Reading the chapter, Reading the chapter, I got thinking about involvement, disengagement, and the phenomenon of the helicopter parents.  Aristotle makes much of balance, with his telos (endedness, orientation) and the Golden Mean idea.  For him, proportion in all areas of study mattered.  So Aristotle is boring to read, but powerful in some ways.

He would probably classify parents into many types.  The typical one has been the following: Authoritarian, laissez-faire, and authoritative.  So it’s harsh, lenient, and a mixture. Of course, the oversimplification is problematic, but there it is.  So in this situation, where might those infamous helicopter parents exist?  They could be any of those three, right?  Named after the famous Time 2009 article linked above, these are problematic figures.

I know of parents who even try to barge into their kids’ classrooms and have principal-created plans that gradually wean them off coming in.  Sort of like psychological approaches to extinction and behavior, I suppose. . .

There are parents who viciously complain if the math is beyond them–to say nothing of the fact that their kids are learning the content from their teacher.

So over-involvement is an issue.  Hovering in some of the schools can lead to those parents who lobby over every grade, browbeat guidance counselors and teachers, and live vicariously through their kids on stage and athletic field.

Some see their children as investments.  Given college costs, this is not entirely ridiculous.  And I know parents who put on the pressure to get their elementary kids into the right schools or with the right teachers.  These things matter to those parents, but the thing is, they know how to leverage things to get what they want.

Slow change over time often is not noticed, so some of you are young enough always to have lived like this, but it’s noticeable for others of us.  This idea that parents would lobby hard is something that used to be confined to graduating seniors and pushing them “across the finish line,” but now it’s pervasive.  Parents now typically try and use open houses to have special conference time with teachers.  That’s not the purpose of those nights.  They quite often feel entitled to question the content and methods of the teacher, bypassing any direct contact and going right to superintendents.  And, yes, they do hand hold to the extreme–at least some of them.

–You know how we sometimes hear that a violent few people are responsible for a disproportionate number of crimes in a given area?  (I don’t mean a racial minority at all–I mean that, among a group of 500 criminals, it might be that 9 of them are responsible for 84% of the violence.)  Well, with helicopter parents, they make themselves known and are tough to forget. . . they use social media to squawk about anything.  They are the disproportionate black hole sucking in one’s energy and time.