Parents of Gen Z College Students Are Overprotective in Group Chats

The anticipation of moving into a college dorm brings a flurry of questions: Do RAs monitor who cleans the bathrooms? Are the windows drafty, or should students bring a fan to beat the heat? Are there schedules for using the laundry room? Where can you hang up your wet towels?

But the above aren’t questions from incoming freshmen. They’re typed out from anxious soon-to-be empty nesters in Facebook groups for parents of college students. They want to know as many details about the unknown as possible, down to whether their children need to bring their own toilet paper. Some questions are practical and logistical: where to find parking spots or places to eat when visiting for parents weekend. Others are so inane they offer a glimpse into a new era of helicopter parenting, when moms and dads micromanage every aspect of their children’s lives into adulthood, from scheduling their medical appointments to arranging their bathing routines.

For Gen Xers — who make up the majority of parents of today’s teens and young adults — access to unlimited information about their kids started early. There are apps that allow parents to record the color, texture, and size of the contents of each soiled diaper. Youth sports and extracurriculars have become so competitive that parents are tapping into group chats to learn the secrets to securing spots with the best coaches and instructors. They’re looped into emails from schools with constant updates about their kids’ grades. And as getting into top colleges has become an American Ninja Warrior obstacle course of extracurriculars, parents have become round-the-clock managers and chauffeurs. Even once their kids are off to college, many parents don’t want to let go: Tracking family members with location sharing has become a norm rather than an invasion of privacy.

Scrolling through some of these Facebook groups (there are thousands), parents post dimensions or video tours of dorm rooms and beds and ask whether desks will come with or without shelves in certain rooms. TikTok abounds with screenshots from the worst offenders, including a parent asking how to contact professors to introduce themself before any issues arise with their kid in class, and another floating the idea of asking a college to install a camera in their child’s dorm room to check whether they’re sleeping enough. There are also reports of some trying to set up playdates for their lonely 18-year-olds on campus.

Meanwhile, professors are taking to Reddit to anonymously share horror stories of parents intervening in their kids’ coursework, by emailing, calling, or even showing up and peeking into classrooms to see whether their kids are at their desks. One exasperated professor wrote that a parent “helpfully advised me that my (college algebra) lecture was a little dry and maybe if I told more jokes her daughter would come to class.”

Professors are taking to Reddit to anonymously share horror stories of parents showing up and peeking into classrooms to see whether their kids are at their desks.

Much of Gen X — the latchkey generation stereotyped for being laissez-faire and adrift — has evolved into stressed, overwhelmed, hypervigilant parents. Parenting is “like a pendulum where we tend to overcorrect,” says Amelia Kelley, an author and therapist who’s also a millennial parent of young kids. “You have all these Gen X parents who were raised much more independently and free range, who are now being inundated with incredible amounts of information and technology and pressure for achievement with their kids.”

“Part of me thinks it’s like, because we didn’t have involved parents and maybe there was something missing, and they’re trying to fill those gaps,” says Christine, a Gen X mom of three kids (two still in college and one graduate) who asked me not to use her last name.

Christine adds that tech, especially the arsenal of surveillance tools at their disposal, has played a huge role in her generation’s hyper-watchfulness. Many Gen Xers became parents just as Facebook groups and Listservs were born, and their arrival upended old parenting trends. “You have so much access to everything that’s going on,” Christine says. She regularly watches all three of her children’s locations from her phone, just to make sure they make it home safely. (She swears she doesn’t really care whether they’re out partying.) Even though she can track their every move, Christine says she wants her kids to be independent and views college as a safely bubbled state of quasi-adulthood.

Part of that quasi-adulthood is financial — everything is too expensive for 18-year-olds to buy themselves. Whether it’s lingering on the family phone or health insurance plan or getting help paying for rent, tuition, and meals, the financial web between parents and their children has grown more complex. With recent graduates struggling to find work, the half-baked adulthood era can continue even longer as they move back home.

“We all know our kids are coming home after college for at least a year or two,” says Tobey Grumet Segal, a freelance journalist who’s the mother of a high schooler and a rising college sophomore. “We have to be part of their lives. They don’t want us to completely step away, but it’s a matter of deciding how much you want to put into it and when you feel it’s best to stop.”

