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Yesterday, at my cousin’s kids’ middle school, they had a Field Day. It’s a day of outdoor activities and experiments and during Field Day this year, the worst thing happened.

It started to rain.

Some kids called their parents to report they were wet and needed new clothes or wanted to be picked up.

A kerfuffle erupted in the parent WhatsApp group. 

• Parents called the school irresponsible. 
• Others complained about interrupted workdays to drop off dry clothes. 
• Still others demanded to know why they weren’t warned in advance to pack backup outfits.

All of this drama because their kids got wet.

It reminded me of those horror movies where the call is coming from inside the house. Maybe the enemy of our children’s education isn’t the schools and the curriculum, the teachers, the incentives? 

Perhaps, us parents, especially in middle- and upper-income communities , are the enemy?

From Helicopter to Harm 

Of course, not all parental involvement is bad. It is actually required.

But there’s a point at which support becomes suffocation and concern becomes control. 

And when that happens, the results are problematic.

A study titled “The Effects of Helicopter Parenting on Academic Motivation” explored this by focusing on middle- and upper-middle college students with helicopter mothers. 

The findings of helicopter parenting were stark:

• Diminished self-efficacy: Students were less confident in their ability to succeed on their own.
  
• Eroded competence: Prior work by the same authors showed these students felt less capable in general.
  
• Impaired goal-setting: They struggled to set and pursue goals independently.
  
• Fear-driven learning: Learning was motivated more by the desire to avoid failure than the pursuit of mastery.
  
• Mastery avoidance: These students weren’t just afraid of doing poorly but feared not fully understanding the material.
  

In short: they didn’t feel equipped, in control, or safe.

Suniya Luthar’s research on affluent adolescents echoes and deepens these findings.

Her work entitled “I Can, Therefore I Must” shows that the damage of overparenting doesn’t stop at academic behavior but penetrates identity and emotional life. 

In high-achieving, middle and upper-middle class communities, Luthar found:

• A pervasive belief among students that love was conditional and earned only through grades, test scores, and college admissions.
  
• A pattern of psychological distress that included anxiety, depression, and even substance use.
  
• A paradox: despite constant involvement in their kids’ schedules and academics, parents were often perceived as emotionally distant.
  
• A misalignment of values: parents prioritized achievement over integrity, subtly telling kids that being good mattered less than being impressive.

In the fantastic book, Excellent Sheep, William Derewicz, has choice words for this subset of parents. He say these “Parents tell kids not to take the same risks that made them who they are” and says the root of this pushing and overinvolvement is:

“Kid getting into elite school is parents getting an A for parenting… Child is extension of the self. It is parental narcissism at its finest.”

What both studies reveal is that when parents try to guarantee their child’s success, they often do the opposite. They raise kids who can’t self-direct, who crumble under pressure, and who measure their worth by what they produce, not who they are.

Overparenting ultimately crowds out student autonomy and hollows it out. 

(Note: There is little research on helicopter fathers, and it seems when studies ask about “parents in general,” respondents usually answer about their mothers anyway).

Grade Inflation vs Mastery

When “learning is done to avoid failure rather than gain knowledge” and parents have the time, education, social capital to pressure teachers and a view of themselves as the customer of schools, grades do ‘mysteriously’ rise. 

College grades are trending to the point the point of absurdity and uselessness where 50% of grades are now A’s.

Now, of course, grade inflation is a multi-variable problem of which overbearing parents are just one cause (perverse incentives being at least 1 other).

The graph above was for A grades in college. The upward trend is also seen in high school.

The makers of the ACT standardized test studied this trend from 2010 to 2022 in high schools and saw GPAs rise in English, Math, Science and Social Studies while associated ACT scores actually declined over the same period.

Schools are Complicit

Schools haven’t been passive victims in this dynamic, and they’ve actually adapted in ways that actually reinforce and encourage overinvolved parenting. 

Many schools now send real-time notifications about minor issues that previous generations would have handled independently. 

Parent portals provide minute-by-minute grade updates, turning every assignment into an invitation for parental involvement.

Teachers report feeling pressured to immediately respond to parent emails about homework questions that students should be asking directly. Some schools have eliminated consequences like detention or failing grades which teach resilience and behavioral consequences and have replaced them with endless “second chances” often due to parental negotiation.

This isn’t entirely the schools’ fault as they’re responding to parent pressure and liability concerns. But the result is an education system that increasingly treats parents as co-managers rather than supporters of their child’s learning journey.

Building a Better Partnership

The path forward isn’t about parents disappearing or schools shutting us parents out. It’s about recalibrating the relationship so both sides support student growth rather than student comfort.

I’ll share the progress of my wife and I as we are still figuring this out. 

I grew up with what you might call benign neglect.

I was the child of immigrants who had no idea where I was after school, let alone what my science grade was. I had house keys at 8, lived on Ellio’s frozen pizza, and played video games with my friends until my eyes hurt. My parents missed soccer games because they were grinding to build a better life. I had freedom, boredom, and no expectation that anyone would bail me out.

I also have seen how far my own parenting has drifted from that model. 

