In the coming days, a whole new batch of freshmen will be arriving on campus.  Their rented mini-vans will clog the parking lots, their wide-eyed gazes and slow feet will make getting to class that much more miserable.  Forget drinking during those first weeks if you’re underage.  Police will be waiting in the bushes for these dummies to come outside holding a telltale red solo cup, and you don’t want to get caught in the crossfire.

When you devote your walk to class thinking of all the ways you hate the new lanyard-toting campus population, remember that you too were once wondering the difference between north and south campus.    And while all freshmen eventually learn the lay of the land, making your life easier, they’re strapped with a couple problems that are harder to shake.  A couple problems named Mom and Dad.

As an upperclassman, your parents have probably learned the ropes by now.  They call when they know you’re going to be sober, and you call when you need your debit card refilled.  The youngins, on the other hand, have yet to teach their folks these difficult lessons.  Forget that they have to deal with Mom checking in at 7:30 on a hungover Sunday morning.  First they’ve got to get the parentals to actually leave. Read More »

A few summers ago, I worked as a CIT at a day camp I had attended as a child. You’d think that going to work at a place that was a major part of your childhood would be pretty awesome, but those eight weeks proved to be an utter disaster. I try not to think about it and, so far, I’ve been fairly successful at suppressing those memories.

But this article in the New York Times reminded me of a particularly nasty piece of work I encountered during my counseling duties that summer. She was the mother of two abnormally hyper and mischievous twin boys who I had to supervise on the bus every morning and afternoon. Frankly, the kids were easier to deal with than this woman. She makes the helicopter mothers mentioned in the article appear to be merely “concerned.”

In addition to supervising a group of kids at the camp, my older brother and I were bus counselors on the vehicle that transported campers in our area. Every morning as the bus approached her house, the crazy woman would come outside wearing her pink, flowery robe and greet us with a sickeningly sweet smile, only to go completely apesh*t on us that afternoon. She would yell at us the moment we pulled up, blaming us if she got a call that day from the camp about her devil spawns’ misbehavior.

I’m pretty sure she was bipolar, because one moment she would be calm, and the next she would be screaming like a banshee about how the camp was lying about her boys’ behavior and how we should be fired for not doing our job. She called the camp director just about every day to complain about us and the lousy job the boys’ group counselors were doing. I fought the urge to tell her that her parenting was the problem, not our performance. Read More »