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Annotated Bibliography

What Effect Does Helicopter Parenting Have on College Students?

Caroline Willis

Professor Malcolm Campbell

UWRT 1104 - 004

March 15, 2017

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Annotated Bibliography

Bayless, Kate. What is Helicopter Parenting? Parents, n.d., www.parents.com/parenting/better-

parenting/what-is-helicopter-parenting/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

This text is a developed article from a popular source. It covers the causes and

consequences of hovering over your children, particularly younger children. The article

was very informational on the basics of helicopter parenting: defining it, discussing what

causes it to take place, deciding if you are a helicopter parent yourself, and giving

information on how to avoid being one. This article does have a certain level of bias;

there are implications that being a helicopter parent is a negative thing. The author herself

doesnt have many credentials besides being a writer at Parents magazine, which means

that she does work with topics such as this often. The reason that I feel this source is most

likely reliable is because she cites multiple doctors within it. It came across as if Bayless

interviewed certain experts and then simply compiled her findings into this article. The

person that Bayless seemed to cite most often was Carolyn Daitch, Ph.D., who is the

director of the Center for the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders and the author of Anxiety

Disorders: The Go-To Guide. Bayless also cites Ann Dunnewold, Ph.D., who is a

licensed psychologist and an author that has done significant research in the field of

parenting. Because of these facts, I feel that this source is reliable. The purpose of this

article is to inform the audience about this particular type of parenting, and the intended

audience is parents or anyone who is curious about the topic. This source is one of the

simpler, more casual out of the ones that I have examined; it gives more of an overview. I

think that it is going to be a great starting point for my research paper because it gives

straight-forward and easy to understand information. This article gives a basic knowledge
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of helicopter parenting to someone who may know nothing about it, and I feel that I will

be using some of the facts that I learned in my paper. It is an article from a popular course

(Parents magazine), and it did a great job of helping me mold and narrow my topic.

Although it didnt mention college students as much as it did younger children, this

source was my most useful when it came to learning about the development and causes of

helicopter parenting that begin at a young age.

Estroff, Hara Marano. Helicopter Parenting- Its Worse Than You Think. Psychology Today,

31 Jan. 2014, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/nation-wimps/201401/helicopter-

parenting-its-worse-you-think. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.

This particular source is a reliable website. After researching the website, I learned that it

is reliable because of the certifications and degrees held by the people who oversee

Psychology Today. This is about helicopter parents, and its focus is on graduate students

and college students relationships, or lack thereof, with their parents. It talks mostly

about the way that the parents of millennials have a tendency to intervene in situations

related to higher education, and it also discusses the possible reasons behind parents

actions. This website has a bias against hovering parents; the verdict is that it ends up

taking a negative toll on the childs life, and that it usually stems from parents insecurity

instead of the childs lack of abilities. The author makes over-involvement from parents

seem like a detrimental thing. Estroff is the Editor at Large of Psychology Today, and she

is also the author of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting. She also

cites Michael Ungar, who is a psychologist and the head of Resilience Research Center at

Dalhousie University, where many studies on family and parenting have been done. Due

to these facts, I feel that the information coming from this website, that was published by
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an association, is reliable. The intended audience is anybody with an interest of the

psychology behind parenting, especially helicopter parenting. In my opinion, this source

is incredibly useful, and probably the most useful one I have found thus far. The purpose

of this publication is to inform people mainly of the prevalence of the issue in todays

times, and why it has become so important in our society. This source is one of the few

that inspired me to focus in on older children, even adults, as the subject of the helicopter

parenting. I do feel that I will end up using this source in my final research paper because

it had a strong focus on the age group I am looking into.

Khrais, Reema. Phone Home: Tech Draws Parents, College Kids Closer. NPR, 25 Sept. 2012,

www.npr.org/2012/09/25/161716306/phone-home-tech-draws-parents-college-kids-

closer. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Phone Home: Tech Draws Parents, College Kids Closer is a developed article from a

popular source. First heard on NPR in September of 2012, this article discusses the types

of relationships that students maintain with their parents throughout their college

experience. Its main focus is on the way that technology has changed the way parents and

their children communicate when they go away from college, including how often they

are in contact with one another. This article also gave the chance for the parent being

interviewed to defend her constant communication with her child, claiming that shes

simply a coach cheering her daughter on from the sidelines rather than a helicopter

parent. I believe that this article is slightly biased, simply because of the fact that they

only interviewed one family on their particular relationship. Reema Khrais, the author,

doesnt have many credentials where parenting is concerned, but she did reach out to

colleagues and look into studies that are directly affiliated with college students and their
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relationships with their parents. Some of the people that she reached out to are Barbara

Hofer, who is a psychology professor and the co-author of The iConnected Parent:

Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up, and

Arthur Levine and Diane Dean, who co-authored Generation on a Tightrope: A Portrait

of Todays College Student. Khrais also spoke to Rodney Johnson, who is the executive

director of George Washingtons Universitys Office of Parent Services, for his opinion

on parent involvement, because he deals with it directly each day. Due to the fact that she

reached out to so many knowledgeable peers for their opinion, I would consider the facts

in this source to be credible. This is a popular source, and its goal was to prove that there

is such a thing as a healthy student-parent relationship, even if they communicate or see

each other every day. This source was one of the easiest to read and most interesting out

of my others, but I feel that it learned the least about helicopter parentings effects from

this one. Even though I didnt receive a ton of information directly concerning my topic

from this text, I feel that it did a great job boosting my curiosity and helping me ask new

questions. This changed how I originally viewed my topic because it sheds a positive

light on over-involved parents, whereas most of my research has claimed that it is a

negative thing. I havent decided if this source will fit into my project yet. If it does end

up in my paper, it will be because this article inspired me to shift my original topic from

helicopter parentings effects on their children to a broader overview of college students

overall relationships with their parents, hovering parents or not, while away at school.

Kuh, George. Interview by Alison Stewart. Helicopter Parents Cant Stop Hovering, 6 Nov.

2007, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16034303. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.

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This source is a developed article from a popular source. In the form of an interview, we

learned from George Kuh about parent involvement in their childs college education.

This interview is based off of a study performed by The National Study of Student

Engagement (NSSE). The study wasnt originally done with a focus on parent-child

relationships, but after they began to see results, they realized that parent involvement has

some direct correlations with student success. The study was done on thousands of kids at

over 600 colleges, and the goal was to look at the quality of undergraduate education.

They ended up finding that most students are typically in contact with at least one of their

parents every day, and that these students are more engaged overall. On the other hand,

they felt that if parents were intervening, it was because the student needed extra help to

begin with. Overall, there is more academic success among students who contact their

parents often. Another thing they found in this study was that most students who have

helicopter parents, by definition, dont mind them. They feel that their parent is only

involved because they are concerned about their childs success and happiness. They also

deducted that for the most part, there is not a specific economic or social profile of

hovering parents. George Kuh, the interviewee, is the Founding Director, Senior Scholar

and Co-Principal Investigator at the National Institute for Learning Outcomes

Assessment. He was directly involved with the study he spoke about that was performed

at NSSE, and he has done lots of work concerning parents and college student

relationships. Also, the study was done over 600 colleges, so it covered many different

types of students. Because of Kuhs qualifications and past work, I feel that the

information given in this article is reliable. This is a popular source, and the purpose was

to inform us about the quality of college students lives. The intended audience is college
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student or their parents. This was, in my opinion, the overall best source I have found. It

was easy to understand, while still being informational. I know that it is a quality and

reliable source, and it also sparked even more of an interest in this subject for me. After

looking more into George Kuhs other work, I found that there are many other resources

that he worked on that will be beneficial while Im studying this issue. This interview

was incredibly helpful, and it will appear in my project because the information given

lined up perfectly with my questions and with my research.

Schiffrin, Holly H. Helping or Hovering? The Effects of Helicopter Parenting on College

Students Well-Being. Journal of Child and Family Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2014, pp.

548-557, 10.1007/s10826-013-9716-3. Accessed 1 Mar 2017.

This is an academic source that is focused on hovering parenting and its tolls on college

students. It has no bias, and it was full of information and research done on students. This

text dissected parental involvement and its different outcomes. It used specific studies to

get accurate information on long-term effects, and whether or not helicopter parenting is

as serious as it is often made out to be. The overall verdict, after all of the research had

been conducted, was that too much parent involvement was directly linked to higher

levels of stress and anxiety in students. It also proved that students often graduate college

and realize that theyre not as independent or intelligent as they once thought, because

everything had been earned for them by their overly concerned parents. The author, Holly

Schiffrin, has a Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology and she is a professor at the

University of Mary Washington. This article was also peer reviewed. Because of this,

and because of the extensive research put into the studies that are within this paper, I feel

that this source is credible. This is a quality academic source due to the fact that it was
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peer reviewed and because there were many subjects in the studies. So far, this source has

been the most helpful in shaping my topic and giving me good information with real and

accurate numbers directly from college students based on their relationship with their

parents. The purpose of this communication was to give insight on the amounts of

students experiencing depression and/or anxiety due to their parents involvement. After

learning how to read the different charts and illustrations in this paper, it helped shape my

understanding of the issue because it was the first legitimate study that I came across

involving only the information that Im interested in. It was also a great way to find

names of other researchers who have done work with helicopter parenting; I have been

able to branch off of this information to find even more research. This source will most

definitely appear in my project because it was able to answer some of my questions,

create more questions, and give me solid research with reliable statistics.