I teach students who are struggling with the transition from high school to college. Their parents are 90% of the problem

Okay, maybe not 90%, because I have a few kids struggling with mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and learning disabilities. But so many of these kids end up in my program because their parents never held them accountable for going to school, turning in work, or putting in effort and are now scrambling because their kids passed through school and now want to go to college. Parents are realizing that spending $40k+/ year on education for a kid who never proved they will put in effort is a bad investment and expect me to fix them in a semester.

We take a very gentle, empathy-forward approach for the first few weeks of the semester to build relationships and then kick their butts for the last 10 weeks. Because they’re technically adults, we are able to be much more real with them. Even still, some of the kids and their parents insist that they should go to college when they can’t pass our single college level course that we provide excessive support for. We have kids who fuck around and get to the end of the semester, panic, and start arguing for higher grades they didn’t earn. The parents back them up then complain that their kids have no accountability. One kid just stopped coming and his parents made excuses: that he didn’t like the other kids and the program was too “emotional” and not “academic enough”… like this kid wasn’t even around enough to know what the program was like! Then the parents had the audacity to demand their money back.

We have a psychiatrist on staff who will sometimes tell parents that their kids need more intensive treatment than we can provide. Recently he told a dad that his kid was horribly depressed and needed inpatient treatment, and the dad argued that actually the kid would be fine if we just taught him to write essays. He was shocked when his kid made no improvement.

This is mostly a vent, but the entitlement of some of my students and their parents is unreal. One parent expected my boss to figure out her kid’s public transit bus schedule for him so he could get in on time. I know people say it here all the time and I’m just screaming into the echo chamber but ffs, these parents are so fucking obnoxious