Monday, March 19, 2007 Echaves: Taboo no more By Lelani P. Echaves Thinking Aloud
PRIVATE jokes between my daughters and me still keep us breaking at the seams.
One involves my first daughter during her teens. When her visitors had left, her father would jokingly say, “I’m sure namatay na ang mga tanom.” (The plants are all dead.) Unknown to me, he had silently observed that to monitor the socializing in the sala, I actually drowned the plants by over-watering them.
For about six years, my second daughter was religiously attending her ballet classes. When she was done, she’d check her cell phone for messages or missed calls. She’d be excited to see nine missed calls...until she’d realize that seven came from me. “Grabe!” she protested.
Call it “remote parenting” or “stage-mothering” or “long-distance parenting” or “micro-managing.” You can have your fun, but I called it “concerned mothering.” And that’s that.
Today, I have good news. The practice of long-distance parenting continues in many college campuses in the US, and the practitioners’ name is “helicopter parents.” Why the term? Because they hover over their children’s college lives, more involved than their own parents were during their own college days.
A favorite website (www. insidehighered.com) states that a survey in an association called College Parents of America showed that 30 percent of the parents communicate daily with their college children, while 73 percent did so two to three times a week. Common modes are 82 percent by cell phone, 50 percent by e-mail, and five percent by snail mail. Students in private colleges get text messages more often than those in public schools.
So, when a college student is seriously talking on his cell phone while walking to his class, that’s not necessarily his girlfriend on the other end, but his parent—most often, the mother. And the topic could be the student’s finances, health and safety, academics, career planning and personal relationships.
Surprisingly, American colleges no longer consider parent involvement taboo. Responding to parents’ call for transparency, college administrations now provide parent service programs, such as invites to sit in college committees, days-long parent orientations, and even pages in their websites and newsletters.
Among Cebu City’s schools, the websites of Southwestern University (SWU) and St. Theresa’s College (STC) are worth emulating. This, especially because the other schools either were inaccessible or non-existent yesterday when I surfed. SWU’s is in fact better than some private corporations hereabouts. Aside from being attractive and colorful, SWU’s is comprehensive as well. There’s a president’s box to receive queries, an SMS registration form requiring signatures from both student and parent, job opportunities, photo galleries, official logos of all colleges and departments, downloadable forms, and a university calendar that stretches to March 2008.
St. Theresa’s College even lists all the school fees. For sure, the school, students and parents are on the same page come enrolment and paying time.
