Your child’s success in college depends heavily on the parental support you provide.
However, being too involved can also hold them back, particularly in the college mentoring process.
Read this article until the end to understand the risks of overly-involved parenting and how to step back to let your child thrive!
Parental Involvement Is Crucial
As a parent, your child needs your support to prepare for college, like helping with applications, organizing accommodations, and finding a suitable mentor with Equity Metrics.
Your support leads to overall better performance with good attendance records, higher grades, and less chance of anxiety and depression.
Unfortunately, even well-intentioned parents can become overly involved, preventing their children from learning to solve problems independently.
That is called being a ‘helicopter parent’, and it’s a problem so common that even college academics, administrators, and mentors recognize it as a regular challenge each semester.
Helicopter Parenting In Mentoring
Mentorship is a one-on-one process between a mentor and a mentee.
Yet, some parents include themselves as an active third party by attending mentorship meetings with their children. Some even speak on their child’s behalf instead of letting them participate independently.
The research points out that this behavior can undermine the mentorship process in several ways (Reynolds, 2022).
For example, the mentor might struggle to understand the student’s needs with an interfering parent. Meanwhile, the student might not feel comfortable sharing what they need help with, knowing that their parents are also part of the conversation.
Setting and following a few basic ground rules can help prevent that problem from happening.
How Involved Should You Be In The Mentorship Process?
As crucial as support is during the college transition, the mentorship process is one area where it benefits everyone for parents to take a hands-off approach.
Thankfully, Reynolds (2022) also offers a few helpful tips on how parents can do so, such as the following:
1. Parents Should Not Join Meetings
The relationship between an adviser or mentor and the student is most effective when done one-on-one.
So, a healthy ground rule to establish is that parents should not join those meetings. Instead, they can let their child develop self-confidence and manage them independently.
2. If Necessary, Parents Could Join One Meeting
If the parent or child feels necessary, parents could join the first meeting with the mentor.
As a parent, you can use that meeting to familiarize yourself with the mentor and communicate any needs.
3. Advisers Should Not Meet Parents Without The Student Present
Although parents might arrange for their child to have a mentor, perhaps through Equity Metrics or an on-campus mentorship program, the parent shouldn’t meet the adviser without the student present.
Doing so prevents undermining the mentor-mentee relationship by letting the student take the lead in such meetings.
Final Thoughts
Being less involved doesn’t mean being uninvolved. Parents can still do their part to prepare their children for college by staying informed.
So, check out the Equity Metrics blog for more helpful guides on mentoring and other important topics!
References
Reynolds, A. (2022). “Can my mom sit in?”: Defining the proper scope of parental involvement in academic advising. The Mentor – an Academic Advising Journal. https://doi.org/10.26209/mj2462940