Argumentative Essay: Helicopter Parents

Parents. Being a parent does not entitle you to be “Entitled.” If reading that shocks anyone, I do not apologize. While there still exists a large number of parents that fully support their children’s teachers and coaches, the number of annoying “Helicopter Parents”, who feel that it’s their inalienable right to interfere with whatever they want in their child’s lives, has grown exponentially over the last fifteen years or so.

While I fully understand that I grew up in another era where teachers and coaches were both looked up to by parents as mentors for their children. If there was a problem with your teacher or coach, it was your responsibility and not “Mommy or Daddy’s” to try to fix it. Consequently, the only time a parent would become

In the first hour of the first day, every parent was ushered into an auditorium without their child. The very first thing that came out of the mouth of the Administrator in charge that day was the following demand: “If you are a helicopter parent, it’s time to park it for the next four years.” She then went on to give examples of what some parents had done over the past few years, under the pretense of being proactive parents, including calling the President of the University to complain about their daughter’s

Along with the assignment, I would include a scoring rubric for the items required for the assignment and how much each category was worth towards the final grade. If the material was there on your final project, you received the allotted points. If it wasn’t, you didn’t receive the points. It was that simple.

I could write a book just on the parental complaints I have received over the years while teaching about how “unfair” or “unclear” I was with a project. These grievances would almost always strongly imply that I, and not their child, was at fault for the poor grade. I would often find out that instead of assisting their child with these assignments, they would often do most of it for them. The result was the parents felt as if they deserved a better grade and it had little or nothing to do with their child’s effort. It was really about