Our daughter is headed off to college this fall. She recently received an email from a dean, which she forwarded to her mother and me. It deals with where she’ll be living, her various advisors, and, in a “closing note,” “Move-in Day.”
The dean explains that for some parents dropping their child off at college is an enormously emotional rite of passage - and not entirely joyful. The dean suggests that in-coming students talk with their parents about “this new phase” of their relationship, and discuss not just being dropped off at college, but also how and how often they should communicate during the first semester away from home. The dean’s advice that students mail handwritten letters home is a stroke of genius; they “will be,” as she writes, “received with joy and kept forever” by most parents, but especially by doting, clinging parents. Then she adds, “Daily cell phone calls may produce a relationship with the folks at home from which you may eventually find it hard to extricate yourself.” The cell phone has been called the world’s longest umbilical cord.
Clearly experience has taught college administrators that such counsel is needed. Some parents are overly controlling and overly protective of their children, and excessively present physically. We know them now as helicopter parents, or as they’re called at one Ivy League college, snowplow parents. In Scandinavia they’re called curling parents, after the person who, in the sport of curling, sweeps feverishly in front of the stone as it slides down the ice to reduce friction so that the stone ends up exactly where the curler wants it to. I like the name “curling parents” better than “helicopter parents“; helicopters merely hover; curlers really get in there and try to exert their influence!
Perhaps because those metaphorical nicknames are comparatively new, we think of helicopter or curling parents as a recent phenomenon, and perhaps they are more numerous now than in previous decades.
But they are not new. Two notable helicopter parents were the mothers of Franklin Roosevelt and General Douglas MacArthur. FDR’s doting and controlling mother rented a house in Boston to be closer to him when he was at Harvard. After he and Eleanor were married, she built two adjoining houses – one for them and one for herself - with lockless doors linking the two houses on every floor.
When Douglas MacArthur went to West Point as a cadet, his mother took up residence at the Military Academy’s hotel and lived there for four years. From her window she could see the lamp in her son’s room and tell whether he was studying. Over the years that followed, she repeatedly wrote letters to influential people advocating for his promotion.
Throughout their lives both FDR and MacArthur struggled to free themselves of maternal influence.
Dropping our daughter off at college this fall will be exciting, fun, and poignant; and we’ll look forward to her coming home for holidays, but I don’t think we’ll be in a helicopter – or sporting a curling broom.
