How involved should parents be in the life of their college-age child?
By Catherine O’Neill Grace ’72
Illustration by Polly Becker
On a bright September afternoon in 1968, I stood and watched my parents drive away in their blue Opel station wagon, heading downhill on Route 125. At the last moment, my mother leaned out of the window and yelled, “Keep in touch, Cath! Call on Sundays—collect.”
And so I did. Every Sunday evening, sitting in the small phone booth at the end of my hall in Battell, I dutifully placed a call from Middlebury to Washington, D.C., to report to my parents about my doings in the past week. We talked about my classes, what I had been eating, the alarmingly low balance in my checking account, my new friends, my lack of a boyfriend. (That was temporary.) We kept the calls short, and we made them at times when the rates were down. As we chatted, two or three other freshman girls would be pacing outside the booth, waiting to place their calls home, too.
And that—along with the occasional letter or postcard—was it. When I got home for Thanksgiving break, my family and I had a lot of catching up to do. And this was typical for most college freshmen.
No longer. According to research conducted by Elena Kennedy ’06, working with Associate Professor of Psychology Barbara Hofer, students today stay in much closer touch with their parents than my classmates and I did. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given the ease of communicating by cell phone, e-mail, and Blackberry these days. (Nine out of ten of today’s college students carry cell phones, according to ACUTA, an association of communications technology professionals in academia.)
What did catch the researchers’ attention was the frequency of those contacts—and the depth and content of the conversations.
Kennedy’s study, “The Electronic Tether: Parental Contact, Autonomy, and Self-Regulation in Emerging Adulthood,” consumed much of her senior year and comprised part of her honors thesis. She investigated “how communication between parents and their college-age children can affect the students’ autonomy, which has been identified in past research as crucial to their development.”
“With this research,” says Barbara Hofer, “we wanted to examine how technological changes have influenced the transition to adulthood during the college years. The issue may not be how often students and parents talk, but what they talk about, who initiates the contact, and the degree to which parents give students room to grow and experiment, make decisions and choices, and learn to seek guidance from other sources.”
In April, Kennedy presented preliminary results from her study at a conference in Washington, D.C., called “Undergraduate Research Posters on the Hill.” Sponsored by the Council on Undergraduate Research, the event featured 60 competitively selected science projects undertaken as collaborations between faculty members and undergraduates. Kennedy’s hot topic generated national press attention. Her research was cited—and Hofer was quoted extensively—in a May 22 Newsweek article about this college generation’s transition to adulthood. In August, Kennedy (who now works in the Emerging Issues division of Child Trends, a nonprofit research center in Washington, D.C.) and Hofer presented their findings at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association—a signal honor for an undergraduate paper.
Hofer began the work in the spring of 2005 with Christina Barratt ’05, a psychology major who helped initiate a literature review and conduct focus groups with Middlebury students as a preliminary step in designing surveys. Kennedy began her research that summer—before Middlebury’s incoming first-years had even arrived on campus—working with the Dean of Student Affairs office to survey a cohort of students and parents about how they communicated with each other. More than 150 students and around 40 parents were asked how often they engaged in conversation, how satisfied they were with both the content and frequency of the communication, and what they talked about. These same individuals were surveyed again at the end of the fall semester, while a subset of nearly 50 students was queried weekly. Preliminary data from the research led to the following key findings:
- Before college, most students anticipated communicating with a parent once a week. Students actually communicated 10.41 times per week on average, by cell phone, e-mail, Instant Messenger, dorm phone, text messaging, and postal mail. Parents initiated the majority of the contact.
- Students reported they were satisfied with their parental communications, though 28 percent would like more communication with their fathers.
- Seventy-five percent of the parents said they are closer to their children than they were to their parents.
- Students who initiated contact with parents three times a week were more likely to be emotionally dependent on their parents and to report parental involvement in their academics.
- Student self-regulation of their academic life and their behavior is directly related to a number of positive experiences, such as satisfaction with their academic experience, friendships, and relationships with their professors. Continued parental regulation during the first year of college is not related to any of the positive outcomes assessed.
To Launch or Not to Launch?
Contemporary developmental psychologists describe the period of development from 18–25 years as “emerging adulthood,” the time between adolescence and adulthood, says Hofer, who teaches a course on adolescent development and whose research interests include the transition to adulthood, as well as student self-regulation of learning. “This is coming out of societal shifts: increased wealth, increased high school graduation rates, a higher median age of marriage. Now there really is a period when you’re not really an adult, but no longer an adolescent, either.” For most emerging adults, leaving home for college is their first experience of independent living and infrequent face-to-face contact with their parents.
Kennedy’s study demonstrated that college students’ connection to their parents is “deep and strong,” Hofer told Newsweek. “They say, ‘My parents are my best friends.’ People would have seen that as aberrant a generation ago, as pathological.”
