Are parents too involved in teenagers' A levels and independence compared to how they used to be?

[Theboredpanda]

…and is this helpful or detrimental to young people? I just saw a thread on here about parents talking about how “they’re” getting through A Levels at the moment. The “they’re” meaning them and their kids. I’d say I had good, supportive parents, but by A Levels and college they had no idea what I was doing day-to-day. They couldn’t tell you what exams I was sitting on what days unless I told them. Although I was still living at home, I was expected to be independent by that age and be doing my own thing with minimal support from my parents. This was in the early 2000s, was this other people’s experience of back then and do you think parents are too involved in their teenagers lives these days and is this stopping them from becoming independent?

I’ve already pointed out there was a train strike

DS has been working a part time job since 16. He has a lot of savings and has arranged a part time job in London. Want to carry on trying to fault his work ethic?

This is more than just A Levels.
Parents are over involved throughout childhood you see it at the playground with 6 year olds. They could actually play and determine things for themselves but parents seem to intervene on everything and as a consequence kids are unable to think for themselves. You don't need an adult to referee whose turn it is on the swing or how someone should go down a slide.

DS is in Y12 and I have very little input into anything. I have helped him identify extracurricular talks he could go to for free or very little cost (we're in London).

I will put his exams on the calendar next year so I'm aware if when they are.

And I will be going to some open days with him. I don't remember going to any until I had offers, and then I went on my own ('90s). So thats one change I see.

My DD struggles massively with time management and procrastination, so I can see myself helping her mire with planning in a general sense.

They have to be able to do it all themselves. Otherwise, what's the point? They're just heading for a huge crash if they're not independent.

I am a more involved parent with my DD than my parents were, but then I wasn't given much guidance, had strict parents around what I could do during A Levels, whilst simultaneously having little support & was left to get on with it, but expected to do well. Beyond pressure to get a job at uni immediately, my parents weren't involved. I wasn't at all self sufficient, had undiagnosed autism & ADHD, so unsurprisingly flunked out.

My DD is taking A Levels & is a self directed learner. I helped her set up a revision time table at her request & have helped with exam access arrangements. She likes to show me her work sometimes, not for feedback, she just loves giving a presentation!

I think it really depends on the child / teen. I have one daughter who can manager her own time, space, emotions and the other who is a mess!
They are both a long way off A levels though...

Wasn’t yesterday just a tube strike?

I guess he would’ve done whatever an adult would do when they had an urgent appointment during a train strike- go the night before etc…. It’s just one of those things we work around?

I knew which A levels were on which day and made sure DD felt supported. I never did any work for her, but would leave cards, a treat, etc. In her room and took her to her favourite restaurant to celebrate two years of hard work.
DD aced her A levels, travelled through Europe alone last Summer and apart from being very poorly not long adter arriving at uni (I went to make sure for myself that she had everything) has settled far better than I expected, making some wonderful friends.
There's a huge difference to my parents, who never ever set foot in any of my schools and took zero interest to doing everything. Somewhere in the middle makes for a happy, independent and successful young adult.

Are you saying you would refuse to support if your son didn't go to a university of your choice? Do you know how wrong and controlling this is?

It's quite a simplistic view "I did it this way, every one does it differently now"...

You were independent because you were able to and/or your parents couldn't be arsed. It doesn't mean that every other student was independently preparing for their exams.

And it's the same now, some teens will need more support than others, and some parents will be more pushy than others. I have seen a wide range of this, although it tends to be a stressful time for everyone in the family.

What if one of the ones she chooses you don’t agree with. Will you withdraw the money! Ultimately it’s their choice and their life.
My son had an offer from a top uni for his chosen course. He turned it down as having gone to the open day he didn’t like the feel of it and went to a less prestigious one and was very happy. Of course we’d have preferred him to go to the top one but we respected his decision.

I think there were always parents who were heavily involved in their children's work (mine were, they insisted on seeing revision plans and monitoring what I was doing, and giving me a list of "approved" and "not approved" activities during exam season).

