A recent study done by the National Survey of Student Engagement, an Indiana based research agency, has shown that frequent parental intervention might be as good as it is bad.

“There's been a lot of press in the US about over-involved parents,” said Jillian Kinzie, the Associate Director at Center for Post-Secondary Research with NSSE Institute. “So we wanted to know to what extent parents are intervening in the students lives in college, in what capacity, and also to get a better sense of what degree a parents intervention is supporting or inhibiting students development.”

The study, which included 587 universities and colleges throughout Canada and the United States, and over 300,000 individual students, took into account the student to faculty interaction rate, academic challenge and educational and campus experienced for each student. When the results came in, just over 13 per cent of students reported having overly attentive parents who often intervened on their behalf.

“To me that says something, that [students] are involving their parents when they have a problem and need help,” Kinzie said. “It may be a generational characteristics, is it because the technology allows parents to be involved, because they all have cell phones and keep in touch that way?

”But they tend to have parents who are very involved in their lives, telling them what to do, and are intervening a lot- that they're having a lot of contact with their parents via cell phone or e-mail or other ways.”

And these conversations were interesting in the sense that students tended to call home to speak with their mother regarding personal issues, family and only sometimes would they talk about their school work and grades. Whereas with the father, the majority of the conversations were about academics.

“There's a name for it, they're called ‘helicopter parents,' and they're called that because they hover,” said Lois Wey, Fanshawe's Manager of counselling and student life services. “There's been a real sociological change that has happened, [because] parents are engaged and involved with their children at a deeper level from the time they're little kids through high school.

“So when their sons and daughters come to college, many parents are still involved, and they expect that they'll still be able to intervene and assist on their son or daughters behalf the way they've been able to from grade school through high school.”

The research done by NSSE also showed that students whose parents were more involved in their education at the post-secondary level were more likely to report having an overall better experience, to feeling more supported. However on the flip side, it also showed that these students were more likely to have lower grades than their more independent classmates.

“It's really a combination of variables,” Kinzie explained. “It just so happened that students whose parents intervened also had lower grades. We can't say whether they had lower grades and therefore their parents intervened, or that their parents intervened which caused lower grades.

“So we don't know what's behind that, all we know is that there was a relationship between parents who intervened, and the students who had lower grades.”

“I'm going to go back to a childhood reference,” said Wey. “If you're not allowed to fall off the two-wheeler, you're never going to learn to ride the two-wheeler. Parents want to be able to support their son or daughter, and every generation tries to give their children a little more than they had, but there is a limit to how much is helpful in the long-term.”

The study, which includes about 50 Canada institutions a year, has become an annual report by the NSSE since the pilot-study was initially done in 1999.

Survey says...

- Students starting post-secondary expected to spend 50 per cent more time preparing for class (18 hours) than relaxing and socializing (12 hours).

- The number of hours students spend studying has stayed at 2001 levels of 13-14 hours, only half of what faculty says is necessary to do well in class.

- In their last year of post secondary, half of all seniors did not write a paper or report longer than 10 pages. One in ten did not write one exceeding five pages.

- Students who studied overseas engaged more frequently in educationally purposeful activities upon returning to their home campus, and reported gaining more from college compared with their peers who have not had such an experience.

- Three fifths (61 per cent) of the respondents indicated they frequently met with the faculty member supervising their work; only eight per cent never met with their faculty sponsor.

- Seven of ten students communicated “very often” with at least one parent or guardian during the academic year.

- The most popular member of the support network was the student's mother, followed by father and siblings.

- Parents who intervened did not differ from other parents in terms of education level.

- Forty-six per cent attended college within 100 miles of home; 34 per cent study more than 200 miles from home.