Not so this generation. Today’s college students are not only willing to talk to mom and dad, they frequently seek counsel from them. What do they discuss? Kennedy asked parents: “This year, on what topic has your student most requested your assistance or advice?” The answers broke down this way:
By tracking the form, frequency, and content of communication between college first years and their parents, Hofer and Kennedy hope to begin to tease out the best way to facilitate autonomy and self-regulatory development—critical components for reaching adulthood.
“Previous generations had none of the immediacy of contact that people have now. Students have this constant ‘electronic tether’ connecting them to home,” Hofer says. “What’s intriguing to me is to find out if that increased contact impedes autonomy. If you have immediacy, do people not learn to become autonomous?”
Hofer and Kennedy are reluctant to say whether their early findings mean that increased contact is helpful or puts roadblocks in the path to adulthood. But current culture seems to be leaning toward the negative, opining that increased contact is not such a good thing—and may even lead to that dreaded new syndrome, “failure to launch.” One small liberal arts college in the Midwest sent out a press release this summer quoting its vice president of student affairs advising students not to pick up the cell phone every time they run into a problem. And many colleges now arm their staff with strategies for dealing with so-called “helicopter parents” who hover around their offspring second-guessing every decision.
Hofer and Kennedy dislike the term “helicopter parents” and the negative association that goes with it. “What we’re trying to do is to sketch a developmental profile of healthy involvement in the college years,” Hofer says. “We know that it’s valuable for parents to be involved in their children’s education in earlier years, but we need to know more about what types of involvement are productive—particularly as children grow to adulthood—and what types of involvement may thwart self-regulation and autonomy development during the period of emerging adulthood.” She offers a more nuanced view than those who are quick to label parent-student engagement as a negative: “We have moved very far from feeling that all this is harmful or suspect. We are beginning to reconceptualize what the relationship between parents and emerging adults looks like and to better understand the healthy aspects of ongoing communication during the college years.”
Hofer says that for a lot of Middlebury students, being on campus as first years is their first significant period away from home. “What we’re finding is that it’s just as common for students to call on their parents to do the hovering. It’s not always the parents who are super involved.”
Just Right?
“This is very interesting research,” says Lawrence J. Cohen, a child and family psychologist in Boston who specializes in children’s play and play therapy.
“I am reminded of Goldilocks and her search for the bed, chair, and porridge that are just right. For some students, the big bowl of porridge, of calls and e-mails every day, is too much. For them, less is more—that is, fewer contacts with parents would provide a better chance for optimal growth and development in young adulthood. For others, the old model of infrequent, rushed, and expensive long-distance phone calls—the baby-sized bowl—did not provide enough sustenance, and they need what e-mails and cell phones now provide.”
He adds, “I think that perhaps the lower emotional intensity of e-mails and cell calls, compared to long-distance calls, balances out the increased frequency.” Cohen says that he wonders if an interesting future aspect of this research would be to look at the overall number of technological social contacts that these young adults make in a week.
“For many of them, if you count IMs and text messages, these contacts number in the thousands. Therefore, 10.41 contacts a week with the parents back home doesn’t seem like such a big number, and in fact, may be a lower percentage of a college student’s overall contacts than parents comprised 10 years ago.”
Hofer plans to continue the research with current and future Middlebury students, looking at what goes on after their first year, and then later, as students are launched into the first year out of college. She was recently awarded a research grant through the National Resource Center that was designed to enable scholarly research on issues related to college student transitions; Kennedy will be returning to campus as a consultant to the project, and Hofer has already recruited a pair of seniors—Connie Souder and Lacee Patterson—to start the research. Hofer is also working with another senior, Katie Hurd, on a study of her classmates, their contact with parents, and their degree of autonomy on a variety of measures, including their ability to “see parents as people.” Frequent contact does not seem to interfere with seeing one’s parents as separate from oneself, Hofer and Kennedy’s study suggests.
“Based on what we’ve found, there is a positive model of communication for students and parents,” says Hofer. “Emerging adults may be trading some autonomy for a better relationship with their parents. We did a parent study comparing the quality of the relationships they had with their own parents at the same age that their children are now—and this generation has a better and closer relationship with their parents.”
When her data started rolling in, says Kennedy, she was “shocked at how high the degree of contact with parents is.” But, she adds, “The idea of the hovering helicopter parent leaves out the fact that students are playing a role in this communication. Students are initiating the contact with parents, yet regulating their own behavior. When I was getting ready to give a talk, my mother wasn’t calling me to say, ‘Be sure to wear your fancy black pants.’ I was calling her to tell her that I was trying to decide between dressing like a college student or dressing like a grown-up.” Kennedy wore the black pants.
Freelance writer Catherine O’Neill Grace ’72 is the coauthor of Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children (Ballantine). She lives in Buffalo, New York.