I do think visibility has increased. Parents see that other parents are doing things, in a way that wouldn't have happened years ago, and think they need to do the same.

The parents who are not interested at all in their children's exams, or those who are quietly letting them get on with it whilst providing snacks and a quiet workspace, are not the ones posting obsessively on forums.

We never do their work - that makes no sense
But we do test them and maybe tutor them through weaker areas or at least find a pattern in past papers and suggest they work on their weaker areas more.

Our eldest had a shocker of first round Y12 mocks so we are nudging revision for resits.

Our Y10 breezed through his end of year and is currently doing his English oral speech so we will listen through that - once he’s written it himself.

Ours go to state comprehensive where sometimes there isn’t the time to expand and enjoy learning so we do some of that at home.

If I’m honest it’s quite fun we all end up talking academia together, they learn through explaining to us, conversations go off in tangents, we eat, laugh, study, adults read, tell stories of when we learnt this stuff. Is this what you mean by over involvement? Because if it is then fine, our eldest is likely to go to uni in just over a year followed by his brother x2 years later. They spend increasing amounts of time away from us so I treasure any time talking, learning together now these days are almost over. And they will miss each other when eldest leaves they adore each other as brothers and listening to them teach each other makes us happy.

But we don’t do their work, we won’t fill in their UCAS forms, we won’t apply for jobs or go to interviews or email uni tutors (we barely email school and college).

By A level you should be learning independently or you won't cope at uni.
It's brilliant that parents care and are interested but a 'how's it going?' should be enough involvement, unless they need specific subject explanation from you.
Although my DD did chemistry A level so I'd have been as much help as a chocolate teapot.

I was at boarding school when do did my A levels first time and they had no involvement at all. Not even in my A level choices. If they had been more involved I would probably had done better, instead of failing them all. I'm sure they weren't uninterested, but they didn't let me see any interest. It didn't help that they were living in Australia temporarily while I was at school in the UK, so our only contact was by letter (way before email or smart phones). I could have done with more involvement.

When I took them again as a mature adult I didn't need their involvement and I did very well, as I did with my HND and Degree studies. They did encourage me to go back to college, and they were interested if I told them how I was doing, at that stage.

My son is doing the leaving cert, the Irish equivalent of a levels. I wouldn't say I'm involved but I'm interested. I know that he is on his way to Maths paper 1 right now, that he is dreading it as he feels that it's his worst paper and that he has geography this afternoon.

I like it when my family show an interest in things that are important to be so I show an interest in things that are important to my family. You are never too old to want people to take an interest in you, it shows that they care. This is the most important thing that my ds has done to date and will decide how the next few years of his life go so of course I will show an interest and if there is anything that I can do to make this time a bit easier for him then I'm there to do it.

Well, that really depends on the young person doesn't it? There isn't a one size fits all, and you would have to have a very narrow world view to think there was. My parents were so hands off, that when asked to collect DB after an accident at school, they had to ask for directions to the school because they didn't know where it was. My upbringing caused me to be robustly independent. For my own DC however, they have significant learning difficulties. If you have a processing speed below the 1st centile and you are trying to do A-levels, then you need some support - and I would expect that to be obvious to most people. I encourage independence on a daily basis, but I will be there to provide the support needed, for as long as its needed.

I think it depends what the poster means by "involved". We told DD that we couldn't afford to give her the "extra" money required to support London prices and we strongly suggested she did not pick a very far off university (thinking Scotland, when we are SE England) as she is disabled and we didn't know when she started how much support we might need to provide. We also were able to visit Open Days and provide different perspectives (for example, Open Days tend to be very focussed around first year accommodation, we made sure she thought about subsequent years). So I would say we were involved, but ultimately DD made her own decisions.

On the other hand we went to one Open Day where the mother of the person sat behind us was openly telling her child that they were not allowed to do x subject as she didn't deem it of any value. (and in this case the subject that was "allowed" was English Lit, and the subject that was "not allowed" was English Lit with Creative Writing so it seemed a bonkers argument anyway).

