School
Helicopter U.
Illustration by Logan Guo
As Sofia, a 17-year-old Ivy League freshman, goes about her day at a university a 10-hour drive from her hometown, her mom tracks her location. She watches as Sofia (not her real name) leaves her dorm and heads to the dining hall, then leaves the dining hall to go to class. When Sofia spends hours at the library, her mom can watch the little blue blinking dot on “Find My Friends” and see just how much studying she’s getting in. On weekdays, Sofia’s mom calls around 10:30 p.m. to confirm she’s in bed.
Helicopter parenting often doesn’t end when a child graduates from high school. Today’s parents have more tools than ever at their disposal to stay involved (or overinvolved) in their children’s lives and keep track of their whereabouts, habits, and activities, from tracking services like Life360 to Facebook groups specifically for parents of college students. If college is historically meant to be a time of self-exploration, complete with bad decisions and murky mistakes, an increasing number of parents seem to be attempting to curtail that growth.
Tess, a 19-year-old student at Purdue University, recently went viral on TikTok for posting screenshots from the Purdue parents group. In the screenshots, parents ask how to find the phone number of their child’s dorm’s resident adviser, vent about interpersonal skirmishes their college student is having with roommates, and wonder if other kids are having gastrointestinal issues from dining hall food. Tess’ mom is in the group, and would often send her screenshots of posts she found funny or cringey, and Tess had the idea to compile the posts into a series on TikTok. “I think it’s also a lot of people who are needing to let go of their kids,” Tess says. In her own life, she’s thankful that her parents have let her find her own way.
But not every parent takes a step back when their kid goes to college. When I ask Sofia about her mom tracking her location, she answers, “You know what they say—strict parents raise sneaky kids.” It’s easy to get around her mother’s location-based surveillance, she says, and all her friends whose parents track them employ similar tricks. If you pause the data on your phone, she explains, your location will show up as the place you were when you paused it—so if Sofia wants to go out, but make sure her mom thinks she’s in her dorm, she’ll pause her data in her dorm and then leave (she can still make phone calls with her data off but texting doesn’t work).Other times, she transfers the location services to her iPad and leaves that in her dorm room. Either way: her mom can watch the blue blinking dot on the map all she wants without really knowing where Sofia is.
Besides the location tracking, there are also constant phone calls. Sofia’s mother calls in the morning to ask if she’s started studying yet.