with all the uncertainties and dangers that are out there.”10

Whether it’s in Australia, Moscow, the UK, Hong Kong, or Singapore, when parents go too far with trying to control their children, chances are that it will not end well. The biggest risk is a violation of trust. Naturally, if your child is struggling with a serious issue, such as drug use, sex addiction, or simply running with the wrong crowd, some kind of intervention may be necessary. But for the average teen, it’s essential that you take a deep breath, talk to your kid, and try more than anything to build a relationship based on trust. That trust must go both ways, so that you can empower your child to be independent and make good choices while he or she, upon taking that responsibility, can offer you the peace of mind to put your spying equipment back in the closet.

East versus West

In 2011, Yale Law professor Amy Chua created quite a controversy with her Wall Street Journal article titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” citing the benefits of her strict parenting methods, as opposed to the more relaxed Western styles of parenting, which she described as being too lax and an invitation to failure. While some experts praised Chua, many critics considered her philosophy to be harmful to her daughters.

But a subsequent study suggested that it’s not merely a question of East versus West, pointing out that family culture is a key to how kids perceive their parents’ motivational style.

Chua calls her strict parenting approach “tiger parenting,” which prioritizes mastery over effort, while Western parenting focuses more on developing self-esteem and independence. While these approaches reflect cultural differences, they may achieve similar results.11

“Parents in both cultures want their children to succeed,” said Alyssa Fu, a doctoral student in psychology at Stanford University, at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Fu’s research found that Asian American high school kids were more inclined to talk about their mothers’ relationships to themselves than were European Americans. Asian Americans tended to mention things such as how their moms helped them with homework or pushed them to succeed, for example. The European Americans were more likely to talk about their mothers as individuals—describing mom’s looks or hobbies, for example.

“Asian Americans,” Fu said, “see themselves as connected in some way to their mothers. Not even just connected, but their mother is part of who they are.”

When it came to how much pressure and support the children felt from their moms, European Americans viewed pressure as a negative. But Asian Americans said pressure and support were not related.

“Asian Americans feel supported by their mothers just as much as the European Americans do, even though they are experiencing more pressure from their mothers,” Fu said. “The European American parents provide their children wings so their child can fly away and be free on their own. The Asian American parents are more like the wind that is beneath the wings of their child, because they’re always there, supporting the child, letting the child fly and reach success.”12

The dominant question for parents is this: when pushing your children to succeed academically while being intensely connected to them, can your children still become appropriately independent and eventually function on their own? Or, shall we favor a more laissez faire approach to their academic performance and encourage them to be more independent, in the hopes that they will recognize somewhere along the way that they have to succeed academically and professionally? This is something that each parent and family must decide on their own, taking into account their culture, their surrounding environment, and the personality of their child.

Considering Independent College Counselors

Sending their child to college seems to be the goal for many parents, and selecting the “right” college is the major goal for many of them. In order to make that happen, some families feel that they should hire the services of an independent counselor to increase the likelihood that their children will get into the college of the parents’ choice, if not of the children’s own choosing. Having experienced the pressures of the college search process on multiple occasions, we understand and sympathize with parents who get stressed out in general with the whole process. But we’ve also discovered a large group of parents who feel that their situation requires special handling. From all the school counselors we have consulted, it’s fair to say that the majority of students do not need the services of what we can only call an exploding cottage industry, better known as the world of tutors. The professional experience and training that most schools provide with their college counseling staff (especially in private schools and charter schools), combined with the support of the administration and faculty, ensure that students receive personalized and accurate guidance, tailored to the individual student throughout the college search process.

The college counselor will write the recommendations that admission officers read, not the independent counselor you hire. Most colleges in this country will not accept recommendations from independent counselors and will not respond to phone calls or emails from an independent counselor about the candidate, a fact that has been underscored in our conversations with college admission officers.

“But what if my daughter gets the added push that an independent counselor can offer, and that ends up making the difference in her getting admitted to the college of her choice?”

Fair enough question, but college admission offices can spot the highly polished, calculated hand of an overcoached application in a heartbeat, and when they do, any hoped-for “advantage” will be lost. The application that might otherwise have been a compelling one if written by the student herself can be relegated very quickly to the “waitlist” or even the “deny” pile. College admission offices see little benefit to students’ working with an independent college counselor. In fact, they associate more negatives with that process.

