Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation • Hacker News Board

Re: Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

#131

Post by vacri » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:27 PM UTC

m_fayer wrote: post #13

The idea that "today's youth" are more fragile than the youth of yore seems to be a growing meme. I do believe that there is a rise in mental health issues among young adults, but there are many potentially interacting causes. I haven't read the book in question, but I hope that anyone who tackles this subject addresses all the possibly relevant social phenomena before pinning it all on one root cause. Some things I…

Economics isn't responsible for lack of resilience. There have been plenty of severe economic climates before, and we haven't seen the same issues from those. Having all your money go on shelter and food, and having to share housing... these things are not new. They're also seen all over the world right now. It's really not harsh economics - more likely it is the lack of resilience from things like helicopter parenting that makes life stressors like economics have more effect.

And even though there are problems like climate change, every generation has it's problems. Billy Joel got so sick of his generation being blamed for everything by the next generation, he wrote a song about it - way back in 1989! "We Didn't Start The Fire" is a song listing scandal afteer scandal, issue after issue, showing that this stuff has always been happening. Climate change wasn't the issue back in the 80s - instead it was things like Mutually Assured Destruction. There's always something. We need to stop making excuses like "it's current affairs issue X".

Re: Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

#132

Post by ThomPete » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:28 PM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #120

terda12 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up with parents who worked all the time and barely took part in their childrens lives. We cook dinner by ourselves a majority of the time. My 10 year old brother has to mow the lawn and do his own laundry. We get yelled at all the time like in the first column of the comics. At first I felt mad for it but now I'm realizing the benefits. I can take care of myself so well. I can cook, I keep my room clean, and I…

What you wrote makes no logical sense. It's simply confirmation bias. > My 21 year old friend has had his parents take a big part in his life. He has upper middle class parents who watch his every move, sign him up for SAT tutors, force him to take piano lessons. Has no clue how to cook, found freshman year comp sci too hard and switched to communications Having parents who take a big part of your life has no bearing…

Most things just take practice especially being a human being.

The point — I think — is not that you become superman by being able to cook yourself. The point is that helicopter parents are wrong in thinking that they are doing their kids a favor by being constantly there for them.

Whatever their motives are they are not putting them in a better position in the long run. It's more an attempt to control the destiny of their childs future by controlling it for as long as they can.

Re: Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

#133

Post by morgante » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:28 PM UTC

wfo wrote: post #90

Dean complains about helicopter parents at Stanford and yet admissions essentially requires incoming students have helicopter parents. To get into a school like this you need to be exclusively focused on exactly the arbitrary criteria that will get you accepted into a school like this -- grades in the "right" classes, enough sports to talk about it in an essay but not too much, extracurricular and volunteer work at t…

I don't agree that helicopter parenting is anywhere near a prerequisite.

In fact, amongst my peers it seems to have been the reverse. The kids with over-involved parents were the ones who ended up seeming too "cookie-cutter" and ended up going to "second-tier" universities.

The hypothesis of helicopter parenting being a prerequisite for elite admissions also seems to be undermined by the consistent success of boarding schools in college admissions. It's a lot harder to be a helicopter parent when your kids are hundreds-thousands of miles away.

Re: Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

#134

Post by oh_sigh » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

ryanmonroe wrote: post #24

munin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista here's an important question to ask yourself: if you had to choose, would you rather your children be kind, or smart?

A kind idiot probably isn't of much use to society

Sure they are. They won't be inventing new devices or running successful businesses, but they will probably enrich the lives of anyone in their social circle

Re: Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

#135

Post by walterclifford » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

awl130 wrote: post #45

please don't post these asinine articles here. there is not even an attempt to furnish data to back up any of its claims, including: (a) are parents today more involved in student's lives? where's the data besides anecdotal? (b) are children today less prepared for life? where's the data? and (c) are these causal?

> please don't post these asinine articles here

HN's guidelines state Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

#136

Post by api » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:30 PM UTC

In many cases failure to helicopter parent is a crime. If a minor under, say, 14 or 15 is caught without an adult their parents can be cited for neglect.

Re: Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

#137

Post by m_fayer » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:33 PM UTC

zkhalique wrote: post #116

klunger wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It is like that old adage, "Behind every great man, there is a great woman." For the modern era, it should perhaps now be, "behind every top-tier university student, there is a helicopter parent". It takes so much to get into one of these schools now that it seems impossible for any child without extensive support.