While full-on benign neglect might not be practical today (though I sometimes wish it were), here’s what we’re trying instead.

What We’re Trying at Home

After feeling like we were a bit overzealous, we’ve adopted what I’d call a philosophy best described as “trying to chill out” – an important skill for us Asian tiger parents.

Instead of one of us jumping in to fix things right away, we’ve started essentially using a “24-hour rule.” 

This way, when our kid is upset about something: a grade, a social situation, forgotten homework, we try to give it 24 hours. More often than not, it blows over.

Instead of reflexively emailing a teacher or even problem solving for our kids, we now put the work back on them:

• “What have you tried so far?”
• “What are your options?”
• “Have you talked to your teacher about it?”

We’ve done a pretty good job (but still WIP) shifting away from grade-watching toward process-focused conversations. Instead of “Why’d you get a B?” we ask, “How would you change your preparation next time?”

It’s becoming more natural and the kids are coming to us with a lot less little isht as they’re also getting the message that they need to solve things on their own. 

What Schools Can Do

As we are building The School of Entrepreneuring, the best schools we’ve seen are getting strategic about this: 

• They’re training teachers to redirect overinvolved parents with: ‘Have you encouraged Sarah to speak with me directly about this?’ 
• They’re creating ‘independence milestones’. For example, by middle school, only students communicate about grades and assignments.
• They’re outlining what kinds of issues they’ll handle without parent involvement (like peer conflicts, missed homework, minor injuries).
• They’re requiring kids 48 hours to solve problems on their own before adults can step in.
• They’re framing communication around student capability and not just what went wrong. This looks like “Here’s how Jamie solved a problem today,” instead of “Here’s the problem Jamie had today.”

If we want to developer students with agency, originality, resilience and adaptability, having clear roles & goals between parent and school is incredibly important.

The Real Payoff: Better Schools

Here’s what nobody talks about: when over-involved parents step back, schools get better.

• When teachers aren’t spending hours responding to emails about why Johnny got a B+ instead of an A-, they can focus on actually teaching. 
• When administrators aren’t fielding calls from parents demanding grade changes, they can work on curriculum. 
• When guidance counselors aren’t managing helicopter crises, they can help kids who actually need support.

The Time-Suck Reality

A teacher recently told me she spends 2-3 hours each week (usually on weekends) just responding to parent emails about things students should be asking directly. That’s 2-3 hours not spent planning lessons, grading thoughtfully, or working with struggling students.

Multiply that across every teacher, administrator, and counselor, and schools start to feel more like customer service centers than educational institutions.

What Happens When Parents Step Back 

When parents pull back strategically, something remarkable should happen:

• Teachers can focus on teaching instead of parent management
• Schools can set higher expectations because they’re not constantly negotiating them down
• Resources get directed toward actual education instead of damage control
• Kids develop real resilience because the system stops rescuing them

The schools performing best? They’re often the ones with clear boundaries that parents respect. These are places where educators can do their jobs without constant interference.

The best schools aren’t the ones with the most parent involvement. They’re the ones with the clearest boundaries.

Breaking the Vicious Cycle

We’ve created a vicious cycle: overinvolved parents demand constant accommodation, schools comply to avoid conflict, educational standards drift downward, parents helicopter even more to compensate for declining rigor.

Breaking that cycle requires parents to trust schools to do their jobs and schools to resist the pressure to treat every parent concern as a crisis requiring immediate response.

And hopefully, this enables us to develop capable, not just comfortable, young people.

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Epilogue 

My focus above was on school age children (k-12) but as I dug into the research on overinvolved helicopter parents, one thing that struck me was that the damage continued so I wanted to share that below.

The Damage Continues into Adulthood

Research specifically examining career outcomes shows that emerging adults with helicopter parents possess “a reliance/dependence on others to find solutions for them when faced with workplace scenarios, as well as possess maladaptive work behaviors (inability to meet deadlines or engage in job seeking)”

Michigan State University surveyed more than 700 employers and found that nearly one-third reported parents had submitted resumes on their child’s behalf, some without even informing the child.

The career consequences are stark: when presented with workplace scenarios like receiving a negative performance review, overparented students were less likely to say they would listen to criticism and try to improve, and more likely to say they would quit the job, explain why the rating was unfair, or even ask a parent to call the manager on their behalf. 

These are adult infants.

Sources:

ACT Research, “Evidence of Grade Inflation Since 2010 in High School English, Mathematics, Social Studies, and Science Courses” by Edgar I. Sanchez, PhD

The Effects of Helicopter Parenting on Academic Motivation by Holly H. Schiffrin and Miriam Liss of University of Mary Washington

Helping or Hovering? The Effects of Helicopter Parenting on College Students’ Well-Being by Holly H. Schiffrin, Miriam Liss, Haley Miles-McLean, Katherine A. Geary, Mindy J. Erchull and Taryn Tashner.

Helicopter parenting during emerging adulthood: Consequences for career identity and adaptability by Joshua E. LeBlanc and Sean T. Lyons.Helicopter Parents Hover In The Workplace (NPR)