Should parents run interference for students?

By MAUREEN DOWNEY

For children to succeed in school, we’re told that parental involvement is key. But I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve pushed that theme too far.

I’m not talking about the fourth-grader who shows up at the science fair with a rotating solar system powered by a blender motor, the product of a parent’s all-nighter in the garage. Nor am I worried much about the bleary-eyed mom or dad with a glue gun who produces an exquisite miniature of the White House built out of sugar cubes.

Such heavy-handed involvement typically fades by middle school and disappears altogether by high school, when most kids refuse to even acknowledge they have parents.

Increasingly, though, parents are running interference for their children well beyond senior year.

College professors say it’s not unusual to receive an irate e-mail from parents complaining about their child’s grade or the class workload. Even graduate schools are seeing more prospective students arrive on campus with their parents, something almost unheard of 20 years ago.

I’ve heard those stories for a few years now, but I have to admit being stunned by a story in the Wall Street Journal last week about parents buying summer career internships for their college kids. According to the story, parents fretful that the dour economy will limit summer internships are hiring professional placement firms to get their students into internships, most of which are unpaid. Others pay marketing companies to promote their children through direct-mail campaigns.

Capitalizing on these anxious parents, savvy charities ask companies to donate internships and then auction them to parents, one of whom paid $12,000 for a weeklong internship at a music-production company, according to the story.

On one hand, you want to scoff at these helicopter parents’ expensive exertions on behalf of their grown children, who eventually are going to have to fend for themselves in life.

But then that thought worms into your brain: “Is that what it takes?”

It may seem folly to spend thousands to buy a 22-year-old an unpaid internship with a law firm, but many parents invest that much and more to assure their children an educational leg-up in other ways. And they do because their efforts pay off later.

I know several kids who were awarded one of those pinnacle scholarships that pay them to go to college and send them all over the world. The students often share driven parents who heaped every educational advantage on their offspring, from math and science camp at Johns Hopkins in elementary school to Duke’s creative writing seminars in high school.

Indeed, parents told the Wall Street Journal that paying for internships is no different than paying for all the other opportunities they provided their children along the way, such as foreign-exchange programs in France and teen-leadership conventions in Washington.

They contend they’re only buying their children entry — the kids still must prove themselves once they get in the door.

But there’s value in facing closed doors now and then, and then finding a way to get in anyway. When parents refuse to dash to school with their second-grader’s forgotten book report, don’t kids learn to put their work in their backpack next time? When parents don’t get out the glue gun to complete the science project that their 11-year-old delayed until the last minute, doesn’t the child learn about time management? When college students don’t get that first internship, don’t they try harder for the second?

In trying to give our children an edge all the time, we may be denying them important life skills — resiliency and resourcefulness.