Overprotective Research Articles

Virtual words: language on the edge of science and technology

The technological realm provides an unusually active laboratory not only for new ideas and products but also for the remarkable linguistic innovations that accompany and describe them. How else would words like qubit (a unit of quantum information), sock puppet (an illicit online alternate identity), or in vitro meat (chicken and beef grown in a laboratory) enter our language? In Virtual Words: Language from the Edge of Science and Technology, Jonathon Keats, author of Wired Magazine's monthly Jargon Watch column, investigates the interplay between words and ideas in our fast-paced tech-driven use-it-or-lose-it society. In 45 illuminating short essays, Keats examines how such words get coined, what relationship they have to their subject matter, and why some, like blog, succeed while others, like flog, fail. Divided into broad categories-such as euphemism, polemic, jargon, and slang, in addition to scientific and technological neologisms-chapters each consider one exemplary word, its definition, origin, context, and significance. Examples range from cybrid (a human-animal hybrid embryo) and unparticle (a form of matter lacking definite mass) to gene foundry (a laboratory where microbes are built) and blackhawk (a combative helicopter parent). Together these words provide not only a survey of technological invention and its consequences, but also a fascinating glimpse of novel language as it comes into being. No one knows this emerging lexical terrain better than Jonathon Keats, and in writing that is as inventive and engaging as the language it describes, Virtual Words offers endless delights for word-lovers, technophiles, and anyone intrigued by the essential human obsession with naming.

The Social Value of Self-Esteem

This essay reflects upon the current cultural skirmishes over the parenting practices of Americans, which have pitted “Helicopter Parents” against “Free-Range Kids”; “Tiger Mothers” against “Panda Dads;” and at-risk communities “Waiting for Superman” against privileged students in the “Race to Nowhere.” Despite the exaggerated claims of difference in these and other popular representations of the parenting wars, a common theme of building children’s self-esteem is evident as a cornerstone of contemporary American parenting practices. Through different means, the relatively privileged parents who write child-rearing memoirs (or confessionals) pursue a similar end: to build and enhance their children’s self-concept and emotional competence. In particular, professional-class parents who are anxious about their own prospects for continued success in a risky economy turn toward emotional capital as a necessary supplement to educational and extra-curricular success to ensure inter-generational transmission of advantage. The goals of emotional competence and self-esteem replicate the mechanisms of control to which elite parents are subjected in professional careers and therefore represent an important form of cultural capital in the reproduction of class advantages.

DOES “HOVERING” MATTER? HELICOPTER PARENTING AND ITS EFFECT ON WELL-BEING

The phenomenon popularly referred to as helicopter parenting refers to an overinvolvement of parents in their children's lives. This concept has typically been used to describe parents of college-aged young adults. Despite much anecdotal evidence, little is known about its existence and consequences from an empirical perspective. Using a sample of college students at a university in the United States (N = 317), the exploration and measurement of this concept is examined. Results of factor analysis of helicopter parenting items constructed for this study support the use of the scale. Results suggest helicopter parenting is negatively related to psychological well-being and positively related to prescription medication use for anxiety/depression and the recreational consumption of pain pills.

Landing Helicopter Parents

Landing Helicopter Parents

Wimps? What wimps?

Older scientists should give researchers starting out on their careers more support and encouragement.

Rejoinder: Discussing culture and childhood

This comment agrees with Prof. Zuckerman that careful inquiry about the effects of culture, in terms of actual parental behaviors and some disparate subcultures, is warranted. It argues, however, that parental anxieties, based on a sense of children's vulnerability, affects even many remiss parents and explains widespread behaviors and areas of excessive supervision; the anxieties also may help account for an indifference to concerns about children in general as opposed to one's own offspring. The helicopter parent is a real and somewhat troubling phenomenon in the United States.

From helicopter parent to valued partner: Shaping the parental relationship for student success

AbstractParents of college students influence the transition experiences of their sons and daughters, and they also experience significant transitions of their own.

