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Ms. Marano,

I am eagerly awaiting the release of your book, "A Nation of Wimps", having read notice in today's Parade magazine of its impending release next month. I am a university faculty member, and have served in higher education for the last 15 years. During that time, I have become increasingly alarmed by the number of students who seem to have difficulty engaging in higher order thinking, problem solving, or conflict resolution. Concurrently, I have seen an extreme increase in the numbers of contacts to me, my departmental colleagues, my chair, the dean, the provost, or sometimes even directly the university president (not infrequently leapfrogging over the "lower echelon" and going straight to the senior university official), fueled with anger toward some perceived injustice to the student. What is most alarming is that these contacts do not come from the students, but rather from the parents. In other words, parents are descending upon universities, stepping in to "kick some butt" when we dare to do something amazingly heinous like require their young adults to adhere to syllabus, departmental, college, and/or university requirements, policies, and procedures. When I hear a parent say, "What would it hurt to bend the rules a bit?", I hear echoes of years of that parent engineering environments to smooth the road for his/her child, rather than expecting the child to be accountable to the demands of that same environment. When I hear a parent say, "You obviously didn't advise him/her correctly" (when I know I had), I detect a pattern of parents listening raptly to the laments of a child and not bothering to seek the whole story from the other side before sanctioning the manipulation.

I take comfort in knowing that these on-site, up-close-and-personal "helicopter" situations are very much in the minority of the students I encounter, thankfully. My alarm stems from the fact that the situations happen at all, at this stage of a student's life when he/she is legally an adult, and that they seem to be happening with significantly more frequency. And, of course, it seems that even if parents are not hovering at our doors, there is still that pesky, and equally alarming, problem of their young adults not being able to think critically, problem solve, etc. -- somehow I attribute this to that same "non-accountability" mindset -- even if the parents are not hovering in person, their influence or lack of it still is, and I see that evidence almost every day.

My colleagues and I have discussed this very issue at some length. Your publicity on your upcoming book seems to suggest that helicopter parenting at the younger years seems to result in, e.g., self-destructive behavior at the college level. I hope you have looked beyond that to identifying behaviors at the university level that not only demonstrate those types of behaviors, but also behaviors that bring into question the ability to move successfully into independent adult roles.

Again, I look forward to the publication of your book.

Unfortunately my boyfriend's youngest son is a victim of overparenting. His mother does not allow the child to be disappointed and pretty much allows him to do as he wishes. At 10 years old, the child cannot deal with anything negative. A few weekends ago, due to inclement weather, he had 2 baseball games cancelled. He proceeded to start bawling as he went to his room. When his brother asked him what was wrong, he proceeded to punch his brother. Not the kind of reaction you should have when someone is expressing concern.

I'm an elementary school teacher whose students include a large group identified as Gifted and Talented. Their parents invariably approach me at the beginning of the school year to tell me how bright their kids are, how bored they've been in school up to this point, and how they really need to be challenged.

So I challenge them. And the kids, because they're not used to working very hard, don't work very hard at first, and their test grades suffer. And then their parents panic. "We don't want her self-esteem to suffer!" "If he's suddenly getting Cs instead of As, then this work must be too hard for him!"

So we look at the child's work together, and every single time I can show the parents that it's clear that the kid understands the concepts, but isn't proofreading, or checking the math, or reading the directions carefully, and once he/she starts to do that, the grades will go up. And the parents agonize. Can they afford to wait a month or so to see if their little darling can get with the program? Or should they just go for the sure-thing A grade by pulling their child out of the gifted program? I've had parents sharing stories of sleepless nights because of a single D on a third-grade math test.

These parents want their kids to be "challenged," but they want me to make sure everything's still easy for their kids. It's hard to get them to understand that a challenge isn't easy--that's what makes it a challenge.

Get this one! At a parent conference the 1st thing the parent reminded us (her daughter was failing almost everything and is an only child) was that she and her husband were divorced and her daughter had to split her time between her and her ex's house. DUH--more than half of the nation is divorced! Try having divorced parents in the early 70's when it wasn't the norm--I couldn't use the old--"my parents are divorced and my stepmom is mean to me" excuse. Then on top of that she says, "If my daughter turns in a blank sheet of paper with her name on it--you're going to grade it." I looked at our administrator and said, "you have to be kidding". He said nothing and I just shook my head.