Handling ‘Helicopter Parents’
The days of parents dropping off their student on campus and waving good-bye are gone. Enter the world of the parent coordinator.
By Lydia Lum
On any given day at California Polytechnic State University, Nona Nickelsen fields phone calls from parents about their children’s tuition or dormitory meal plans. Nickelsen also might be lobbed a question like this one, posed by a worried mother: “My son’s classmates all have girlfriends and boyfriends. What can I do to help my son find someone?”
Welcome to the world of parent coordinators, who now work at about 70 percent of the nation’s four-year colleges and universities. Although their job titles vary from one campus to another, their duties typically include organizing campus events for annual parent weekends, producing regular newsletters and staffing telephone hotlines — some of them toll-free. The coordinators field questions ranging from financial aid and academic advising to homesickness and how to get a student to wake up in time for class.
“This is a whole new career field,” says Dr. Gwendolyn J. Dungy, executive director of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, which represents about 11,000 student affairs officials.