Colleges are looking for a student’s authentic voice. They want to know, in students’ own words, what they care about, what motivates them, what they think and believe, how they will engage on the campus, and so on. Overly coached and parentally edited applications obliterate the student’s voice, leaving the application reader wondering who wrote the essays, who filled out the application, and why this student is particularly interested in the college and would enroll if admitted.

Students will never benefit from the heavy hand of an adult advisor any more than they will from a generic reference by an alumnus who barely knows them. The reason your child gets admitted should be because of his or her efforts and accomplishments. By turning over the process to people who hardly know your child, you risk removing the child’s voice, thereby diminishing the success that he or she has achieved through his or her own efforts.

Perhaps a bit of history might be helpful. The profession of independent counseling came into existence as the result of inadequate counseling resources at public high schools. There was a clear need for students and their families to find information about the college process outside of school. But some independent counselors soon learned that there was money to be made in counseling more affluent families who could afford to pay large sums for personal attention. The profession grew even further when it became clear that families were ready to hire on if these independent counselors could tap into the nerve of parental guilt and social pressure.

“If one college counselor is good, two must be better!”

“If I don’t pay for an independent counselor, I am not supporting my child.”

“Our neighbors have hired a private counselor, so we’d better do it, too.”

“Everything I’ve heard in the news suggests that our child won’t get into college without the help of college coaching.”

“I don’t know anything about the college search process, so we need help!”

For parents with children in private schools, the extra attention and individualized approach, which includes the relationship your child develops with an experienced admission professional, is what some of your tuition is paying for. For those of you with children in public schools, especially large ones, it may be harder to find the same personal attention, but, regardless, the school your child attends is the one with the academic and support personnel dedicated to working with your child throughout the winter and spring of junior year right through to graduation a year later.

School counselors can function in a way that independent counselors cannot. They have full access to school records, teachers, and coaches. They are the source contacted when a college has a question about an applicant. They write the recommendations that most colleges require. Most important, they know the students!

But there are reasons why a family might consider employing an independent counselor. They include a high student-to-counselor ratio, the absence of college counselors and/or college search resources and programs in the school, learning differences (which can vary tremendously from school to school and child to child), Division I and II athletic recruitment, or severe organizational problems with the student or the family.

Whichever direction you choose, based on your child, his or her goals, the school’s counseling reputation, and your financial resources, you must try your best to ensure that your child is not caught in the middle of what she is told by the independent counselor and by her school’s college counselor. You must also steer clear of allowing an independent counselor to package essays and other responses in a way that makes your child’s own voice lost in the final submission. Even worse, do not burden your child with keeping it a secret that he or she is working with an independent counselor. If you do employ an outside counselor, keep the lines of communication open between that person and your school counselor. Having these counselors work in cooperation with each other is in the best interest of your child.

The college admission process is not a contest to be won or a consumer commodity to be bought. As with all things, the college process is an educational journey for your child, one that, with the help of whatever college counselors you work with, will teach your child how to research, make choices, come to know herself, develop lifelong skills that will serve her well, and attain a well-deserved sense of pride and accomplishment when she is offered admission and selects the college of her choice.

However, one caveat worth adding is that you should help your child and the counselor try to find a “hook” that will help differentiate your child from all the other applicants for each spot in the class to which they are applying. It can be athletics, music, theater, or an outside-of-school activity, such as holding down a job to help out with the family income. It really doesn’t matter what it is, but it does help for the college to be able to differentiate your child from the others because of your child’s individual “hook.” The guidance counselor, or whoever writes the recommendations, should know about that as well.

When Parents Can’t Let Go

Michael Thompson, coauthor of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys and author of Homesick and Happy: How Time Away From Parents Can Help a Child Grow, discovered during his research that there has been a huge drop in summer-camp attendance over the past generation, and that an increasing number of parents are instead choosing weeklong, skills-based camps. What he found was that those parents who do opt for a longer overnight camp scenario are struggling to say goodbye to their kids. In an earlier generation, the camp would give the children a postcard each week to send home, but in this era some camps provide a constantly updated stream of online photos for these “child-sick” parents.

If parents can’t bear to send their kids away to summer camp, and need to keep constant tabs on them when they do, how will they manage when their kids grow up and go to college? Are all the children who left their parents a tearful mess at home now commuting to local community colleges because they feel guilty leaving their parents at home alone? Do children who go away to the college of their parents’ choice have their parents rent a house close to their campus so that they can stay in touch more easily, that is, help with their homework and laundry and meals? Hopefully not. If those kids are smart, they’ll gently remind their parents to live their own lives and let them live theirs. A compromise would be to put a picture of your child’s graduation picture on the refrigerator door or use it as a screensaver on your computer.

