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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So I was at a parent orientation session when one of my kids was entering college. A man got up and gave the speech about allowing your adult sons and daughters to navigate their own way, this is a learning experience, they should advocate for themselves and so on. No one can disagree with that. Then he said he'd seen two generations of freshman classes come through, and this was the first time they had to create a "parent liaison" office to deal with parents who helicopter and want to do their kids stuff for them.

So a dad in the audience said maybe it's because colleges have stopped being reasonable, and students are sometimes unable to get results with their reasonable requests, and so parents have more and more had to use their stronger voices of authority to right wrongs. You could have heard a pin drop. Because yeah. If reasonable student requests were respected, parents (who usually don't want to get involved, frankly) wouldn't have to step in.

I stepped in a couple times, interestingly, for computer glitches that happened and the university acknowledged my son's schedule was dumped accidentally, and another son was removed from the choice dorm and placed in the worst dorm (oops, sorry, we see he did register and pay the deposit on the first day the registration opened, and through a computer glitch he and the other first 20 students to register were also dumped. We can try to work him in after school starts. Um no, actually, that's not going to work).

So yeah. After my kids tried and hit closed doors advocating for themselves, I did it. Because I was listened to.

"Well, it sounds like you won't be able to resolve this issue. Please transfer me to someone who can". Done.

Had the universities in these cases treated my kids like the adults they were, I wouldn't have had to step up and demand they be treated fairly.[/quote]

These are both issues that your kids could have solved on their own with some persistence. But you won't know because you stepped in when things got too frustrating for them.[/quote]

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