Hovering

My email box greets me daily with a few subscription-type notices.  One I particularly enjoy is the e-magazine from my daughter's college, titled BU Today.  It goes inside campus life, both academic and social, with small, detailed views of interesting happenings. It offers quick little bites making the large community more reachable (at least to me). Today's edition contained a video segment called "You Speak" showing students replying to the question: Do you have helicopter parents, and if so, what do they do to keep tabs on you?” http://www.bu.edu/today/node/11571

Predictably, the less than two minute video of brief responses offers a broad glimpse into some students' unvarnished opinions about the amount of parental contact they receive. Between texting, email, and phone calls, reaching out and touching is more like a knee jerk reaction than a planned date on the calendar. Instantaneous gratification - today we expect it and yet we have to harness it as our college age kids work without a net.  It makes me think - do I hover?  Is the fact that I subscribe to the e-magazine for daily updates from school indirect hovering?  Can you hear the whirring of the helicopter blades? 

It makes me chuckle to recall communication with home or friends while I was in college.  The pay phone (I think it was a touch-tone but perhaps a rotary phone) at the end of the dorm hallway was used to call the outside world.  It seems strangely out of touch to consider the unpredictable nature of making or receiving a call to or from home. When the phone rang, some student who happened to be walking by or whose room was nearest to the phone would answer, check the intended call recipient's dorm room and leave a message about the call on the dorm room white board. The pony express seems quicker. My parents couldn't hover even if they wanted to.  I wonder if they knew what a blessing those pay phones really were?

Sandy Hingston, Sr. Editor at Philadelphia Magazine, ends her ten year reign as the voice of the Loco Parentis column this month.  While she will continue her work at the magazine, the editor's column has been, to use a little old publishing terminology,  put to bed.  As her son heads off to his first year of college and her daughter continues with her study abroad, Sandy gives us one more very real, often humorous, always poignant look at her family life through her well polished parenting prism. 
http://www.phillymag.com/articles/loco_parentis_moving_day/ Readers feel as though they know her kids because, well, we've been reading about them for ten years - but thankfully not in a gnawing, endless boast.  She is direct, simple, easy. I wonder, does Sandy Hingston hover?  How well adjusted must her kids be to know that their knucklehead antics, successes, failures, are all fodder for the column? That's one question I would love to have answered. Sandy makes me feel good about my daily BU Today interest.  I love her style.

While visiting colleges a couple of years ago, I was struck by how many admissions office representatives included in their "tips for college" repertoire reminders that parents should not be contacting professors about their child's grades. At first, I smugly snickered at such a preposterous idea.  But I then thought about the simplicity of a school district's online grade book system that makes it easy to check my elementary, middle, and high school student's status regarding every class assignment, test, quiz, project - anytime.  Feeding parents at the banquet of up-to-date grade results probably has nurtured the sometimes ravenous need for academic information. It also explains the need to tell parents the days of talking to the teacher are over. 

I recall one mother in a room of several hundred parents of college freshman vehemently questioning the dean during orientation about the practice of all college communication going only to her child, including grades and financial information. Included in his delicately worded incisive reply, the dean reminded the parent that the college accepted the child, not the parent. The rotors on that helicopter were duly clipped!

The dearth of parenting advice regarding how much or how little attention children should receive overwhelms while it informs. It can be exhausting. In her ample article titled "All Joy, No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting," New York Magazine writer Jennifer Senior addresses how parents feel about the job of raising kids.  http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/  She notes, "Children may provide unrivaled moments of joy. But they also provide unrivaled moments of frustration, tedium, anxiety, heartbreak...This makes it perfectly clear why parenting may be regarded as less fun than having dinner with friends or baking a cake. Loving one’s children and loving the act of parenting are not the same thing." Parenting - it's not for sissies.  Transforming parental love from being a director into being a guiding light - now that is magic.

I have read my share of "Now that your child is going to college" type articles. If degrees were conferred for overzealous interest in a subject, I think I could state that I have achieved some credits toward a 'Masters of Science and Art in Letting Go" on my resume.

The science involves survival. It's the rational desire to give your child the tools they need to be in the world. 

The art, however,  involves more elusive efficiency.  It's the trust you feel that your child has access to both roots and wings on their everyday journey.  

Sandy Hingston says it best at her column's conclusion as she considers her children from afar. "They can’t quit me. They were inside me once. Now I’m inside them." 

Safe landing, helicopter pilots.