Nicole Eisenberg's older son has wanted to be a star of the stage since he was a toddler, she said. He took voice, dance and drama lessons and attended the famous Stagedoor Manor summer camp for half a dozen years, but she was anxious that might not be enough to get him into the best performing-arts programs.
So Eisenberg and others in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., the suburb where she lives, helped him start a charity with friends that raised more than $250,000 over four years.
"The moms — the four or five moms that started it together — we started it, we helped, but we did not do it for them," she recalled. "Did we ask for sponsors for them? Yes. Did we ask for money for them? Yes. But they had to do the work."
She even considered a donation to the college of his choice. "There's no amount of money we could have paid to have got him in," Eisenberg, 49, said. "Because, trust me, my father-in-law asked." (Her son was admitted to two of the best musical theater programs in the country, along with nine more of the 26 schools he applied to, she said.)
College has been on their radar since her son was in diapers. "We've been working on this since he was 3 years old," she said. To apply, she said: "I had to take him on 20 auditions for musical theater. But he did it with me. I don't feel like I did this. I supported him in it. I did not helicopter parent him. I was a co-pilot."
Helicopter parenting, the practice of hovering anxiously near one's children, monitoring their every activity, is so 20th century. Some mothers and fathers are more like snowplows: machines chugging ahead, clearing any obstacles in their child's path to success, so they don't have to encounter failure, frustration or lost opportunities.
Taken to a criminal extreme, that means bribing SAT proctors and paying off college coaches to get children into elite colleges — and then going to great lengths to make sure they never face the humiliation of knowing how they got there.
In its less outrageous — and wholly legal — form, snowplowing (also known as lawn-mowing and bulldozing) starts early, when parents get on wait lists for preschools before their babies are born and try to ensure their toddlers never do anything that might frustrate them. It gets more intense when school starts: running a forgotten assignment to school or calling a coach to request that a child make the team.
Later, it's writing them an excuse if they procrastinate on schoolwork, paying a college counselor thousands of dollars to perfect their applications or calling their professors to argue about a grade.
The recent Operation Varsity Blues bribery scandal, in which celebrities pleaded guilty to bribing their children's way into top universities, has "just highlighted an incredibly dark side of what has become normative, which is making sure that your kid has the best, is exposed to the best, has every advantage — without understanding how disabling that can be," said Madeline Levine, a psychologist and the author of Teach Your Children Well: Why Values and Coping Skills Matter More Than Grades, Trophies or "Fat Envelopes."
"They've cleared everything out of their kids' way," she said.
In her practice, Levine said, she regularly sees college freshmen who "have had to come home from Emory or Brown because they don't have the minimal kinds of adult skills that one needs to be in college."
One came home because there was a rat in the dorm room. One didn't like to eat food with sauce. Her whole life, her parents had helped her avoid sauce, calling friends before going to their houses for dinner. At college, she didn't know how to cope with the cafeteria options — covered in sauce.
"Here are parents who have spent 18 years grooming their kids with what they perceive as advantages, but they're not," Levine said.
HOVERING
If children have never faced an obstacle, what happens when they get into the real world?
They flounder, said Julie Lythcott-Haims, the former dean of freshmen at Stanford University and the author of How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.
At Stanford, she said, she saw students rely on their parents to set up play dates with people in their dorm or complain to their child's employers when an internship didn't lead to a job. The root cause, she said, was parents who had never let their children make mistakes or face challenges.
"Helicopter parenting" is a term that came into vogue in the 1980s and grew out of fear about kids' physical safety — that they would fall off a play structure or be kidnapped at the bus stop. In the 1990s, it evolved into intensive parenting, which meant not just constantly monitoring children, but also always teaching them.
This is when parents began filling afternoons and weekends with lessons, tutors and traveling sports games. Parents today spend more money on child rearing than any earlier generation did, according to Consumer Expenditure Survey data analyzed by the sociologists Sabino Kornrich and Frank Furstenberg.