But there’s no clear stop sign. Thanks to Facebook, Reddit, and group chats, parents can gossip with one another about what’s happening inside that college bubble. A support group for parents of New York University students boasts nearly 8,000 members and averages several posts a day; one for the University of Wisconsin has nearly 9,000 parents. “We’ve been groomed, so to speak, to be part of these groups way before the kids left for college,” says Erin Mantz, the author of the blog Gen X Girls Grow Up. The messages and group chats of parents started as early as preschool, she says, when she was organizing carpooling and sports with other parents. It’s been a natural progression to join the Facebook parent groups at her two sons’ colleges.

And kids, Mantz says, want parents to be tapped in. “They don’t necessarily want us to be sharing personal information or asking questions on their behalf to figure stuff out for them, but they don’t want us to miss anything,” she says. “And we’re scared to feel like we might be out of the loop.” But some of the questions lead her to wonder why parents are even posting. Mantz tells me she once saw a parent post that their kid had a headache for days, and they asked for advice on whether the kid should go to the doctor or take pain medicine. “That’s kind of scary, honestly.”

For all their worrying and attentiveness, Gen X parents aren’t sparing their Gen Z kids from stress.

Seeing past groups she had joined devolve is why Grumet Segal hasn’t joined an online group for her college-age son. What started as groups to share hand-me-down baby items within the community evolved into nasty fighting and divisive parenting opinions, she says. All of this over-involved parenting makes her wonder whether the pendulum will swing back when Gen Zers become parents. “I do wonder how we get out of this,” she says. “It’s almost like a death spiral of helicoptering.”

For now, the groups serve as outlets for parents to commiserate or vent their ever-rising stress. Last year, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy put out a public health advisory on the mental health and well-being of America’s parents. “Something has to change,” he wrote, and fixing the issue “will also require us to rethink cultural norms around parenting.” In a 2023 American Psychological Association survey, one-third of parents with children younger than 18 reported feeling high levels of stress, up from 24% of parents in 2019. Parents of children under 18 were also more likely to report feeling stressed about money and to say that most days they were so stressed that the pressure interfered with their ability to function.

But for all their worrying and attentiveness, parents aren’t sparing Gen Z from stress. In the same 2023 APA survey, people 18 to 34 reported being more stressed than other generations on average. The amount of time young people spent socializing with friends in person dropped by about 70% between 2003 and 2020, a study from researchers at the University of Rochester found. Pew Research Center found in 2019 that the time spent on homework had doubled compared with high schoolers in the 1990s. All of this comes as colleges have become increasingly competitive. In the 2010s, college-bound high schoolers were applying to more universities than ever before, and admission rates at nearly half of the nation’s colleges dropped by at least 10% between 2002 and 2017. For parents, the message has become that top students, athletes, and performers need full-time management to succeed in crowded pools.

There’s a balance to strike between parental involvement and suffocating kids with care. Dr. Gene Beresin, the executive director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, says that while the government deems you an adult at 18, adolescence lasts from about 14 all the way to age 26, when the brain fully develops. Still, some parents overcompensate during these years and may rob their kids of the ability to cope with failure and adversity. “They’re trying to prevent unhappiness, and they’re also trying to give the kids a hand,” Beresin says. “Sometimes it’s really important to let our kids fall and let our kids fail.”

All this said, it’s not just parents who want the constant connection — many young adults continue to badger parents with Adulting 101 questions. Chip Leighton, a father of two who started posting his kids’ zany questions to TikTok and wrote the book “What Time is Noon?” about the phenomenon, says it’s mostly positive that teen and young adult children and parents yearn to stay connected, especially when there are so many search and AI tools that provide instant answers. “At the extreme, if the kids’ first instinct is always to reach out to their parent for the answer, that’s probably not great,” he adds. Parents submit text messages from their kids to Leighton’s TikTok, which takes lighthearted jabs at the pressing questions young people ask that seem dumb to those of us who have been filing our taxes for several years, such as: “What do I put for make of car? Metal?” “Why don’t I get the child tax credit?” and “Am I tax exempt?”

If college students and recent grads still get a helping hand from mom and dad, that might ease the transition to real adulthood. But for parents who stay plugged in, there comes a question of when the time to cut the chord actually is — is it graduation? When their kids get their first job? Not until their kids get married?

I recently received a LinkedIn inquiry from a parent of a young journalist looking for her first “real job” who wanted networking advice for her daughter. The best advice I could think of was that it’s time for her kid to start sending the networking DMs herself.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.