Death by Hovering

Death by hovering is not how the coroner's report will list it. But the murder of a student at Indiana University-Purdue, the first act of violence in the 40-year history of the Fort Wayne campus, may well be the first documented case of death from helicopter parenting.

According to police reports, 22-year-old Liette Martinez was found stabbed to death in her dorm suite on April 18. The leading suspect, now in police custody, is Tina Loraine Morris, the mother of one of her two roommates. The mother had taken up residence—illegally—in the dorm for two weeks before the slaying. According to court documents, she was unhappy about something Miss Martinez had said to her daughter the night before and "confronted" her.

“I’m afraid this may be the ultimate and tragic result of hovering,” the VP of Student Affairs at another university wrote me, in bringing my attention to the report, which I had already seen, in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education.

Stories of helicopter parenting are rampant. A father books a hotel room on campus for a month while his son changes majors. A mother protests a student’s grade on a paper; it turns out that she wrote it. Parents and students exchange multiple cell phone calls each day, some initiated by students, at least as many initiated by their parents. Every little flicker of experience is reported. Students don’t get to sit with and manage their own emotions. And parents put themselves on the receiving end of a steady stream of unfiltered, undigested negative experience from their precious child.

“It raises questions about emancipation,” observes Richard Ling, a research scientist at the University of Michigan and a leading expert on cellphones. He believes that cellphones strengthen already existing ties to friends and family, but, because they limit interactions with outsiders, could narrow a user’s understanding of the world. They are forces of conservatism and deepen the status quo. Another scientist, Switzerland’s Hans Geser, calls them forces of “regressive social insulation.”

Whenever college administrators get together, tales of the latest outrage in helicopter parenting abound. But usually the reaction is little more than a roll of the eyeballs. Maybe it’s time to understand that there is a lot more that goes on in helicopter parenting and a real social transformation taking place here.

Let’s start with trust, that fragile interpersonal link that turns out to be the bedrock of a civil society. As I discuss in my just-published book, A Nation of Wimps, The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, constant monitoring of grown children’s experience undermines the belief in and what should be growing reliance on the competence of the young one. Trust entails expectation, a small leap of faith, a prediction about how someone will behave. And since it is future-oriented, it is predicated on optimism.

Hovering is not trust. It is cynicism embodied. It is antithetical to the development of autonomy—excuse me, but isn't that still the goal of childrearing?. And it threatens the character and strength of the next generation.

It’s time for parents to back off and, at a minimum, let the kids settle their own roommate hassles.