What do you think? Is there a tendency for modern parents to be too involved in the lives of their young adult children? Share your thoughts with columnist Mary McCarty at mmccarty@coxohio.com.
University of Cincinnati senior Aubrey Ireland obtained what every child, from time immemorial, has wanted at some point or another:
A stalking order against her own parents.
“It’s just been really embarrassing and upsetting to have my parents come to my university when I’m a grown adult and just basically slander my name and follow me around,”Ireland lamented at an Oct. 9 court hearing.
Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Jody Luebbers ordered Ireland’s parents to have no contact with her until Sept. 23, 2013, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer, after her parents admitted to stalling monitoring software on her laptop and cell phone. “She’s an only child who was catered to all her life by her loving parents,” her mother, Julie Ireland, told the judge. They said they were only acting out of concern for their daughter’s well-being.
But Aubrey, a dean’s list student at the College Conservatory of Music, contended that her parents drove 600 miles from their home in Leawood, Kan., with no warning, allegedly spreading rumors about her promiscuity and use of illegal drugs. The situation became so severe, the Enquirer reported, that UC hired security guards to keep Aubrey’s parents out of her CCM performances.
It’s an extremely unusual story, but one that strikes a chord nonetheless with children and parents alike.
What child hasn’t struggled to break free from a parent’s oppressive yoke? (Based on personal experience, most of them start trying at, say, the age of 2.)
And what parent hasn’t wrestled with the when and how of letting go?
My kids would tell you I’ve been stalking them for years, invading their privacy by ordering them to clean their own personal rooms and checking on that nefarious instrument of educational torture known as the Progress Book. (For those who haven’t had school-age kids for a while, the Progress Book enables parents to track their kids’ grades and classroom performance. We know when they haven’t turned in a homework assignment or when they did poorly on a test.
“It’s creepy,” is my kids’ unanimous opinion about the Progress Book. I see their point, and at times I approach the Progress Book with all the delighted anticipation of sticking a red-hot poker in my eye. But I’m a Mom, and it’s still my job to stalk my kids while they’re still K-12.
There’s a curious and disorienting thing that happens when your kids turn 18. All their lives you have been in charge of them — their doctor’s appointments and play dates, where they live, where they go to school. Suddenly, you need their permission to talk to their doctors. They can marry and join the military without your say-so. They can vanish without anyone issuing an Amber Alert or launching a massive search.
Of course, in reality, most parents keep writing college tuition checks and making home-cooked meals. Most kids text their folks on a daily if not hourly basis.
So it’s not surprising that the “helicopter parent” trend has developed. I can even empathize with Aubrey Ireland’s parents, up to a point.
But the process of letting your kids take charge of their own lives can be as liberating for us as parents as it is essential for them as young adults. It starts with choosing where they go to college or whether they go to college. Perish the thought of a Progress Book for college students. It would be ridiculous for me to question a prof about my kid’s grade.
We’re still here to advise them, support them, and, most of all, love them, to be a safe place if they fall. But we’re not here to run their lives — that’s their job now.
And if we continue to hover? In the words of Aubrey Ireland, that would be “really embarrassing.”
For us parents even more than our kids.
About the Author