I wonder how much parents are screwing up their kids by not letting go?
They text message their children in middle school, use the cellphone like an umbilical cord to Harvard Yard and have no compunction about marching into kindergarten class and screaming at a teacher about a grade.
To handle the modern breed of micromanaging parent, educators are devising programs to help them separate from their kids -- and they are taking a harder line on especially intrusive parents.
At seminars, such as one in Phoenix last year titled "Managing Millennial Parents," they swap strategies on how to handle the "hovercrafts" or "helicopter parents," so dubbed because of a propensity to swoop in at the slightest crisis.
My parents and others of their generation possibly erred in the other direction, not getting involved much at all unless the principal called to say Junior or Little Missy wasn't playing well with others. But I liked it that way and would have been mortified if my parents kept showing up at school. That would have been as bad as the teacher dropping in at my house. There are boundaries, you know.
