STANFORD (US): Invariably, when I would tell people that for the past eight months I have lived apart from my husband and twenty-something children while on a fellowship at Stanford University, I would be asked how often I called home. Inevitably, when I would say, “Oh, every week or two,” a semi-stunned look would cross the questioner’s face. The subject would be quickly dropped, but for me an aftertaste would linger as I wondered if there was something wrong with my relationships or with me.
That is, until I realised the luxury I was afforded — the simple luxury to be alone. The very word has taken on creepy and scary overtones, but in truth being alone means being on your own. And that truly is a wondrous thing.
It’s a realisation I have come to from watching the students who surround me on Stanford’s campus. These young men and women are some of America’s most able, smart and ambitious, with prosperous futures awaiting them. I am in awe of them, and I have delighted in their company. Yet I feel a sadness for them, because many don’t seem to be living their lives on their own but rather trying to live up to the ideas their parents have for them.
Take the young woman I met last fall in a beginning golf class. Set to graduate this spring, she was enrolled in golf because she figured it would help her in the business world.
Of course, as she admitted to me, she really didn’t want to go into business. What she wanted to do was to be a teacher, but she knew her parents would be disappointed if she did that. “Maybe,” she said, “I could do a couple years of corporate and then teach.”
Or listen to the lament of the creative-writing professor about how his most talented students are engineering or science majors who won’t for a minute consider developing and pursuing their considerable writing skills because of the expectations of parents.
The most ubiquitous symbol of parental control in the lives of these college students is the cellphone. Walk in the bookstore at the start of an academic quarter, and you will overhear students consulting Mom over whether it makes more sense to buy used books or new.
Listen as classes break up, and you will hear students summarising, in calls home, the lectures they just heard. And, of course, no day can be complete without a review of the food eaten that day.
Julie Lythcott-Haims, dean of freshmen and transfer students at Stanford, said that such instances are fast becoming the norm.
She recently asked a small group of students how often they talked to their parents. Half said every day, with one student admitting she was in touch with home three times a day.
Lythcott-Haims, who worries that students will fail to develop the skills to live independently, told the troubling story of a young woman who, unsure of the location of one of her classes, called her mother in another time zone — for help.
The phenomenon is not unique to Stanford. A recent national survey by College Parents of America, based in Arlington, found that three out of four college parents are in touch ‘two to three times a week’ with their children, with more than one in three communicating daily.
Psychologists have adopted a phrase for these people: helicopter parents, because they hover over the lives of their children.
The media have chronicled the more outlandish tales. And university and college officials across the country have tried to lay down guidelines telling parents how to let up and let go.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service
