“直升机父母“的意思是不论孩子在做什么，父母都会在孩子头上盘旋，什么事都会管东管西的。有些直升机父母直到孩子上了大学之后还是继续盘旋——这种直升机父母被21世纪的育儿教养圈指责，说这会导致孩子大学毕业后就立刻想回到父母亲的怀抱，一点责任感以及独立性都没有。但是，父母亲的介入真的会影响孩子的成长，以及让大学感到更多负担吗？在这本书里，社会学家Laura Hamilton探讨了许多女大学生以及她们跟家人之间的关系来深深地研究这个难题。
 
作者访问的父母亲来自各种社会背景，从财富500公司的CEO到在餐厅工作的服务员。她发现父母亲们自己都会有不同的“理想大学经验”，而这个理想会大大影响他们如何介入孩子的生活。这些理想建设于家长们认为女人的工作／家庭地位，以及他们认为孩子几岁才算“长大了”。有一些家长非常密集地介入孩子的生活，延迟了孩子成熟的机会，作者也将这些直升机父母亲们分类：“职业直升机父母”会根据女儿毕业后的理想职业而针对帮女儿发展某些技能以及文凭；“粉红直升机父母”会关注女儿的外表、美丽以及社交，希望女儿可以找到一个有钱人嫁掉。而相反的，“旁观者父母”——他们的影响只限制于经济上的协助——经常不太出现在孩子们的生活里。最后，“急救父母”来自于许多不同社会阶层——他们只有在紧急状况的时候才会帮助孩子，主要希望孩子能够自给自足。
 
作者深度地分析了这许多不同款式的父母。她访问了许多不同大学的学生以及家长，认为没有任何家长介入是不可能的，而学校们也渐渐更加依赖父母亲们。所以，我们到底该如何把学生、学校以及家长这三样好好的平衡呢？看了这本书就知道！
 
关于作者：
 Laura Hamilton是加州大学Merced 的社会学副教授。她合著过Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality一书。
 
好评：
Mitchell Stevens, author of Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites
“Marshaling insights from the parents of a cohort of young women moving through a public research university, Parenting to a Degree shows—in graphic, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking detail—how substantial parental investments are in what we often imagine is the ideal four-year college experience. It makes clear that persistence in college and early forays into the labor market are joint ventures between young people and their families, and that gender and class identities strongly shape how adults decide to support their children. These are pivotal contributions to our understanding of American higher education.”
 
Viviana A. Zelizer, author of Economic Lives.
“Parenting to a Degree offers a transformative account of why and how college parenting matters. A skillful and caring interviewer, Hamilton reports on how social class, gender, and cultural expectations shape parents’ varied involvement with their children’s education. A pioneering contribution to the field of education.”
 
Naomi Gerstel, coauthor of Unequal Time
“This book is a page-turner, revealing how daughters’ successful navigation of college so often depends on their parents’ continuing investment of intensive effort, money, connections, and knowledge. Parents’ varied visions and approaches, Hamilton vividly shows, often reproduce their own experiences and, in doing so, reproduce—or deepen—class inequalities. Parenting to a Degree is an outstanding contribution to scholarly work and should be used in today’s pressing policy debates about inequality in higher education.”