Quote:
Originally Posted by AOII_LB93
I'm also wondering if our society doesn't encourage helicoptering in a way...granted I'm a HS teacher, but at all of the local elementary schools there are "class parents" and it's expected that the parents of all the kids show up and help out in some form or another. There's a message board and yahoo groups for the parents of the community where I live and for the particular schools. I don't have children yet, but I find this odd. Am I out of the ordinary?
Not that my parents didn't care for me, but that didn't happen at my elementary school. Ever. Maybe it was just the school I went to? Anyhow, I've experienced the helicoptering at the HS where I work and one of my good friends who works for USC (the real one-Southern Cal, not South Carolina  ) with all the super bright kids(Rhodes scholars, Fulbright, etc..) has had to deal a lot with parents in the last couple of years. She got chewed out by a parent on the phone because this woman's son wasn't named the Valedictorian and someone else got it. I mean come on, wouldn't this young man be embarrassed at 22 that his mommy is calling about Valedictorian to his university? |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Army Wife'79
I first noticed it when my son was in Boy Scouts and they were given a chunk of wood and they were to sand it, paint it and make it into a car to race. My son worked on it as a little kid would and it looked like it. When we showed up for the race we saw all these elaborate cars and were stunned. (The rules were the kids had to do it themselves). I asked one dad how his son cut it and he replied "power tools" and I said "you let bubba use a power tool" and the dad said "no, he did that part". Well, heck, I think the little twit should have been disqualified but it seems all the dads did a bunch of work on the cars.
I was proud when my son's came in 3rd, even tho it looked juvenile.
|
Yes, I think we do encourage it. And I think ArmyWife79 story also points out how it can be encouraged simply by not enforcing the limits that exist. Most parents aren't willing to let their kid's work look like junk in comparison with other kids'. And often at schools and in youth organizations, unless adults are really thoughtful about what they are looking for long term, there's a tendency to reward kids for work that probably isn't their own, to the point that parents who do let kids complete things on their own start to look remiss.
Any tour of a suburban school's science fair will probably reveal the same thing, unless the judges and scorers and really mindful about what they are doing. There can be an emphasis on presentation, materials and complexity that would be really unrealistic for a kid whose mom or dad wasn't highly involved with the project all the way through.