The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015)

E.g., one year:

Me: requests A and B

Friend: requests A and non-honors B

hour 4: Me in non-honors B; friend in gym.

hour 5 (only hour honors B is offered): Me in A; friend in honros B.

Based on a few years of observations, I'm almost certain courses were filled using some variant of this algorithm:

    for each student s sorted by student number:
        for each non-filled course c in hour 1..n:
           if(s wants c and not in c): assign s to c and continue to next hour.
        for each non-filled course c in hour 1..n:
           if(s wants c' and not in c' and c is like c'): assign s to c and continue to next hour.

Things got better each year but never in a way that would suggest someone finally decided to pick up an algorithms textbook.

I suspect by now they've purchased something that works or else managed to prove P=NP and the solution is billions of if statements fixing special cases the teachers/students complained loudly enough about...

As a parent, I think that teachers should pay attention to research on homework that says there is on average no academic benefit, but there is a huge cost in family conflict. You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time. Free family time up for what parents see best.

When I was 5-10, a typical day for me was spent alone or with friends outside, from sun up to down, with zero adult supervision. There wouldn't even be an adult who knew where I was going or where I was. They simply gave me the responsibility of returning home before the sun went down, and over those years I always did, mostly because I was hungry. The only exception was one day when I traveled too far, realized too late that the sun was going down, and collapsed from exhaustion trying to get home. My family searched for and found me during twilight. I learned valuable lessons that day.

I recently looked up my childhood home on Google Maps to see how far I would go, and I would regularly travel within about a 3-mile radius. The surrounding area was heavily wooded and mostly vacant.

I would see a black bear probably once a month. My parents just told me to make noise as I traveled, to keep them scared off of my position. I knew never to play with their cubs. I knew never to run from them. I knew to stand ground and be loud and aggressive if I was ever approached or charged by one.

I fell off my bike and skinned my knees probably 40 or 50 times. I have many memories of limping my bike home on foot for a mile while sobbing in pain, and then squeezing my dad's hand as hard as I could while he poured hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol over my bleeding knee. Every time this happened, he would just tell me I was going to heal up fast and get right back on the bike.

A common route for me was to ride my bike along the side of the highway a few miles to a corner store so I could buy chips or candy, or visit a waitress my family knew at a local breakfast spot for some free eggs. Nobody ever stopped their car and tried to "rescue" me. The people at the shops knew how I got there, they were not concerned.

When I was about 10, my family moved to a rich white suburb outside a major city. Their policy of letting me be independent and go wherever I wanted unsupervised continued, but in this new town I was regularly approached by adults asking if I was lost, strangers asking where my parents were, and adults on golf carts with walkie-talkies reprimanding me and sending me home for no particular reason.

I found their concern for my well-being incredibly insulting. I was insulted that they thought I couldn't handle myself, and later I was insulted by the way I realized they were judging my family and my parents. As a result, I was downright rude to a lot of them, and kind of earned a negative reputation. Ended up getting blamed for a lot of vandalism despite never vandalizing anything, and causing problems between my family and other local families, simply by locals assigning blame to me for all kinds of things based purely on my reputation of being out unsupervised a lot and being rude to certain adults.

So I got a taste of both worlds just by moving. I don't think the problem of over-parenting is restricted to time and trend. I think it has a strong geographical and cultural component, too. I suspect that if I went back to my hometown, I might still find kids unsupervised, riding their bikes and skinning their knees in the summer. I've also heard from people outside the country that this helicopter parenting thing seems to be largely restricted to the US.