According to time-use data analyzed by Melissa A. Milkie, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, today's working mothers spend as much time doing hands-on activities with their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s. Texting and social media have allowed parents to keep even closer track of their progeny.
Snowplow parenting is an even more obsessive form.
"There's a constant monitoring of where their kid is and what they are doing, all with the intent of preventing something happening and becoming a barrier to the child's success," said Laura Hamilton, author of Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College and Beyond and a sociologist at the University of California, Merced.
The goal is often admission to college. A degree has been seen as essential to earning a middle-class wage.
But college admissions have become more competitive. The number of applicants has doubled since the 1970s, and the growth in the number of spots has not kept pace, remaining basically unchanged at the very top schools.
At the same time, it's no longer guaranteed that children will do as well as their parents. Children born in 1950 had an 80 percent chance of making more money than their parents, according to work by a team of economists led by Raj Chetty at Harvard University. Those born in 1970 had a 61 percent chance. But since 1980, children are as likely as not to earn less than their parents did.
"Increasingly, it appears any mistake could be fatal for their class outcome," said Philip Cohen, a sociologist studying parenting and inequality at the University of Maryland.
The problem is: Snowplowing is a parenting habit that's hard to break.
"If you're doing it in high school, you can't stop at college," Lythcott-Haims said. "If you're doing it in college, you can't stop when it comes to the workplace. You have manufactured a role for yourself of always being there to handle things for your child, so it gets worse because your young adult is ill equipped to manage the basic tasks of life."
In a poll by The New York Times and Morning Consult of a nationally representative group of parents of children 18 to 28, three-quarters had made appointments for their adult children, such as doctor visits or haircuts, and the same share had reminded them of deadlines for school. Eleven percent said they would contact their child's employer if their child had a problem.
Sixteen percent of those with children in college had texted or called so they didn't sleep through a class or test; 8 percent had contacted a college professor or administrator about their child's grades or a problem they were having.
NOT THAT SPECIAL
"Some of them think they're doing the right thing by their children," said David McCullough Jr., a high school teacher and the author of You Are Not Special and Other Encouragements, who helped popularize the "snowplow" term. "Parents understand that going to a highly prestigious college brings with it long-lasting advantage."
It's not just the wealthy. Recent research suggests that parents across lines of class and race are intensively parenting, whether or not they can afford it.
Often, that involves intervening on behalf of their children. In a recent study that surveyed a nationally representative group of parents about which parenting choices they thought were best, people, regardless of race, income or education, said children should be enrolled in after-school activities so they wouldn't have to feel bored. If a child didn't like school, they thought parents should talk to the teacher to get the child different work.
But the severe snowplow parenting is done largely by parents who have the money, connections and know-how to stay two steps ahead of their children. Families without those resources can't invest in lessons and college counselors, and may not have experience navigating college admissions or ultracompetitive job markets.
Carolyn O'Laughlin worked as a director of resident life at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia, and now does a similar job at St. Louis Community College, Meramec. At the elite schools, O'Laughlin said, a mother once called her to ask her to list the items on the school salad bar so she could choose what her daughter should eat for lunch, and another parent intervened over video chat to resolve a dispute with a roommate over stolen peanut butter.
Now, many of the students she works with are immigrants or first-generation college students.
"As I read about the scandal, I feel for those parents, I do," she said. But, she added, "first-generation students coming through here are figuring out how to navigate an educational system that hasn't always been built for them; it is changing the course of their lives and the lives of their families." Families she seldom hears from.
Cathy Tran, 22, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, is the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants who did not attend college. "They do give me a lot of emotional support, but they haven't really been able to tell me about what I should be doing, like next steps," she said.
"I actually think that I have a sense of independence and confidence in myself in a way that some of my friends whose parents attended college might not have," she said. "I had some friends who didn't even know how to do laundry. I guess in some ways I feel like I was forced to be an adult much earlier on."
Style on 04/22/2019