Any college professor who has received a call from a parent concerned about his or her child’s grade has experienced the wonder of helicopter parenting. While Lareau has demonstrated the involvement that many middle-class parents have in their children’s daily lives, this involvement can also extend past the teenage years (as documented by Arnett in Emerging Adulthood). As Nelson argues in Parenting Out of Control, technological advances are one of the primary factors driving this change. This recent commercial from Google shows us how:
I don’t mean to imply that the increased connections made possible by cell phones, texting, Facebook, and video chatting are necessarily bad (especially when a child’s mother has passed away!), but we are in a period of rapid change when it comes to relationships between parents and their college-age children. It wasn’t that long ago that I started college in a dorm room with one landline phone (and no answering machine) that was shared between five roommates who had to use calling cards to make long-distance calls home!
Memoirs of a SLACer 