Schools Channeling Goldilocks?

Given the frequency with which "more parental involvement" is cited as a panacea in education debates, I was shocked--shocked!--to read in today's Washington Post that some schools are now facing a problem with too much parent involvement. So-called "millennial parents," the Post tells us (apparently this is jargon for the parents of anyone born after 1982), are just too wrapped up in their kids' lives. They feel a need to monitor every aspect of their children's lives, they are obsessed with ensuring Junior miss no educational opportunity that might improve his chances as landing a slot in the Ivy league, and, once he's there, they might have trouble letting go. They are pesky and sometimes downright abusive to teachers, sometimes so much so that some D.C.-area private schools are implementing policies to keep such parents out of schools and classrooms.

Coming from a family of educators, I've heard plenty of anecdotes about overinvolved parents and how they can be a pain in the neck. But in general, accounts of widespread parental overinvolvement and the enormous stress it's putting on parents, children, and schools strike me as falling into the same category as those stories about the competitive elite preschool admissions race* or the allegedly ever-tightening college admissions race: It may reflect reality for the elite, well-educated, upper middle class folks to whom education coverage seems mostly to be targeted, but it's not the reality for most parents and children in this country.

Take a look, for instance, at the American Time Use Survey, which the government conducts to measure the amount of time people spend doing various things, such as working for pay, participating in leisure activities, and, yes, caring for their children. There's not a category in the American Time Use Survey for time spent pestering child's teachers, but we can look at the amount of time adults report under the "education-related activities" subcategory under "time spent caring for children as a primary activity" (time spent supervising children while focusing on something else, such as preparing dinner, is counted separately).

According to the September 2005 Survey, the average adult in a household that included children under 18 spent 1.34 hours caring for children as a primary activity, of which 0.1 hours was education related activity, and 0.07 hours time attending children's events. Even women in households with children between the ages of 6 and 17, who averaged the most time spent on education-related childcare activities, spent only .16 hours of education-related activities, and 0.08 hours attending child's events. Does this really suggest an epidemic of parental overinvolvement in children's education?

*I'm sorry to hear that some well-off parents are having trouble getting their kids into Ethical Culture. But as long as wealthy children are more likely that poor children to attend preschool, less than half of poor children attend preschool, and the quality of preschool and childcare options available for many low-income and working families remains abysmal, I'm going to focus my attentions on these issues.