What defines a helicopter parent?

[alum]

The first time I heard the phrase helicopter parent was on a news segment. They profiled a woman who came down once a week to her son's campus and did his laundry, cleaned his room and made dinners for a week so that he wouldn't starve until the next visit. That seems a bit excessive.

The mothers on GC who have come looking for support or even just answers haven't particularly struck me as overbearing. Now some of them did get hostile to our younger GCers when they thought they were being insulted and that was wrong of them for being rude. However, these mothers making an idle threat to drop alumna support to their GLO is not an unusual reaction. I know plenty parents of college applicants who will stop financially supporting their alma maters because their kiddos didn't get accepted.
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In terms of the majority of the mothers who are upset, most of them are from the south. You've read it from both male and female members that certain towns seem to go XYZ or AAA at certain schools. I personally can't relate going down for Bid Day but no one in my family attended college in the Deep South. The mothers visiting to share in the excitement or to present a consoling hug is hardly a new phenomenon at some of those big Southern schools. If that had been a tradition at my daughter's school, I would have been there in a heartbeat. For that matter even if it wasn't a tradition but she had had an unsuccessful recruitment for whatever reason and she wanted me there, I would have also visited.

The southern girls in my undergraduate chapter told us, but I really didn't understand how much Greek Life permeated certain segments of Southern life much more deeply than in the north until I actually lived in the South. From seeing the marriage notices including Greek affiliation to outright questions of what you pledged (the assumption being that you were a member of a NPC group if you went to college), it was an eye-awakening experience.