I don’t know if the increasing emphasis on perfect parents is part of the helicopter parent phenomenon, but I could see it being connected.

In the IHE article, I thought it was a little weird that the mother was looking things up on the son’s university website and sending him the links. I think making the suggestions she did was fine, I just wouldn’t have done the actual footwork. Maybe just sending the links was faster than explaining that they would be there if he looked, though. My current department chair definitely assumes none of us are familiar with the university website, and always gives instructions; my bet is that it’s because it’s faster to head off all questions at the beginning; the mom is also an administrator and may have gotten into that mode.

But as regards the other phoning and so on, I think a lot of it is just because space-time have been changed since long distance phone calls became free. I remember people in college whose mothers phoned them long distance and every morning, and it was apron strings. Others sometimes extravagantly phoned their mothers for advice on cooking, and it was just love. In my family, we all had interrelated majors and we’d phone each other to ask quick academic questions just because there was no Internet, the library and the professors’ offices were a trek away, and asking a friend could mean creating a social distraction.

For perspective, when my father was in university (late 50s/early 60s @ large midwestern institution), students routinely mailed their laundry home. The post office even had special boxes for this purpose. In loco parentis rules also forbade students from having kitchens. A lot of that changed after Vietnam.

I have little doubt that this is the case for my sister-in-law, and there it has nothing to do with decreased family size.

As for changes over time, I have seen the shift from “in loco parentis” (which ended just before I started college) to “no parents” to helicopters in my lifetime and I find it bizarre … except that I can understand why my brother would want a bit more structure in his kids’ college experience than he had. It might not be a coincidence that boomers had extreme freedom in college in the 70s and then watch their kids like mother hawks.

That said, there were kids back in my day who had that need. Some ran up their phone bill and some couldn’t handle it and dropped out (but might have continued school at home). They might survive today. But the fine-grained supervision today (24/7 cell contact) is overkill even if I do wonder how I ever managed to go grocery shopping in pre-cell days!

Of course, some of that detail directed toward the parents might also be a way of creating the illusion that the parents know everything that is going on…..

(A brief anecdote: a few years back, I spent a few days in London and stayed at the apartment of a college friend, who had spent a few years working in finance in New York and then had moved to London. After eating some food, I went to wash the dishes and filled up the sink with dishwater. My friend then came over and asked me how I had done that; he had probably washed individual pieces under running water, I’m assuming, but had never filled up a sink with warm, soapy water. We were 25.)