This article was originally published on 18 October 2023

In the years before she retired as headmistress of Francis Holland School, Sloane Square, Lucy Elphinstone noticed a sharp uptick in the number of emails and phone conversations that parents wanted to have with the school regarding just about everything, from grades to children’s social and emotional lives both in and out of school. Partial school closures and disruptions during the pandemic only made parents’ concerns worse.

Elphinstone says that, across the sector, the number of parents requesting special educational needs assessment also went up as children struggled with concentration and confidence. Staff at schools like Francis Holland, a private, all-through girls’ school, began to feel overwhelmed and that they didn’t have the time or resources to address all parents’ requests and needs.

Many colliding forces, from the impact of social media to the shrinking number of university places that parents want for their children, have caused parent anxiety to spin out of control, she says.

“Over the past 10 years, whether in private or state, the middle- to high-income parental need for involvement and control has increased significantly,” Elphinstone explains. “And it’s been exacerbated by the pandemic.”

While some parents are withdrawing from schools and can never be contacted, some of those who are getting in touch are doing so more than ever - and that’s a problem.

Changes in societal expectations

Over the previous decade, schools across the UK and the US had already been seeing a steady rise in parent concern and oversight regarding what goes on at school; the pattern of obsessively checking the online parent portal for grades and trying to “snowplough” a conflict-free childhood is captured in popular books such as The Gift of Failure and How to Raise an Adult.

But then the pandemic came, with all its attendant anxieties, seeming to supercharge parents’ desire to connect with, and sometimes control, schools. Since the pandemic school closures, parents’ rights groups in the US demanding more transparency and curriculum control have gained more power, pushing Congress to attempt passage of a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” to give parents more control over what happens at school.

UK schools, meanwhile, say they’re seeing an increase in parents who desire constant communication and reassurance, not just around children’s attainment but around their social interactions, too.

And in both countries, more parents are opting out of traditional schooling to homeschool their children, taking more control. Since the pandemic, US homeschooling rates have tripled, and UK homeschooling, though relatively smaller, has still increased by 50 per cent.

‘There’s a climate of distrust all around, and that has unintended consequences’

The reasons why parents’ need for oversight, communication and control over schools is skyrocketing are varied and wide ranging, covering cultural and economic issues as well as vast changes in what society thinks good parenting looks like.

Yet increasing parent demands are changing how some schools operate. Schools are trying techniques such as more frequent and detailed communication, and working harder to get out in front of potential issues once considered manageable.

Teachers and school leaders are also asking themselves where these big changes are headed, and whether parents and schools can still work together as “partners” for the good of the children.

“Parents are now interacting with teachers more than ever before, especially over grades,” Professor Frederick de Moll, of the University of Luxembourg, told the BBC. “It has become the parents’ responsibility if [their] child fails in the education system or not. It’s more the parents’ failure than it is the school’s.”

Concerns about entry to elite universities and making it into the top set aren’t the only motivations behind parents’ increasing anxiety. The pandemic, political polarisation and concerns about rising violence and student safety have also put parents on edge. Other parents are concerned about academic attainment and learning loss after the pandemic. 

In some instances, these concerns can be beneficial to schools. In the US, a growing awareness around persistently low reading scores helped to launch a parent-led national push to improve reading instruction and address special educational needs such as dyslexia. 

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However, there is also a downside. Across society, trust - not just in schools but in everything, including government and other people - has been shaken on both sides of the Atlantic, experts and school leaders say.

“There’s a climate of distrust all around, and that has unintended consequences,” says Karyn Slutsky, former co-founder of the Queens Paideia School in New York.

Today, leaders say, there is a growing worry among parents that everyday failures and mistakes, whether academic or social, will affect their children, perhaps permanently - and many feel responsible to try to stop those mistakes from happening.

Parents’ “helicoptering” is partly to blame, says US middle school health teacher Jodi Maurici, for why her students have begun to cry at school if they answer a question wrong or do poorly on a test. 

“These kids are so afraid of failure. If they get a bad grade, their parents call the school for them,” says Maurici. “They aren’t able to do things on their own.” 

Growing pressure

What is it that’s driving this increase in helicopter parenting? As family structures have shifted, 21st-century parents are having fewer children and spending more time with them than previous generations - especially doing enrichment activities, like taking kids to music lessons, playing or reading books together.

Experts say that this, along with increased pressure to help children achieve academic success, has changed the entire cultural norm for how people from all backgrounds parent. 

Decades of research shows that parent involvement at school is positively linked to better student attainment and social skills, and higher graduation rates.

But big changes in culture have made some parents worry that simply making sure homework gets done or attending a parents’ evening is not enough. They believe that, for a child to be successful, parents need to have more control, making sure kids are involved in enriching activities and contacting the school when they perceive a problem with grades or social life. 

“Intensive parenting has really become the dominant cultural model for how children should be raised,” Patrick Ishizuka, a Cornell University researcher, told The New York Times. In a 2018 study, he found that a majority of parents believed in the most hands-on, intensive forms of parenting - such as making sure children have enrichment activities after school, even if these are expensive - regardless of their race or income level.

More intensive, hands-on parenting and the desire for more control make sense considering the modern environment, researchers argue.

Matthias Doepke, an economist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has found that intensive parenting - another term for helicopter or snowplough parenting - is increasing across the globe and is most extreme in societies with high levels of inequality.

This makes economic sense, Doepke argues in his book Love, Money and Parenting: how economics explains the way we raise our kids, because parents perceive (correctly) that the stakes are high if young people don’t get good grades, go to university and get a good job. For example, recent US studies show that, today, a university degree is a more reliable predictor of longer life expectancy than other factors, such as race.