You only have to look on threads on here OP - parents involving themselves in their children’s petty school squabbles from primary age onwards, deciding who their children can and can’t be friends with, what subjects they should study, what career they should aim for, who they should date. It’s so creepy.

And then you see the ultimate outcome of that level of parental involvement: thread after thread from women who seem to be utterly incapable of handling the most mundane conflicts, who share every aspect of their lives with their parents, or women who are struggling to assert boundaries with in laws who are involved in every aspect of their lives, from where they live to how they dress their children.

The issue is that parental over-involvement is getting worse and worse, so it will unfortunately lead to entire generations of people who can’t do much as pick an outfit or deal with a difficulty without running it past mummy and daddy.

Thats control not help.

Having uninvolved parents doesn't mean a child will have learnt independence/resilience.

I agree. I think some parents are over involved. Tracking phones? Really?

I also think some parents on this thread feel that they are better parents because they are completely hands off. These parents don't seem to understand that all 17 and 18 year olds are different - some are independent and motivated and some need an extra nudge. Why would anyone deliberately set their children up to fail?

I took the middle road. Train strikes and a poor bus service meant that I did ferry DD around when absolutely required. The school buses were so unreliable that I couldn't risk DD being late for school for a morning exam.

For GCSE I downloaded some past papers for maths and the sciences for her to practice on.

For A level she was pretty much on her own other than proof reading her geography NEA and testing her on her biology flashcards because she asked me to.

For her degree, no involvement other than showing her how to use Excel and proof reading her dissertation - because she asked me to.

I think it is fine to offer moral support and lifts if required (posters being sniffy about this clearly live somewhere with reliable public transport).

There is nothing wrong with ‘good’ involvement, it is when it veers into helicopter parenting that there is a problem.

Good involvement: maintaining a calm environment with food/drink. Asking how it is going and how it went. Being generally supportive.

Bad involvement: nagging, getting overly anxious, making them revise to your timetable, not going out yourself, losing sleep over it.

Yes. My parents in the late 80s / 90s had just the right amount of involvement, and then it was very much a case of leaving us to it, exam-wise.

Parents never "came up the school" or got involved in school issues unless it was something really bad.

But that said, 80s and 90s parents trusted and respected teaching staff, and would never, ever question them or argue with them. Even if some of the stuff the teachers did was unfair, our parents told us to get on with it!

The parent uni groups are full off, we got 4 A*s we got an Oxbridge offer etc, utter madness. Then the extreme of they got a rejection and have the predicted required grades I’m going to complain so they get an offer.

I think there's a happy medium? I know (generally) which exams DC sit on which days, but they're organising their own 6th form stuff/revsion/practice papers etc.

My parents were very hands off/disinterested but the first to have something to say with my poor results.

I can imagine though that many kids are over patented and don't cope well at uni.

Why are you paying £25k a year? I haven't budgeted for this !

My DC is doing GCSEs and has ADHD, they asked me to make sure they are awake so they don't miss any exams, and provide bountiful revision snacks as support.

I always ask how exams went (because I'm interested and it is a little fun), I know what exams are that day. I check there isn't anything practical they need - like equipment or a lift to an exam in torrential rain, and general welfare check they're not burning out. I'm fairly sure this is what my parents did too. No lifts or equipment has actually been wanted, but I feel like it's supportive to offer.

Fingers crossed I feel like the exam period has gone quite smoothly so far, neither of us has felt particularly stressed. I feel like I know what's going on and have been supportive in a general sense, but not involved in any actual revision.

A subject teacher contacted me earlier in the year about some specific coursework issues that I helped my DC resolve by discussing, and my DC asked for a tutor in one subject which I duly booked, paid for, and transported to.

Maybe I am overly involved? I vaguely feel as neither of us feel stressed - out it's been a kind of OK level of support. I definitely feel like they're going to 'own' the success (hopefully not lack of) themselves, all the actual work has been them and not me.

I do know some much much more involved parents, but I doubt my DC would want me doing that.