Table of Contents

Abstract Cover Story Reap significant rewards for your unit by initiating corporate partnerships Clemson raises thousands from corporate partnerships Helpful Hints Successful partnerships = addressing needs of division, companies Grant Watch Briefs Court denies challenge to financial aid law FIRE finishes redesign of free speech resource Judge rules that materials for program are illegal College suspends group for planning a concert Assessment Advice Improve relationships with faculty by sharing assessment data Alcohol Report shows extent of student binge drinking, drug abuse Helpful Hints What can you do to reduce alcohol, substance abuse? Did You Know? Alcohol‐related deaths, injuries, sexual assaults have risen in recent years The Advisory Board Speaks Review advisory board's thoughts on proposed changes to FERPA regulations The bottom line: proposed changes to FERPA regulations Did You Know? Note proposed changes to FERPA regs that affect student affairs Washington Report New law will help ensure access to student loans Law & Campus ACCESSIBILITY College's prompt action leads OCR to close complaint College will make public forum fully accessible TITLE IX College destroys evidence in Title IX case, faces sanction GREEK AFFAIRS Fraternity loses recognition, files due process claim DISABILITIES Student challenges policy on service animals Leaders & Innovators KENNETH A. ZICK, VICE PRESIDENT FOR STUDENT LIFE, WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY Relationship covenant informs helicopter parents of proper behavior Model Policy Couple relationship covenant with parents' orientation, council

Childhood, Power, and “Symbolic Plenitude”

Childhood, Power, and “Symbolic Plenitude” Richard Flynn The articles in this issue concern themselves with what Leslie Frost, in her article "Shadows of War," calls "children's symbolic plenitude." Frost's assertion that children and the concept of childhood may be employed in the service of ideologies ranging from the leftist to the fascist is not surprising. However, the nature of this symbolism and the ideological uses to which it is put are both slippery and subject to social and historical forces. The authors in this issue understand the intensity of our investment in childhood as a symbolic center and recognize childhood as a site for enacting both our idealism and disciplinary practices, often simultaneously—and usually uneasily. Ken Parille's "'What Our Boys Are Reading'" reveals the limitations of our received view of boys' reading as reinforcing "notions of male authority and privilege," in contrast to the disciplinary function of girls' reading. By examining Lydia Sigourney's writings about boyhood literacy alongside her biography of her son, Andrew, who died at the age of nineteen, Parille investigates Sigourney's critique of the "harmful norms" of "boyhood masculinity" perpetuated by the idea of "heroic imitation" in antebellum literary culture. Parille demonstrates that Sigourney's insistence that reading should cultivate boys' "domestic virtues" is echoed in later fiction for boys, such as Francis Forrester's Dick Duncan. Modern critics' tendency to divide nineteenth-century children's literature into "boys' books" (Twain) and "girls' books" (Alcott) obscures the complexity of both boys' reading and authors' attitudes toward the young. By questioning our reliance on "familiar classification of authors . . . by gender or perceived literary seriousness," Parille asks us to re-examine our "long-held beliefs" about boyhood. Daniel Greenstone presents a witty and cogent account of the ways in which Ian Falconer's Olivia books comment on the "unfulfilled promises of feminism." Greenstone reads Falconer as a satirist and social critic of contemporary gender relations, suggesting that the career of Gloria Steinem is emblematic of the ways in which feminism as a political movement has been subsumed (some might [End Page 1] say co-opted) by parenting styles that put the child at the center of a (largely upper-middle-class) world. In "The Sow in the House" Greenstone argues that the raising of a "fully actualized child" occurs mostly at the mother's expense, since it is usually she and not her husband who does most of the parenting, even in our more "enlightened" times. It is not surprising that Steinem praises Olivia's "self-esteem" in her jacket blurb for the book since the pop-psych Steinem—the "self-help feminist" author of the problematic Revolution from Within—has almost entirely supplanted the feminist who believed in political action. Making the child the center of the universe—a star like Olivia—often happens at the expense of the mother's autonomy. And as Greenstone notes, since Falconer has no plans to allow the six-year-old, "bratty and willful" Olivia to mature, we are not privy in the fiction to the results of such childrearing techniques, even as in real life the costs of "helicopter parenting" are becoming annoyingly clear. Perhaps the roots of Olivia's need to be center stage may become apparent when we turn to Joe Sutliff Sanders's examination of the changing role of sympathy in orphan girl novels. Sympathy, which Sanders describes as an "emotion . . . made up of a potent concoction of guilt, affection, and admiration," is depicted as "centrifugal" in novels such as What Katy Did and Uncle Tom's Cabin in which the weak characters use their position as the "heart of the house" to change the powerful. But while "radiat[ing] influence outward constitutes a kind of power, it does not alter the subservient status of the child." As the emphasis shifts from the centrifugal to the centripetal in Progressive Era novels like Pollyanna, the weaker character, rather than acting as a moral influence, becomes the recipient of adult attention. Having spread the glad game before her car accident, Pollyanna is now able to receive and "consum[e] the fruits of her labor: adult attention." In "'Saving the World Before Bedtime,'" Lisa Hager...

