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walkitoutA friend of mine loves reading the FB parents post for his kid’s college, because Parents Do the Darndest Things. Journalists know that there’s a lot of parent interest in launching their offspring in college, and so they publish annual articles on the topic, some of them around “helicopter parenting” a phrase I 100% loathe.
For the record, I’ve never been in my son’s dorm. I see him when he chooses to come visit my house, or when I miss him and invite him to meet me for dinner, which most recently happened on Tuesday. It was prompted in part by the fact I hadn’t seen him for weeks and people were asking me how he was doing. He used the GPS monitoring app to see whether I was on the way and if so where, but I’d screwed up and switched it to my iPad from my phone, so he couldn’t see where I was so he called to ask when I was 2 minutes late and about a third of a mile away. I have rock solid I Am Not a Helicopter Parent credentials. I don’t hate this shit because it hits close to home. Regular readers know that my son applied to college over my preferences (I wanted him to do a super senior year in high school, and he wanted to go drive around in the rain at rush hour and look at colleges from the road shortly after getting his driver’s license. I said absolutely not, and he went upstairs to his room and applied to several colleges online in a fit of pique. One of them accepted him and he attends there and is consistently on the deans list. We are all very proud of him, obviously, if a little confused.)
With that disclaimer, when the usa today version of this article was sent to me this morning, I responded with links to annual coverage of the same author’s book starting around 2015, continuing to the pandemic, etc. And then I saw from last year the coverage of her stepping down from committees in Palo Alto, in the wake of an autostraddle piece.
https://www.autostraddle.com/i-had-an-affair-with-my-college-dean/
And then I spent some time on her wikipedia page (not the author, the former dean with the obnoxious book and relentless annual coverage).
And then I realized the timeline.
So. Dean has a relationship with a student. Bad. Husband knows, doesn’t do anything to stop her from being horribly inappropriate and stays with her. Worse. Shades of MZB, gender flipped. Student eventually tells people (boyfriend, then parents) — talking about this stuff is really important, because that’s how we develop some perspective, and suppressing talking to protect the person who is behaving badly is one of the many bad aspects of these relationships, and mother complains to school. Dean loses job.
THEN dean writes book. THEN dean is annually everywhere telling parents to Back the Fuck Off.
Oh. Really.
How much of the talk about helicopter parenting is part of a larger grooming campaign. How. Much.
I really hate the “helicopter parenting” trope. I just hate it. Yes, parents do need to share decision making with their offspring. No, you do not need to throw the people you love out in the cold in the name of “independence”.
For the record, I’ve never been in my son’s dorm. I see him when he chooses to come visit my house, or when I miss him and invite him to meet me for dinner, which most recently happened on Tuesday. It was prompted in part by the fact I hadn’t seen him for weeks and people were asking me how he was doing. He used the GPS monitoring app to see whether I was on the way and if so where, but I’d screwed up and switched it to my iPad from my phone, so he couldn’t see where I was so he called to ask when I was 2 minutes late and about a third of a mile away. I have rock solid I Am Not a Helicopter Parent credentials. I don’t hate this shit because it hits close to home. Regular readers know that my son applied to college over my preferences (I wanted him to do a super senior year in high school, and he wanted to go drive around in the rain at rush hour and look at colleges from the road shortly after getting his driver’s license. I said absolutely not, and he went upstairs to his room and applied to several colleges online in a fit of pique. One of them accepted him and he attends there and is consistently on the deans list. We are all very proud of him, obviously, if a little confused.)
With that disclaimer, when the usa today version of this article was sent to me this morning, I responded with links to annual coverage of the same author’s book starting around 2015, continuing to the pandemic, etc. And then I saw from last year the coverage of her stepping down from committees in Palo Alto, in the wake of an autostraddle piece.
https://www.autostraddle.com/i-had-an-affair-with-my-college-dean/
And then I spent some time on her wikipedia page (not the author, the former dean with the obnoxious book and relentless annual coverage).
And then I realized the timeline.
So. Dean has a relationship with a student. Bad. Husband knows, doesn’t do anything to stop her from being horribly inappropriate and stays with her. Worse. Shades of MZB, gender flipped. Student eventually tells people (boyfriend, then parents) — talking about this stuff is really important, because that’s how we develop some perspective, and suppressing talking to protect the person who is behaving badly is one of the many bad aspects of these relationships, and mother complains to school. Dean loses job.
THEN dean writes book. THEN dean is annually everywhere telling parents to Back the Fuck Off.
Oh. Really.
How much of the talk about helicopter parenting is part of a larger grooming campaign. How. Much.
I really hate the “helicopter parenting” trope. I just hate it. Yes, parents do need to share decision making with their offspring. No, you do not need to throw the people you love out in the cold in the name of “independence”.