I don’t know if this is a phenomenon that you are
experiencing in your Academic Support Program, but every Professor in our program has received some communication from a student’s parent
and/or other older relative this academic year. One of my colleagues heard from the uncle of a student asking if our
office provided private tutoring or could recommend a tutor. Another colleague was asked to report the
progress of a student on academic probation to a parent. I was sent an e-mail from an anxious parent yesterday morning asking if I could recommend any techniques for more efficient
reading since this parent’s child was having a hard time.
I find this
troubling. And not just because I
consider myself the only maternal influence a law student should need, but
because it seems to go hand in hand with a general sense that although our
student body is getting chronologically older, they are getting academically
younger.
In the hip new lingo (that I had to look up on the internet because I am neither hip nor new), these parents are
called “helicopter parents.” (See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent). Although these parents are most often found
at the undergraduate level, it appears that their children have graduated and
come to law school.
According to some of the literature on this "helicoptering" thing, the blame falls squarely on the cell phone which is evidently the
wireless equivalent of an umbilical cord (now, wouldn’t childbirth be easier
if we could all go wireless? But I digress). I imagine E-mail and IM share the guilt here too. Does it all start with the daycares that now have fulltime webcams? Will we be forced to do that in law school
too?
What worries me most about this trend is that students who do not take
full responsibility for themselves are, I find, least capable of removing themselves
from academic difficulty. Students who
do not recognize that their grades are the result of their behavior will not
seek to change their behavior. Instead,
they will blame others: “my professor hates me,” or, ”the exam wasn’t
fair.” I think this small, purely
anecdotal, epidemic of parental involvement is a symptom of more of this to
come.
In the end, no matter how much
they wish to assist their children, parents who intervene on their behalf at
the law school level will find that their efforts will instead hinder their
child’s success. But, I suppose the Bar
Examiners should start expecting the calls….. (ezs)