But many kids have no such luck, so by the time they leave for college, after having been suffocated, managed, supervised, and maneuvered for their entire childhood, they are out of control as soon as they set foot on campus. They are on their own for the very first time, with no idea what to do or how to monitor or control their behavior. It’s akin to watching a child left alone in a candy store with no adult supervision or young men on their first leave from military boot camp. They go wild.

“Every fall,” reports a University of Virginia professor, “parents drop off their well-groomed freshmen, and within two or three days many have consumed a dangerous amount of alcohol and placed themselves in harm’s way. These kids have been controlled for so long, they just go crazy.”

Some parents continue overparenting well into their child’s college years by paying for their kids to hire tutors to help them study. Even worse, parents have been known to pay to have their child’s papers written for them. In some cases, the college student will hire someone on his or her own, without parental consent. That’s what a credit card with unlimited spending and no review of the charges can do. The mistake in either scenario is obvious, but what might the collateral damage be to that child who graduates college with a degree earned entirely by someone else? What kind of moral code does that child have to carry with him for the rest of his life? If any of this sounds at all suspicious, simply check Craigslist on any given day under the “education” heading, and you’ll see proof of this illicit industry. The offerings advertise for teachers, writers, and other types of “educators” who are looking to get hired to write papers for undergraduate, graduate, and advanced-level degree students. Is it any wonder that many of these young adults cannot function in a real job, where they are expected to meet someone else’s expectations besides those of their parents?

Are some of the current ethical issues that we see in the financial industry a result of this kind of behavior? A student who was recently kicked out of Harvard Law School for falsifying his schoolwork changed his name, went to business school, and was working in finance when he was found to have used illegal insider information to game the system. Was this young man a victim of overparenting?

The Effects of Overparenting on College Graduates

The economic recession of 2008 has had continuing residual effects for many recent college graduates and their families. More and more American college graduates are planning to return to their hometown and move back in with their parents. This is surprising, given the American tradition of kids leaving home as a rite of passage. However, many parents haven’t seemed to mind their kids’ returning to the family nest. Even though economic circumstances have precipitated much of this, when parents take their kids back into the fold so easily, they are delaying their eventual exit and risking a certain level of arrested development.

Children moving back home can be viewed as a financial safety net for the more than three million so-called “boomerang children” in the United States. But when these short-term stays turn into extended stays, is that a good thing, and is overparenting to blame? Experts disagree on whether the boomerang trend is a good thing, but statistics imply a generational uptick in dependence on parents over the long haul. In 2011, a public opinion poll found that 50 percent of forty-six- to fifty-six-year-old moms financially assisted their adult children, whereas 85 percent of those moms had established financial independence for themselves by twenty-five years of age.13

“Whenever possible, it’s better for children to live at home for a little longer and become moderately spoiled,” says a European-raised mom, now living in Shaker Heights, Ohio. “It is easier to support yourself through school by living with your parents, and, besides, I love getting to make my son’s bed again for him.” Is this what you want for your twenty-five-year-old?

How does all of this play out for young adults in their twenties and thirties? For parents who have been inclined to overdo it with their kids while raising them, who’s to say that they won’t continue this behavior with their kids now that they are much older? Parents are still overdoing it with twenty- to thirty-year-old kids. They’ve been known to go on job interviews with their children, and orchestrate aggressive follow-ups to these meetings. One lawyer responsible for hiring new law school graduates at her firm said that she likes to hire “those who can cope with the everyday demands of our office. Of course, we prefer someone with good grades, but we’re always looking for a person who is well-rounded, relative to the quality of their school, someone who can get along with others, think on their feet, and bounce back quickly from any adversity.” Obviously, this firm would not be interested in a candidate whose mother accompanies him to the job interview, although that has been known to happen.

Does that “someone” sound like a child who grew up overparented? It’s doubtful that many of the children cited here will find lasting success in demanding jobs and/or relationships. At least, it will take them more time to find their way, because overparenting has compromised their development in many key areas. This is not just limited to their career path. It can manifest itself in relationships, where fears of commitment are common, open communication is lacking, and self-esteem is a tenuous affair. None of these conditions, perhaps instigated by an ongoing fear of failure going back to childhood, are conducive to developing healthy relationships that honor commitment and responsibility.

