{"id":2349,"date":"2010-08-26T20:07:18","date_gmt":"2010-08-27T00:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2349"},"modified":"2010-08-26T14:13:19","modified_gmt":"2010-08-26T18:13:19","slug":"omg-helicopter-parents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2349","title":{"rendered":"OMG&#8211;helicopter parents!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some observations as my daughter watched her friends head to college in the past week and then moved in herself:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One friend of my daughter reports that her roommate at a public university brought a flat-screen television along with a microwave and mini-fridge. At first, my daughter thought that this was stereotypical university overindulgence. No, responded the friend: it&#39;s the roommate&#39;s parents who are that indulgent.<\/li>\n<li>When my daughter and I arrived on her&nbsp;campus yesterday morning, we went our separate ways for an hour: she to do all the bureaucratic stuff, me to get a bite to eat and relax on the campus cafe&#39;s patio. The student who followed her out of the parking lot towards the first station? Accompanied by two parents and two or three siblings (I forget).<\/li>\n<li>I saw several trailer-containers with more than a few cubic feet of space, and parked in the (only) driveway in and out of one parking lot was&nbsp;a Ryder truck (not a trailer or a van). I can only hope that the truck had stuff for <em>several<\/em> returning students.<\/li>\n<li>The administrator who greeted me at a morning reception seemed a bit surprised that I had dropped my daughter off with a few suitcases and odds and ends and didn&#39;t know what she was doing at the moment. Then he praised me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Yes, my daughter&#39;s college had a reception for parents and an explicit time at which they had scheduled &quot;parents say good-bye and go away.&quot; As a result, I think I better stop making fun of today&#39;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/08\/23\/education\/23college.html\">parent-handling routines<\/a>. I&#39;m sure that some of my classmates also had helicopter parents, but I got to my college in the evening of move-in day after traveling cross-country with a suitcase and trunk, and by the time I had dragged everything to my room, I was exhausted, and it was dark. If anyone brought a vanful, I wasn&#39;t going to know.<\/p>\n<p>By the time of the afternoon hug-and-go deadline yesterday, I was on my flight back to Tampa&#8211;I teach T-Th 8 am classes this semester. I would have loved to stay in the area to visit some friends and enjoy sub-90 F. weather (oh, the cafe patio and the outside part of the reception was wonderful&#8211;temperatures in the mid-70s), but&nbsp;I think the only practical thing I could have done was shuttle my daughter to get (or get on her orders) odds and ends that don&#39;t make sense to pack for a plane trip. That&#39;s what care packages are for (this week&#39;s: a coffee grinder, filter, and other accoutrements).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some observations as my daughter watched her friends head to college in the past week and then moved in herself: One friend of my daughter reports that her roommate at a public university brought a flat-screen television along with a microwave and mini-fridge. At first, my daughter thought that this was stereotypical university overindulgence. No, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,5,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-higher-education","category-personal","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-BT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2349"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2355,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2349\/revisions\/2355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}