Perhaps, following sentiments of Peter Thiel and others, it's not necessary to get into an elite school today, in order to succeed. If it was, then good education and success would still be scarce in today's world, as most people can't afford to go to Harvard, Stanford, etc. Now we have MOOCs an schools can become centers for socializing, tutoring and testing. A great teacher can educate more than 300 people a year t…

If you're a parent then, your decision looks like:

Let your kid be a kid and bank on society having advanced far enough to allow success without a big-brand school on your CV. Barring that, hope your kid will be driven/creative/wily enough to make do without that stamp of approval.

Or, take the "safe" route and go full helicopter-parent, and give your children the best possible guarantee of success in the world as it currently stands.

That's a brutal decision to have to make.

Re: Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

#138

Post by cthalupa » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:33 PM UTC

seiji wrote: post #84

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today's environment is extremely competitive and the margin for error is lower. The margin for error is enormous, compared to previous generations. The probability that a mistake in life will lead you to die of starvation or cold is smaller than ever. What I think is happening is that global communication is leading to increased status neurosis. Before, you could compare your kids to the neighbors'. Now you can com…

Margin of error: go to Stanford, make the right connections, become a billionaire in 8 years versus go to a state school and work for the billionaires while making 1/5000th to 1/150000th as much as they do, yet you're doing all the work that makes them richer.

Stanford has 27 billionaire alumni. At any given time, there are ~15,000 students studying at Stanford.

Getting the top 10 schools for creating billionaires, it accounts for 206 total. (Though this number also includes Cambridge, and I'm not sure if the 11 billionaire alumni from there are part of the same 500ish US billionaires)

Out of the 500ish billionaires in the US, nearly 100 of them have no degree at all.

So, these top schools produce about double the amount of billionaires that zero degrees do, and roughly the same number as the rest of the schools combined.

This is such a relatively small sample size and there are so many factors in play here that it would be silly to draw any sort of strong conclusion from this, but even going with shoddy science on this and playing fast and loose, we can see that while, yes, you do gain an advantage in the 'become a billionaire' game, it's still a ridiculously insignificant chance, and the population of billionaires without a degree or with a degree from a school not known for producing billionaires is still higher.

All of this to say: There ain't no easy path to billionairehood besides being born one, and getting in to Stanford or any other school does not increase your chances of becoming one to a statistically significant number.

Re: Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

#139

Post by ChuckMcM » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

Perhaps obviously I resonant with her message, not letting your kids stand on their own, gives them weak legs. But as a parent I am viscerally aware of how hard it is to watch your child make bad choices.

From the parents perspective looking backwards through time they "see" how something today will have huge repurcussions later. Nobody can stand by and watch their child turn down a dark alley filled with hazards.

So what to do? Find ways to teach your kids failure is the step toward success early in life. Let them work out things for themselves, talk with them about how they went about it. And most importantly start early. As kids get older their ability to completely screw up their life goes up exponentially.

I don't think anyone who is not a parent can internalize how hard it is to do.

Re: Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

#140

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

riffraff wrote: post #81

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today's environment is extremely competitive and the margin for error is lower. The margin for error is enormous, compared to previous generations. The probability that a mistake in life will lead you to die of starvation or cold is smaller than ever. What I think is happening is that global communication is leading to increased status neurosis. Before, you could compare your kids to the neighbors'. Now you can com…

> What I think is happening is that global communication is leading to increased status neurosis. A thousand times this. There is also a growing body of research[0] that shows that social media make you feel worse cause you are exposed to a selection of what's good in other people's life. I suspect the same often applies to TV. [0] which I have not read further than the news reports, so might be total bullshit, cavea…

It's all global media. Even colorful lifestyle magazines. Those celebrities you read about are carefully selected top N of 7 billion people. The chance of meeting any single person like that in one's neighbourhood is practically zero for a normal human being, yet you treat them as next-door neighbours in terms of comparing yourself to them, because media hijacks the availability heuristic. That effect is a reason why I start to think mass media is doing more harm than good to humans (a lot of ways in which general population turns batshit insane can be attributed to availability heuristic).