"At Stanford, she said, she saw students rely on their parents to set up play dates with people in their dorm or complain to their child’s employers when an internship didn’t lead to a job."

"She" = Julie Lythcott-Haims, "the former dean of freshmen at Stanford and the author of 'How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success,'" quoted in "The Unstoppable Snowplow Parent/Helicopter parents are so 20th century. Snowplow parents keep their children’s futures obstacle-free — even if it means crossing ethical and legal boundaries" (NYT).

In the 1990s... parents began filling afternoons and weekends with lessons, tutors and traveling sports games... [T]oday’s working mothers spend as much time doing hands-on activities with their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s....

So sad! I grew up in the 1950s, and my mother stayed home, and I don't remember her doing any "hands-on activities" with us kids. There wasn't even the concept of mothers arranging "play dates." You went outside and found your own friends, and no one needed to drive you to their houses. You found them because they lived on your block. It pretty much worked for mothers to be completely hands-off in those days.

Imagine a mother arranging play dates for a college student!

In a new poll by The New York Times and Morning Consult of a nationally representative group of parents of children ages 18 to 28, three-quarters had made appointments for their adult children, like for doctor visits or haircuts, and the same share had reminded them of deadlines for school. Eleven percent said they would contact their child’s employer if their child had an issue.

Sixteen percent of those with children in college had texted or called them to wake them up so they didn’t sleep through a class or test. Eight percent had contacted a college professor or administrator about their child’s grades or a problem they were having....

Then there are the mothers who act like they know children should be independent but they're up to something else for their own little darlings:

Felicity Huffman, an actress charged in the college admissions scheme, has long extolled the benefits of a parenting philosophy in which children are to be treated as adults. On her parenting blog, What the Flicka (which was taken down this week), she described raising children as “one long journey of overcoming obstacles.” In another post, she praised schoolchildren “for walking into a building every day full of the unknown, the challenging, the potential of failure.” This week, Ms. Huffman was accused of paying $15,000 for an SAT proctor to secretly inflate her daughter’s test scores.