Helicopter parents have gotten a bad reputation over the years. They’re often criticized for being overprotective, getting involved in older children’s careers, and even giving teachers a hard time.
A Reddit thread asks teachers about their worst experiences with helicopter parents, and they truly delivered. Here are some of the best worst stories we could find.
10. Power to the Parents
“I had 3 kids who were caught turning in the same paper and after giving them zeros for the assignment they got their parents to form a witch hunt. One of the parents rallied all the other parents in the class who all came in to hold a meeting about me and how I teach, even though none of them have been in my class or have talked with me personally.
This is a highly advanced class and the LOWEST grade is a C which is really amazing. I’m actually super proud of all of them. Anyway, parents got the administration to have me allow them to redo the paper (essentially showing that I have zero authority for grades or to uphold high standards) AND I now must be extra evaluated because of the things these parents say I do in my class.
Meanwhile I still have to teach these kids and act as a professional toward them, which I will. This behavior is unacceptable as a parent.”
9. Daily Email Updates
“I had a student a few years ago whose mom would email all his teachers every single day wanting to know what we had done in class (we have websites with class calendars on them). It got so bad that the school eventually told her that she could only email once a week.
Later that year, the student turned in a research paper, and the first paragraph had been stolen word for word from a website. I printed out the web page, gave the kid a zero, and wrote a referral for cheating.
Hours later, the mom emails me furious that I would accuse her son of cheating. I explained the situation, and she told me “oh, it wasn’t his fault! He had been too busy to type it, so I did it for him. I wanted to spruce up the intro a little bit, so I added that little extra bit. I guess I forgot to add the source”
Seems legit…”
8. Killjoy for Everyone
“The 8th graders at my middle school used to take a trip to a theme park or something every year, but you weren’t allowed to go if you were failing any of your classes. Well, some kid’s mom called and whined that her kid couldn’t go (because he was failing) and it was discriminatory towards him and ended up getting the trip canceled for everyone.
Edit: For those that say the school was being unfair for keeping someone back who was failing. The end of the year trip was the ONLY field trip that they would keep kids home on for failing and we knew upfront that we were expected to do well to get to go. This kid just didn’t give a shit about school. He skipped a lot, he was constantly in trouble for acting out, and in one class that I had with him we were getting ready to take a test and he said “Fuck this”, tore it up and walked out.
His mom should have been more focused on getting him help rather than ruining things for the kids who did try.”
7. Too Early for This
“Teaching 2nd grade, we took a field trip to our district’s vocational school so the kids could get a sense for the wide array of career choices available.
One parent would not allow her daughter to attend because she was so afraid her daughter might take a liking to one of the non-collegiate career tracks (horticulture, culinary arts, etc.) and ruin her predestined path to medical school.
Second. Grade.”
6. Mom Moved In
“When first visiting colleges, one of the stories our tour guide told us was of how this kid’s mom moved in as his room mate…for an entire semester.“
5. This Parent Had a Theater Fixation
“When I was in high school the director of the musicals always cast her daughter as the lead in every play even though she was awful.
I challenged her on it when I was elected vice president of the club, which was a student vote she had no control of, and I was never cast in a show again.
Flash forward to this girl getting accepted to college, the mom applies for a teaching job in the theater department of the school she’s attending.”
4. Competitive Much?
“I gave my students a fun Halloween activity that was basically a color by number on a hundreds chart.
If they followed the directions, it turned out to be a monster.
I hung them up for parents to see and one of the moms saw her daughters paper and was so disappointed and told me, “she can color better than that, you just have to push her.”
She’s 5 and it was supposed to be fun.”
3. Trespassing Parent
“I had a parent sneak into my classroom during my lunch period and erase his son’s name from the “sad face list” on the board, claiming that he “got a feeling” while he was at work that his son was being mistreated at school.
He could only believe that I had wrongfully accused his son of something, because his son was an angel. He picked the lock to come in and “defend” his son!”
2. One Parent Wanted a TA to Break the Law
“As a college TA, I had one parent come in and demand that he see his sons grades(yup…asian…son about 19?).
I told him about FERPA laws and that I indeed had no access to grades to begin with.
He tried going above my head and ended up getting booted off campus since he harassed all the professors his son had classes with.”
1A. A Bonus Story
“One time my assistant’s mother called me to say that her son had overslept, and he would be late to work.
Homeboy is 27 years old, and does not live at home any more.
WTF kind of person would rather call his mother than his own manager to say he’ll be late?”
1B. A Bonus Story 2
I taught ESL to a bunch of high schoolers, many of which were at an SAT level. There was this one kid who was incredibly fluent and would write wonderful essays in my class.
However, his mother wasn’t satisfied. She forced him to write a 10000 word essay every single day. Now, she had never learned a foreign language, didn’t speak English, I don’t think she even graduated from college. But she would (through her son and other translators) give me an earful on how I was being too easy on the students because I wasn’t making them do 4 hours of homework a night.
And this poor kid… this unfortunate, 14 year-old bastard who was fluent in two languages and was ready to take the SATs in a language not his own ended up getting worse and worse at writing. He would repeat things again and again just to get the word count, because his mother would check the essays every night. (well, she’d check the numbers. She wouldn’t be able to read the paper.) He would lie and make up stories, interjecting them at weird places. He did ABSOLUTELY MISERABLY in his exams because he wouldn’t take my advice to “stop writing when you’ve run out of things to say”.
These are some wild stories! Do they make you more appreciative of what teachers put up with?
Feel free to answer that question or share another story in the comments section.