How Overparenting Affects You as a Parent

Children, teachers, and coaches aren’t the only ones who pay a price when subjected to overparenting. Parents may lose the most, after all. A mother or father who spends an inordinate amount of time devoted to his or her children may end up with no life of his or her own. Even worse, these parents may experience perpetual angst and guilt from feeling that their children will never survive without them. Or, they may fool themselves into the illusion of being in control (just a false sense of security) of their children’s lives, and, thus, of being in control of their own lives. Throw in a rollercoaster of guilt, doubt, and insecurity as their children grow up and leave the nest, and who knows what shape a parent may be in when facing their golden years? Overparenting, while tolerated by children when they are young, takes its biggest toll on parents when it compromises their relationships with their grown children. This is often perpetuated by parents who lavish their kids with expensive cars or even houses that the children could not afford on their own, and then feel resentful when the (adult) child seems unappreciative or angry at them. It is as if they are trying to make one more effort to stay in control and manage everything. And they miss out on some of the best aspects of parenting, as the following story illustrates.

“It is one of the ironies of life,” says Paul of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, “but also very true, I guess, that just when you get what you want, you may not really want it, after all. My son, Jack, was a nutcase as an adolescent, and it seemed like forever until he finished middle school and high school and was ready to go to college. There were times that I felt like one of those guys in prison who was marking the days off on a wall calendar. Then, just before he left, we spent a long weekend together and really enjoyed each other, and I missed him quite badly when he left. All those years I had been there for him, and even though he never showed it, I know now that it meant something to him, and that means everything to me. Sometimes, we don’t know the positive effect we have on our children just by hanging around. It’s as if we try too hard most of the time because our kids basically function fine without us, as long as we are there.”

Choosing a Different Path

More and more parents are resisting the urge to overparent their children and instead are following a path from early on to ensure their child’s autonomy. These parents are not rattled by the thought of their child falling from a tree or even breaking a bone in the process because they believe that children need the freedom to explore and learn from their efforts, even if they involve risk.

But as we have stated again and again, along with those risks come subsequent rewards, including newfound creativity, physical exercise, and the sense of empowerment that a child can get from learning something new, all by himself, without the benefit of an adult’s helping hands. Children who are given the opportunity to play outdoors unsupervised or to walk or ride a bicycle to school or a friend’s house will develop a sense of responsibility, self-esteem, and self-sufficiency. Parents who provide their kids this opening are not negligent, reckless, or uncaring. Most often, they are choosing to create what they consider to be an ideal atmosphere for raising their children. These parents, when they get past the initial anxiety of allowing their children to take the little steps toward independence, also develop a good feeling of having done the right thing as they watch their children flourish. That is very different than manipulating your children to remain dependent on you, which may make you feel very important and central to their lives but will also have the effect of crippling them.

The “Free-Range Kids” movement is a term coined by writer and columnist Lenore Skenazy, whose manifesto on the subject has attracted considerable attention. Skenazy, an op-ed columnist, came into the public eye back in 2008 when she wrote a column about allowing her then-nine-year-old son to ride the New York City subway alone.

“I let him do this because he wanted to take a trip solo, he knew how to read the map, and I had every confidence that he could find his way home,” she wrote at the time. “The mere fact that I’d let my son out of my sight made me seem nuts to more than a few people, who wondered why didn’t I follow him, or keep checking in with a cell phone, or wait until he was thirty-four and balding before I let him go out on his own.”

The backlash continued, which only proved how far the pendulum had swung toward overparenting. A poll on the NBC website asked whether any other viewers would let their kids do what Skenazy had done with hers. Fifty-one percent said no, 20 percent were undecided, and about one-third took Skenazy’s side.

Just a generation ago, allowing a child to ride alone on the subway was not considered to be dangerous. Should it be thought of as a threat for that child now, when, according to Congressional Quarterly’s 2011 report, New York City has the third-lowest crime rate in America among cities with populations over five hundred thousand? In 2008, the year Skenazy’s son rode that train by himself, New York City was ranked 136th in crime overall.14

“What my son did is something a whole lot of other city kids do daily,” she added, “their mothers are just smart enough not to write about it. I could even add that, believe it or not, I’m a safety fanatic when it comes to helmets and seatbelts.”

But children can’t wear helmets or seatbelts everywhere they go. Whether you agree with Lenore Skenazy or not, there’s no question that we must reconsider the restrictions we choose to place on our children and recognize that at some point they will have to move forward on their own, just as we did once upon a time.