Snowplow parenting: Junior Varsity Blues |
On Board Online • June 10, 2019
By Mareesa Nicosia
Special Correspondent
A parent requests that a child be assigned to a specific elementary classroom. Another wants a student to receive extra time on an exam for a dubious reason. A third contacts a mental health professional, insisting a child needs to be medicated to properly function in school.
All are examples of "snowplow parenting" in New York schools, according to On Board interviews with educators. While "helicopter parents" are known for over-involving themselves in their children's lives, often out of fear and anxiety, snowplow parents are pushier in their interactions with teachers and school administrators. They seek to remove, or plow away, all perceived obstacles standing in the way of their children's success, even once they've entered adulthood.
Four percent of parents admitted to writing "all or part of an essay or other school assignment" for their adult child (now 18 to 28 years old) in a survey by Morning Consult for The New York Times. By far the most common behavior, reported by 76 percent of parents, was "reminding their adult children of deadlines they need to meet, including for school work," according to the Times.
Parents sometimes impersonate their children when calling college admissions offices. Rich Clark, director of undergraduate admissions at Georgia Tech, told public radio's Ira Glass on a 2013 episode of "This American Life" about a mother who pulled it off for about 15 minutes, then said, "What if she, I mean, I wanted to list more than that number of activities on my application?"
And employers say they are contacted by parents, according to the book How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare your Kid for Success. Of 725 employers who responded to a 2006-07 survey by Michigan State researchers about the experience of hiring a college senior, 23% reported parents being involved "sometimes," "often" or "very often." This included requesting information (40%); submitting a resume‚ (31%); attending a career fair (17%); complaining if the company does not hire son/daughter (15%); negotiating salary and benefits (9%) and attending the interview (4%).
The most extreme - and illicit - examples of snowplow parenting were seen in the recent college admissions scandal dubbed "Operation Varsity Blues." Federal prosecutors alleged earlier this spring that dozens of wealthy parents in six states, including some celebrities, had bribed college coaches, exam proctors and other officials - in some cases for upwards of $1 million - to get their children spots at Yale, Stanford and other elite universities. Federal prosecutors charged 50 people in the scheme.
"I think the cheating scandal is sort of the tip of an iceberg that has been growing and growing and growing around the college process (and) the standardized testing process," said Pamela Cantor, founder of the nonprofit Turnaround for Children in New York City.
A child psychiatrist who formerly had a clinical practice, Cantor recalled working with many families who felt "a tremendous sense of urgency" around finding the "right" college counselor and the "right" test prep.
In all cases, Cantor said, the parents' urgency was driven by a fear that their child "won't end up succeeding if they don't get into this particular college, if they don't get onto that particular team."
This anxiety stems from our culture's rather narrow definition of "success," Cantor said. A parent's conviction that their son or daughter must get into a prestigious college at all costs creates a huge amount of pressure for children and their families, she said.
"(You have) kids who think that if they don't make it into that narrow end of the (success) funnel, then their lives are going to be ruined," she said. "And worse than that, they have parents who think that too."
Snowplow parenting can be a habit that parents start when their children are young ("Can Susie be in the same kindergarten classroom as Rachel? They've been best friends since they were three years old.") It seems to surge as adolescents prepare to enter college and the workforce.
While the parental urge to protect a child from life's harsh realities is "a very healthy inclination," it's also important to allow teens to make their own choices, said Michael Alcee, a clinical psychologist based in Tarrytown whose practice is focused on adolescents.
"It's important to have a balancing act with this stuff," Alcee said. "To know, when might my child or teen need a little of that pushing and modeling of how to do this, and when can I step back and help them to engage the process, and also to help them discuss their feelings and thoughts about it."
Alcee, who also serves as Mental Health Coordinator at the Manhattan School of Music, said it's not uncommon for parents to write to him that their struggling student needs a prescription.
Sometimes medication is totally warranted, but that also can be another interesting form of trying to 'snowplow,'" he said.
Parents also seek diagnoses from medical and mental health professionals to allow students to receive accommodations for completing schoolwork or taking college-entrance exams. Of the 63,322 high school students who graduated in 2018 and took the ACT in New York State, 7% took the test with an accommodation, including extended time, large type, Braille, pre-recorded audio, reader or sign-language interpreter, according to an ACT spokesperson.
While an accommodation sometimes is appropriate, the desire for an accommodation can reveal an underlying issue, Alcee said. That was the case when a student came in suspecting that she had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Talking with the student, he understood that her attention difficulties were actually the result of intrusive parenting. With therapy, her symptoms began to improve.
Snowplow parenting is something that school officials appear to find difficult to address. Confront parents about school officials' perceptions that they have been overstepping parental boundaries? That would be overstepping educational boundaries, some educators say.
"I would not want a superintendent to tell me as a parent how I should or should not raise my kid," said Donna Ramundo, who has three grown children and is a retired teacher who taught at Nyack Public Schools for 30 years. She also served as president of the Rockland County Teachers Association from 2010 to 2014.
During her career as an elementary school teacher and math specialist, Ramundo remembers parents who'd pull her aside and ask for their child to get a specific classroom placement. When that happened, she favored a straightforward approach - firmly explain the proper channels through which the parent could address the matter, and make no promises.
Snowplow parenting does not appear to be a subject that superintendents are eager to discuss in their blogs, a district newsletter, a parent night discussion or even in an article in On Board. (Several superintendents and principals contacted for this story declined comment or did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
In college admissions, a lot of anxiety on the part of parents is misplaced, according to Cassie Magesis, president of the New York State Association for College Admission Counseling (NYSACAC) and director of College Access and Success at The Urban Assembly in New York City.
Magesis said the Operation Varsity Blues scandal has directed the public's focus toward "an incredibly small subset" of elite institutions where acceptance rates are far lower than average, in some cases less than 10 percent of applicants. The majority of colleges in the U.S. and New York State accept more than 50 percent of students that apply, she noted.
Also, the scandal has highlighted what Magesis says is "also a small subset of parents" who aggressively work to get their children into these competitive schools, no matter the cost. "The students I work with are filing their own financial aid paperwork and calling campuses to advocate for themselves," she said.
When she does encounter aggressive parents, she relies on a simple strategy: "Make sure that the student is leading the conversation." If that means the counselor has to stop the meeting and ask the parent to leave the room, that's OK, she said.
In her 2015 book, How to Raise an Adult, former Stanford University Dean of Freshman Julie Lythcott-Haims wrote that while parents who overdo it are motivated by love, they are delaying what some have called the "adulting" process.
A parent herself, she says restraint can be hard, but it is necessary for children and young adults to develop their self-sufficiency.
"Join me in doing right by those children by leaving the herd of hoverers by fostering independence, not dependence," she writes in her last paragraph. "Together we can push the parenting pendulum back in the other direction: toward raising adults" rather than children.