Don’t Be a Helicopter Parent! Be a Satellite Parent!
by Alex Lightman
hel·i·cop·ter par·ent
1 a parent who takes an overprotective or excessive interest in the life of their child or children. "some college officials see all this as the behavior of an overindulged generation, raised by helicopter parents and lacking in resilience"
According to Parents.com, the term “helicopter parents” was added to the dictionary in 2011, but was first used in the Summer of Love, two generations ago (1969) in Dr. HaimGinott's book, Parents & Teenagers.
Helicopter Parents are those who are seen by their kids or other parents or teachers as being overly protective and too involved with children or teens to allow natural maturation and growth to occur. Helicopter parenting refers to "a style of parents who are over focused on their children," says Carolyn Daitch, Ph.D., director of the Center for the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders near Detroit and author of Anxiety Disorders: The Go-To Guide. "They typically take too much responsibility for their children's experiences and, specifically, their successes or failures”.
Parental oversight is a double-edged sword. Too much, and you are seen as overcontrolling, overprotecting, and overperfecting, in a way that is in excess of responsible parenting,” according to author Ann Dunnewold, Ph. D., a licensed psychologist. But engage in too little parental oversight, and you could be accused of being a neglectful or bad parent, and get blamed for anything bad that happens.
How do you “Goldilocks” parental oversight? That is, not too much but not too little? Technology can help. This article is going to differ from most articles because it’s going to suggest that parents take on the role normally assumed by a high tech entrepreneur or CEO or government official, and demand an upgrade in transportation infrastructure in order to get the balance right.
A starting point is to know where your kids are, and whether that’s where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there, with intelligent alerts provided when the child or teen is in the wrong place, or in the right place, but at the wrong time, and otherwise, as Pink Floyd sang in the title song for The Wall album, “Leave those kids alone!”
If kids are supposed to be in school during specific hours, parent should ask for a text message to be sent to them if their son or daughter is not in school when it starts, and, if possible, is not in each class when it starts.
Some schools do this. All schools can and should. Once this principle is established, the next step, while technologically more sophisticated, is conceptually congruent.
And that is to track students on the way to and from school, whether they are taking a school bus or their own car or truck. Let’s start with the big picture of school buses. It would take a long article to cover every nation, so I will just cover the US. Your mileage and stats may vary.
In the United States, a nation with 321 million inhabitants, 50.4 million students attend primary and secondary schools. Every day 27 million of these students take one of the 500,000 school buses. About 54% of the nation’s enrollment travels back and forth, 220 days a year, on school buses. School buses are amazingly efficient. Each parent that replaces a bus ride with driving their child to school uses approximately 180 additional gallons of fuel per year, spends an additional $663 on fuel, and puts 3600 miles on their car. If the buses are traveling at an average of 15 to 20 miles an hour, this means the average student is on the bus for 135 to 180 hours a year!
Parents, many of who could be called helicopter parents, who drive their own kids to school, are part of the reason kids spend so long on buses. Parents driving their children to schools generate 20 to 30% of morning traffic! But that’s not the worst aspect of kids not taking buses. That would be deaths. Each year, approximately 800 school-age children are killed in motor vehicle crashes during normal school travel hours. About 2% of these deaths occur on school buses, while 74% occur in private passenger vehicles. Approximately 22% are bicycle or pedestrian accidents. More than half of these deaths overall are due to a teen driver.
Given that 54% of students are taking buses, but only 2% of the deaths during school travel hours are on busses, it’s simple math to see that it’s 27 times or 2,700% more dangerous and deadly to drive to school or be driven to school rather than take the bus.
To recap, getting more parents to have their kids take the bus would, each year, save hundreds of lives nationally and, per family, save dozens of hours of travel time (because of reduced traffic caused by parents driving their kids), dozens of gallons of fuel, hundreds of dollars, and thousands of miles of wear and tear on the car.
So what can be done to make parents more comfortable with putting students on school buses? Fortunately, my answer is also the same as to the question, “How can we make school bus drivers drive more safely?”
The answer, which won’t be a surprise if you remember the title of the article, is…become a satellite parent.
What’s a satellite parent? I coined the term satellite parent so I get to define it. A satellite parent is one who uses intelligent GPS tracking (satellites and software) to keep track of students just enough to make sure they are safe, but not so much as to inhibit their freedom, sanity, or natural maturation.
How would this work? This is the challenging part: parent need to demand that school districts put an intelligent GPS tracking device on each and every school bus, and then pay a fee for the parent to be able to see a little tiny icon of the bus with his or her child or teen as it travels, along with a timer that estimated when the student would arrive at a given point on the bus route. A cost to the parent of $7 to $10 a month is reasonable, and a company like Cartrack, a publicly traded provider of intelligent GPS tracking devices has told me this was a reasonable price, and that they could install the trackers at little or even no cost to the school districts if they were able to send a message through the school to the parents alerting them to the service).
What would be the advantage of putting intelligent GPS trackers on the 500,000 school buses, at no cost to the schools, while allowing parents to pay $63 to $90 a year (which comes out to just 14 to 20 cents per bus trip, if we assume 220 days of school and two trips a day, or 440 trips a year)?
1. Reduced crashes and reduced deaths. School districts and principals would now have very sophisticated and objective Driver Scorecards. These alerts would not only be for managers of school bus programs, but also for the drivers, in real time. They would be sent an alert if speeding. At the end of the trip, they would get a message, “This is how your trip went. Here’s you score.” (Parents should also install intelligent GPS trackers, such as those from Cartrack, in their own cars, so that they could compare their own driving, and the driving by their teens, to the driving of the school bus drivers). This is more serious than parents might think. Consider the Chattanooga school bus incident. There were repeated complaints about erratic driving from students in place, and the school officials were derelict in their duty. Despite the ready availability of intelligent GPS tracking devices, they put nothing in place. 9 students were killed when the bus driver hit a tree. To this day, that school system still hasn’t put trackers on buses, tempting fate.
2. Increased communications and peace of mind. Satellite parents would know that their children were okay, secure in the knowledge that if something were different, an alert would be texted to their mobile phones.
3. Greater coordination to reduce exposure to the elements. It’s important to have a system, including an app that can give estimated arrival time. This is especially important for areas with rain or show. If bus is going to be 45 minutes late, parents need to know so student isn’t standing 45 minutes in the rain.
4. Geofencing – the relevant officials could receive a message if a bus was off-route.
5. Less pollution and wasted fuel by drastically reducing idle time. Cartrack statistics (based on over 600,000 subscribers in 23 countries) indicate drivers reduce idle time by over 50% after the devices are installed. In California, the law states that buses cannot idle for more than five minutes. The intelligent trackers could make that sensible policy national policy practically overnight, and thus reduce asthma and other problems caused by bus pollution around schools and students.
6. Less time wasted filling out maintenance sheets in paper, since these can now be filled in via mobile phone with many of the values automatically input.
7. Less paper wasted in filling out forms. The system from Cartrack can integrate with Oracle and is customizable.
8. Save time in tracking IEP kids (students with special needs who are driven to school). Every state reimburses school districts for busing of special needs students. A school employee starts an overly complex process, and starts by writing these trips down, then a person in the office is then going to go to the district, then generate a report, then send that off to the state for reimbursement. But we can track the IEP student with tracker (or wrist or ankle or backpack) and can automatically calculate their miles and automatically generate a report. This system can eliminate two to three paid people being involved. The software can be customized to calculate the cost and send it off to the state, greatly simplifying the process.
One final note, it’s important that the parents receive instruction in how to use the app, and be given the app for free.
Good-bye, helicopter parents! Hello, satellite parents!