Leave us kids alone…

27th Nov 2009

Overzeal­ous par­ents need to grow up, says Vic­to­ria Shires

‘WHERE are you going? Who are you going with? When will you be home?’ These are famil­iar ques­tions I’m cer­tain most of us have heard. The plight of con­cerned par­ents wor­ried about us ven­tur­ing into the big bad world alone is becom­ing more and more com­mon. I read an arti­cle the other day about par­ents who fol­lowed their trav­el­ling chil­dren around the world on their gap years. Yes, you did read that right.

In the mod­ern, cot­ton wool, polit­i­cally cor­rect world where kids can’t play in the mud in case they get dirty and teach­ers can’t tell off naughty chil­dren in case they upset them, it seems that it would be a crime for any of us to grow up and actu­ally make a mis­take. I under­stand that we are our par­ents’ chil­dren. They love and care for us uncon­di­tion­ally; it is their job to moan at us for spend­ing too much of our loan on nights out and for sleep­ing all day when we ‘should be doing some­thing pro­duc­tive’ but they need to remem­ber that we are all at least 18 now. In the eyes of the law, we are adults; we can vote, get mar­ried and go to jail (hope­fully not the lat­ter!) and I believe it is time for them to back off a lit­tle and let us grow up and take con­trol of our lives. I want to make a mis­take and learn from it, I want to go through a hard time to under­stand it; I don’t want mum to bail me out with the answer or dad to warn me of the consequences.

In reports of recent years, the ‘heli­copter par­ent’ has become a new emer­gence, famous for hov­er­ing over­head and swoop­ing down to res­cue their young when needed. This new breed of par­ent is sim­i­lar to the recently recog­nised ‘lawn­mower par­ent,’ so-called for their abil­ity to smooth out their children’s lives and mow down all obsta­cles. From UCAS forms to grad­u­ate job fairs, it is widely becom­ing known that par­ents are inter­fer­ing too much. Some uni­ver­si­ties have resorted to send­ing out ‘Par­ent Packs’ to advise how to deal with a child leav­ing home and have recruited fam­ily liai­son offi­cers to help deal with any issues. Some large com­pa­nies have even had to deal with par­ents nego­ti­at­ing their grad­u­ate sons and daughter’s salaries!

While we laugh at the idea of a swarm of par­ents act­ing like preda­tors to pro­tect their off­spring, it is actu­ally a seri­ous issue. More and more par­ents are now join­ing up to Face­book, espe­cially when their sons and daugh­ters go to Uni­ver­sity, to keep tabs on what they are doing. Luck­ily, I haven’t had any noti­fi­ca­tions telling me that my dad ‘liked’ the fact that I went to the library or that my mum com­mented on a pic­ture of me in Gate­crasher. Ma, Pa, we would love you even more if you were there to help us when needed and not con­trol our lives totally.