Not a Luxury, But a Necessity: Toward Transgressive Teaching

Not a Luxury, but a Necessity:Toward Transgressive Teaching Nami Kim (bio) I still remember the excitement I felt two years ago about the prospect of participating in the "Teaching for Change" conference. I was excited about the conference; as a "brand-new," struggling teacher, I hoped and expected that the conference would shed some light on the many questions I had regarding teaching and scholarship, and their relationships to the transformation of both the academy and religious institutions. Two years later, I still have many and maybe even more questions. However, what has changed since then is that I am asking different sets of questions: questions that challenge me to become more accountable and (self-)critical in the process of producing and reproducing [End Page 112] knowledge, and that urge me to reexamine my own commitment to teaching and scholarship that seeks to change society. In this brief reflection on my experience and thoughts about feminist "Teaching for Change," I focus on three interrelated conference highlights as a guidance to affirm what I have learned from the conference and to address some of the issues with which I continue to wrestle. First, the call for an ongoing critical analysis of the institution and the renewed vision of teaching for change the conference participants articulated challenged me to reexamine my own teaching context more critically. Many feminist/womanist teacher-scholars and/or activists who were at the conference voiced their concerns over the increasing corporatization of the academic institutions in U.S. higher education. The conference was an alarming call for me to be aware of institutional aspects of teaching context as a site where knowledges are manufactured as well as contested. In this light, I realized that reexamination of my teaching context includes understanding not only who my students are but also what kind of academic institution I am situated in. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty has explained, the academic institution is one of the few "contested sites crucial to feminist struggles" and, at the same time, the space that "determines the everyday material and ideological conditions" of my work as a teacher and a scholar.1 To what extent does this institution provide spaces for feminist engagement and practices when global market economy, U.S. imperialism, and the religious Right is forming evermore-solid alliances? What are the institutional supports for or roadblocks to teaching and engaging in feminist studies in religion, especially when technology savvy "generation Y" students and their "helicopter parents" view themselves as "rightful consumers" of the academic institution, where they can get necessary credentials to become "successful" global consumer-citizens? Does this institution affirm the teaching that "enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries"2 when education tends to become another "commodity"? Asking these questions, I continue to struggle over what my roles and responsibilities are as a teacher at this historical juncture in which students expect to become "winning players" in the competitive global markets, and how I can challenge students to engage in critical thinking and enable the classroom to become "the most radical space of possibility in the academy."3 A close examination of my own teaching context in relation to the broader social, political, and economic context has also pushed me to look more critically at how I am implicated in this contested site of struggle through my teaching [End Page 113] and scholarship. In other words, examining teaching context also includes a critical assessment of my participation as a racialized-gendered person in the production and reproduction of various forms of knowledge in the U.S. academy. The second issue I'd like to address is how the conference reaffirmed the importance of the ongoing examination of the relationship between knowledge production and its relationship to power. To what extent does our work challenge or reinscribe the politics of knowledge that "naturalizes global capitalism and business-as-usual in North American higher education"?4 How do we implicitly and explicitly maintain the status quo or even inadvertently serve the interests of the religious Right in conjunction with global capitalism through our engagement in the production and distribution of knowledge? As bell hooks and many other feminists have critically explained...

