Illustration by Steve Brodner

In the fall of 1972, Jeff Howard and his father drove the family's blue Chevrolet Impala to the Minneapolis airport where the younger Howard boarded a plane bound for the Raleigh-Durham Airport. Upon landing, he caught a ride to Durham with Steve Evans, one of his freshman roommates, and moved into a first-floor triple in Kilgo Quad. Four years later, Howard's parents set foot on the Duke campus for the first time—for Jeff's graduation.

"I called home every Sunday afternoon and occasionally sent a letter, but that was the extent of my communication with my family," says Howard, an investment counselor who lives in Winston-Salem. "And that was the norm." Now the father of a Duke sophomore, Cameron Howard '09, and a recent alumna, Sally Howard '06, Howard is well aware that times have changed. He and his wife, Carson Dowd Howard '76, who are active on a number of university committees, visit the Duke campus frequently. During a break between sessions of an alumni-leadership conference this fall, Howard is interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. It's Cameron, calling to see what the dinner plans are for later that evening.

"We almost joke about it now," he says, hanging up after confirming a meeting time and place. "It seems that we are here almost every weekend."

Geographical proximity has afforded the Howards the kind of convenient access to campus, and to their daughters' evolving undergraduate experiences, that most parents only dream of. Even with regular campus visits, though, the Howards communicate with one another electronically four or five times a week, and sometimes more often. Although most families can't hop in the car for a day trip to Duke, the increase in frequency of communication between parents and their college-age children, made easier by cell phones and computers, is not unusual—in fact, it appears to be a hallmark of this generation of parents.

A recent survey by the College Parents of America found that 74 percent of parents spoke with their children two to three times a week, and a third did so at least once a day; 90 percent used cell phones to communicate, and 58 percent used e-mail. Students chatting away on cell phones between classes are just as likely to be seeking course-selection advice from mom or relationship advice from dad as planning the evening's activities with friends.

While students of earlier generations may have reveled in their independence, current students—through the wonders of communications technology and sociocultural factors specific to their generation—are constantly in touch with their parents. Today's young adults, dubbed Millennials by authors Neil Howe and William Strauss in their seminal book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, have grown up mastering rapidly changing technology and constant multitasking. For them, a world without cell phones or Internet access is unimaginable. With family and friends only a few buttons or keystrokes away, telephoning or e-mailing—if only to discuss something as mundane as the weather—is such an ingrained habit, it's almost second nature.

Howe and Strauss, who have also written about baby boomers and other generational patterns throughout American history, note that Millennials are one of the most protected populations in memory. From bicycle helmets and mandatory child-safety seats to play dates and constant supervision, Millennials are accustomed to overweening safety and security, scheduling and scrutiny. In Millennials Rising, the authors observe that this generation has grown up under the close eye of parents, teachers, coaches, and child-care providers, rarely left to their own devices for hours at a time. For those parents who, as children, spent whole weekends away from home, riding bikes in packs, or exploring nearby woods, the thought of not knowing what their nine-year-old is doing for eight hours at a stretch is unfathomable today.

One advantage of such persistent oversight of a child's activities is that the majority of Millennials report feeling very close to their parents; that's particularly true of mothers and daughters. Ironically, many of the baby boomers who rebelled not only against their parents but also against the notion of in loco parentis when they were in college are now actively engaged in their Millennial children's day-to-day lives into the college years and beyond—and expect the colleges to provide the same sort of oversight and attention to their children's needs that they do.

Particularly in competitive higher-education settings like Duke's, today's students have been nurtured by families that put a premium on academic excellence and high achievement. With so much invested in their children's success, parents are increasingly attentive to how university staff members and administrators contribute to the continued success and well-being of their child, as well. As a consequence, university administrators increasingly find themselves in the position of interacting with parents about a range of issues their students are facing—from housing and roommate problems to academic disappointments and health concerns.

With nearly three decades of experience working with Duke students and their parents, Sue Wasiolek '76, M.H.A.'78, LL.M. '93 has seen a wide range of parent-child relationships. She compares her own generation's rejection of in loco parentis to today's student-parent dynamic. "It's ironic that the students who wanted to eliminate any kind of parental role that the university played—making them sign in and out of dorms, for example—have become parents who demand to be involved in their children's lives," she says.

But there's a fine line between reasonable parental concern and overbearing interference, she says. The term "helicopter parents" is used to describe those moms and dads who constantly hover over their child, ready to swoop in whenever there's a perceived crisis. The phrase is so widely used among college administrators that one Duke official, upon seeing a Duke Life Flight helicopter circling the Bryan Center plaza this fall, joked to a colleague that it surely contained Duke parents checking on their children.

What concerns observers of the helicopter-parent phenomenon—including everyone from residence-hall advisers and student-affairs staff members to counseling and mental-health care providers, deans, and faculty members—is the inhibitive impact such continual supervision has on young adults at a time when they should be making the transition to adulthood.

"Young adults need lots of opportunities to negotiate obstacles and even experience failure, recover from failure, and learn from it," says Kathy Hollingsworth, director of Duke's Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS). "What we're seeing here at CAPS are emerging adults whose parents are, on the whole, very caring, educated people. But in many cases these students have been treated as gifted children almost since birth. They've been sent to competitive schools and special summer camps and after-school language programs. As a result, they tend to be high achievers and perfectionists who, consciously or not, link love and acceptance to academic excellence. They feel like 'trophy kids.'

"So when they get a bad grade or experience a setback, some fall apart. They not only turn against themselves, they feel as though they've failed everyone around them."