Christine Webb, Your Health & Fitness
Competition is tougher than ever to get into Georgia Tech's freshman class, with 10,000 applications and only 2,400 slots, but it is not just potential students who are feeling anxious as they await an answer. So are their parents.
"We usually get daily phone calls from parents," said Ingrid Hayes, Georgia Tech's admissions director. "We get a lot of that 'We have applied for admissions, and we were filling out our forms.'"
"The term (helicopter parent) comes from the concept of hovering, and they're always around their kid's life, not really allowing kids to figure out solutions to problems on their own," said Mark Crawford, a clinical psychologist.
John Stein, the dean of students, often has to deal with the effects of helicopter parents.
"The student begins to believe that he or she actually can't do it on their own," Stein said.
Crawford said teenagers need to learn coping skills long before they leave home.
"You don't learn resilience. You don't learn independence without tripping up sometimes. Don't let yourself panic when you see your kids falling," Crawford advised parents.
Making mistakes, and learning from them early on, is often the best way to avoid them in the future.
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