Ethics and the law: delegating decisions to another person

Many nurses will be familiar with the situation in which an over-protective or ‘interfering’ relative disrupts communication between the medical team and the patient, by speaking on behalf of the patient. The second case in our short series on mental capacity follows on from Jane’s story, covered in the last issue (George and Dimond, [2007][1]). You will recall that Jane was in the last few days of her life and was incapable of making decisions for herself. In that case, the clinicians encountered a difference of opinion between her biological family and her declared next of kin as to what was in Jane’s best interest. The Case scenario in this issue (see box) describes a patient who is quite capable of making her own decisions, but is rendering herself incapable by electing to defer to her mother and extended family, allowing them to make critical treatment decisions. A serious problem has arisen because the family is refusing life-saving treatment on behalf of the patient. The patient appears passively to be colluding with her family by not responding to the medical team directly. It is the medical opinion that treatment is in the patient’s best interest. This article will examine the legal and ethical issues of the scenario, discussing methods by which this type of situation can be managed. [1]: #ref-2

Preparing for the Nexters

They've been called “Generation Y,” the “Millenials,” the “Nintendo Generation,” and most recently the “Nexters.” The generation of children born between 1976 and 1994, are entering our classrooms in colleges of pharmacy, and beginning to practice within the profession. For the most part, they are children who grew up with hectic schedules filled with scouting, baseball, piano lessons, and dance classes. They are accustomed to fast-food dinners and weekend soccer tournaments. They are the children of “helicopter parents,” a term coined because of the parent's hovering approach to parenting. The Nexters chat online while listening to music on their iPods, and expertly search the Internet for answers to a history question that they can not find in a textbook. They have a personal tutor, but he lives in India and they can access him anytime of the day or night through e-mail. As educators, it is our job to prepare curricula that meet their needs and to provide experiences that help with their entrance into the workforce. In order to predict their needs, we first have to assess their special skills and abilities, and then address their deficiencies. In the book Generations at Work, the strongest asset of the Nexters is defined as their resilience.1 They are characterized as optimistic, tenacious, hard-working, and civic-minded. They are technologically savvy and they easily adapt to change. On the flip side, previous generations sometimes describe them as self-absorbed, unable to entertain themselves, and not tough enough to handle the workplace.1 The first question for our colleges is how to recruit into our programs the best students from this generation. Our recruitment strategies should focus on a team-based approach to learning, technologically rich curricula, and opportunities for feedback and evaluation. Innovative colleges should consider recruitment strategies that include parents, as this generation not only listens to their parents, but actually considers them to be “cool.”1 These students are also looking for experiences that provide them with opportunities to serve, and to see other parts of the world. They may also have a few liabilities that they bring into the workplace. They may be impatient, expecting to find answers quickly at their fingertips. In a customer environment, they may be easily intimidated by difficult customers since Nexters have experienced mostly cooperative relationships with parents and teachers.1 As a generation that was pampered and nurtured as children, they may be unprepared for environments that do not provide a lot of positive reinforcement. As we design curricula, it is important to consider the framework of these learners. They have been exposed to multimedia entertainment since the time they could hold a controller. They expect to be entertained as they learn. To hold their attention, we may need to consider having traditional lectures comprise a smaller part of the overall curriculum. Active-learning experiences, such as role playing, do not intimidate these learners and may help them improve their communication skills in negotiation, mediation, counseling, and consoling. If we recruit these graduates into our academies, we should also be aware of a number of factors. They prefer flexible hours over many other benefits and expect competitive salaries based on market trends. They do not require a lot of supervision, like working as part of a team, and although respectful of authority, would not stay at a place where they sensed they were being micro-managed.2 The Nexters are better educated, more accepting of multiculturalism, and more civic-minded than their predecessors. They bring enthusiasm and high expectations to the classroom. Since today's pharmacy faculty members are members of the Baby Boomer generation and Generation X, we must stay mindful of the next generation's learning styles, values, and goals in order to best prepare them for careers in pharmacy.

Organizing a Ground Crew for Today's Helicopter Parents

The relationship between college students and their parents is far closer than it was when most of today's educators were in school. Tapping into the upside and managing the potential drawbacks of highly involved parents is taking on great importance on an increasing number of campuses.