Reddit Teachers Share Their Worst Experiences With Helicopter Parents
Helicopter parents are creating a generation of entitled brats
Helicopter parents are parents who are way too overprotective of their children and are pretty much involved in every single aspect of their lives. They're basically the worst kind of parents and make their kids' lives an absolute nightmare.
Their parenting methods are extremely damaging to their kids and it's pretty much impossible to convince them to change their ways. Teachers, unfortunately, have to deal with these people on a daily day basis, and some of the things these people do are absolutely absurd.
Reddit user u/terminus84 asked teachers on r/AskReddit to share their worst experiences with helicopter parents, and some of the replies were absolutely shocking.
1. Cheaters have to be punished, period.
“I had 3 kids who were caught turning in the same paper and after giving them zeros for the assignment they got their parents to form a witch hunt. One of the parents rallied all the other parents in the class who all came in to hold a meeting about me and how I teach, even though none of them have been in my class or have talked with me personally. This is a highly advanced class and the LOWEST grade is a C which is really amazing. I’m actually super proud of all of them. Anyway, parents got the administration to have me allow them to redo the paper (essentially showing that I have zero authority for grades or to uphold high standards) AND I now must be extra evaluated because of the things these parents say I do in my class. Meanwhile I still have to teach these kids and act as a professional toward them, which I will. This behavior is unacceptable as a parent.”
2. Seems totally legit to me
“I had a student a few years ago whose mom would email all his teachers every single day wanting to know what we had done in class (we have websites with class calendars on them). It got so bad that the school eventually told her that she could only email once a week.
Later that year, the student turned in a research paper, and the first paragraph had been stolen word for word from a website. I printed out the web page, gave the kid a zero, and wrote a referral for cheating.
Hours later, the mom emails me furious that I would accuse her son of cheating. I explained the situation, and she told me “oh, it wasn’t his fault! He had been too busy to type it, so I did it for him. I wanted to spruce up the intro a little bit, so I added that little extra bit. I guess I forgot to add the source”
Seems legit…”
3. The whole thing got cancelled
“The 8th graders at my middle school used to take a trip to a theme park or something every year, but you weren’t allowed to go if you were failing any of your classes. Well, some kid’s mom called and whined that her kid couldn’t go (because he was failing) and it was discriminatory towards him and ended up getting the trip canceled for everyone.
Edit: For those that say the school was being unfair for keeping someone back who was failing. The end of the year trip was the ONLY field trip that they would keep kids home on for failing and we knew upfront that we were expected to do well to get to go. This kid just didn’t give a shit about school. He skipped a lot, he was constantly in trouble for acting out, and in one class that I had with him we were getting ready to take a test and he said “Fuck this”, tore it up and walked out.
His mom should have been more focused on getting him help rather than ruining things for the kids who did try.”
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4. Absolute control freaks
“Teaching 2nd grade, we took a field trip to our district’s vocational school so the kids could get a sense for the wide array of career choices available. One parent would not allow her daughter to attend because she was so afraid her daughter might take a liking to one of the non-collegiate career tracks (horticulture, culinary arts, etc.) and ruin her predestined path to medical school. Second. Grade.”
5. Every college kid's worst nightmare
“When first visiting colleges, one of the stories our tour guide told us was of how this kid’s mom moved in as his room mate…for an entire semester.“
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6. Push her? WOW
“I gave my students a fun Halloween activity that was basically a color by number on a hundreds chart. If they followed the directions, it turned out to be a monster. I hung them up for parents to see and one of the moms saw her daughters paper and was so disappointed and told me, “she can color better than that, you just have to push her.” She’s 5 and it was supposed to be fun.”
7. That's absolutely insane
“I had a parent sneak into my classroom during my lunch period and erase his son’s name from the “sad face list” on the board, claiming that he “got a feeling” while he was at work that his son was being mistreated at school. He could only believe that I had wrongfully accused his son of something, because his son was an angel. He picked the lock to come in and “defend” his son!”
8. How to embarrass your son for life
“As a college TA, I had one parent come in and demand that he see his sons grades(yup…asian…son about 19?). I told him about FERPA laws and that I indeed had no access to grades to begin with. He tried going above my head and ended up getting booted off campus since he harassed all the professors his son had classes with.”
9. He think he's still in kindergarten
“One time my assistant’s mother called me to say that her son had overslept, and he would be late to work. Homeboy is 27 years old, and does not live at home any more. WTF kind of person would rather call his mother than his own manager to say he’ll be late?”
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10. His mom basically ruined him
I taught ESL to a bunch of high schoolers, many of which were at an SAT level. There was this one kid who was incredibly fluent and would write wonderful essays in my class.
However, his mother wasn’t satisfied. She forced him to write a 10000 word essay every single day. Now, she had never learned a foreign language, didn’t speak English, I don’t think she even graduated from college. But she would (through her son and other translators) give me an earful on how I was being too easy on the students because I wasn’t making them do 4 hours of homework a night.
And this poor kid… this unfortunate, 14 year-old bastard who was fluent in two languages and was ready to take the SATs in a language not his own ended up getting worse and worse at writing. He would repeat things again and again just to get the word count, because his mother would check the essays every night. (well, she’d check the numbers. She wouldn’t be able to read the paper.) He would lie and make up stories, interjecting them at weird places. He did ABSOLUTELY MISERABLY in his exams because he wouldn’t take my advice to “stop writing when you’ve run out of things to say”.