In countries where inequality is relatively low, such as Sweden and Norway, Doepke says, parents are more likely to say that childhood is about play and exploration than families in countries such as the US and the UK, where hard work in children is more highly valued. 

“A lot of the changes in parenting we have seen in recent decades are completely reasonable to a change in economic inequality, and higher stakes in education more specifically,” Doepke says.

“It was not always like that; [in the past] there was very little pressure. The competition has gone up. For example, for the top colleges, the size and entering class hasn’t changed but the number of students applying has doubled.”

‘Kids need to have the space and self-confidence to take some risks’

Though intensive parenting may make economic sense to adults, it may not be what’s best for children: recent research points to some negative side effects when parents intrude too much. 

Jelena Obradovic, a psychologist at Stanford University, found that overparenting can sometimes undermine how children learn to regulate their emotions - a critical capacity in developing executive functioning skills.

In a 2021 study, Obradovic and her team asked kindergarteners to participate in a variety of everyday activities from cleaning up to playing with toys, while parents observed.

The children whose parents stepped in to offer instructions or help, even though kids were happily on task, Obradovic found, had more difficulty regulating their behaviour and emotions at a different time. 

Results show that giving children space to figure things out on their own, even at a very young age, is connected to developing agency.

“We coded children’s behaviour second to second,” Obradovic says. “And we are able to say that when children are actively on task, those parents who can step back, their kids had better executive functions.” 

Bad experiences

There are good reasons why some parents may find it hard to take a step back from their child’s education, though, suggests Sarah Sumner, headteacher at Westlea Primary School in Swindon. Economic factors aside, some families are wary of schools because of bad past experiences, she explains - and staff will need to take steps to win back their trust. 

Westlea offers a traditional primary education alongside a special provision for physically disabled children and those with complex needs, and many parents have had to fight for their children’s basic rights and education, Sumner says. 

“Because some of our parents have had a bad experience, that’s going to put them very much in a negative frame,” she explains.

“Parents will sometimes be angry because they’ve had to fight so much for things. I understand where the parents are coming from. There is no money, there are waiting times for assessments.

“There’s a bit of inequality: some of our parents can afford to get a private diagnosis and some can’t. I feel quite sorry; they are trying their very best, and yet there are too many other external factors that make that difficult.” 

After the pandemic, as emotions became more intense as parents attempted to work and care for their children with special educational needs, Sumner altered communication to help reassure them, backed by the philosophy that “every child has needs”. She and the staff use their weekly newsletter to give parents advance notice of upcoming events, and to celebrate students with “stars of the week”. 

Westlea has also understood how parents’ anxiety rose in part simply from their not being able to enter the school building during Covid restrictions.

Since rules have relaxed, staff have made a point of giving parents ample opportunity to come inside, with coffee mornings and in-person meetings, so they can get to know teachers and staff, and see what their child does all day.

Worries about social media

Some schools have also had to address increased parent anxiety around social media and children’s social interactions.

Peter Thackrey, deputy head (pastoral) at Bedales, a private day and boarding school in Hampshire, says that since the pandemic he’s spent more time talking with parents about children’s social relationships outside the classroom. A combination of the pandemic, growing teen independence and social media has left parents wanting the school to intervene in social matters more than it used to. 

In response, Thackrey and his team have created parent workshops to talk about walking the fine line of keeping teenagers safe while also giving them the independence they need.

“During the pandemic years, parents had not had their children away from them,” he says. “But I hope we are helping people learn that kids need to have the space and self-confidence to take some risks.” 

Not all schools are feeling the squeeze from parents, however. Several London state school teachers interviewed for this story say that, owing to school choice and the fact that GCSEs are marked externally, they feel relatively little pressure from parents to change grades or otherwise intervene with academic matters. 

But schools that do feel increasing pressure might look to emerging evidence and a growing movement in the US towards giving students more space and independence to solve relatively minor school issues, allowing parents to step back.

Increasing children’s independence

One possible way to turn down the temperature for parents is to increase children’s independence. In a relatively new, small pilot study, Camilo Ortiz, a clinical psychologist at Long Island University, has been giving children independence activities to complete, such as riding the subway alone or going food shopping on their own, as a treatment for clinical anxiety.

The results so far have been promising: increasing independence not only successfully decreased children’s anxiety but also parents’ anxieties as well.

A US-based non-profit organisation called The Let Grow Project shows how these findings could be applied in practice in schools. It has developed evidence-based school programmes to increase childhood independence and combat overparenting.

For example, there’s Play Club, an after-school club built around children just playing, without adult interference unless something physically harmful occurs; and “independence therapy”, which involves homework assignments that charge children and young people with trying something new on their own, like cooking family dinner or driving an hour away from home.  

Some parents and young people are scared at first, says health teacher Maurici, who’s been doing the Let Grow independence project with her classes for the past few years.

Though she has to do some coaxing, and always has a few parents who can’t help themselves and want to “help”, overall students and parents benefit from decreasing the child’s dependence on adults all the time. 

Let Grow’s founder, Lenore Skenazy, says schools that participate often notice that parents, so focused on all that could go wrong for their child, are often surprised at their child’s capabilities when left to their own devices.

“It gives parents the gentle push they need to let go,” Skenazy says. “Nothing changes until parents see with their own eyes how amazing and independent their kids can be.” 

Many schools see active steps to increase communication and parent education paying off, building trust and keeping parents in the loop. Parents can also increase trust in the other direction, some leaders say. Instead of needling teachers over grades, they can ask for specific instructions on how they can help at home. 

“One question that would be so refreshing is: ‘What skill can I practise with my child at home?’” former leader Slutsky says. “That would be so helpful. It says, ‘This person knows what they are doing. And, of course, they can’t do everything for my kid.’

“It’s so much better than assuming the worst about your child’s teacher.”