Calling all students, the Dartmouth parents’ Facebook group chat has leaked your personal information. Your father seeks comfort from 3,800 of your peers’ parents because it is 11 p.m. and you are not in your dorm room. Your mother posts about the mold growing in your closet and shares that you enjoyed the streakers during finals, while your father educates parents about the Leydard Challenge. As for upperclassmen who live off campus, you think you’ve been spared? Wrong. Your parents are reporting about your rabies shots after “two bats made their presence known inside the house.” While one mom crowdsources the best barber in Hanover for your curly hair, another shares how lonely you are and seeks a calculus tutor because “the TA simply has not provided the support we need.”
Parents used to drop their kids off at college and drive away. Now, they log into Life360 to track your movements and troubleshoot your minor, personal inconveniences in the Facebook parent chat. What likely began as a wholesome space to ask about dorm bedding or dining plans has evolved into something far stranger: a 24/7 feed of worry, logistics and low-stakes drama.
Kiss your autonomy goodbye. Privacy at college is fading fast, as hawk-eyed parents unite to monitor and discuss students’ lives. Mothers running Pentagon-level operations discuss checking your Canvas and compare notes about how to retain control. It is easy to laugh, and we should. It is funny. But it also says something about how technology has erased the natural distance between parents and their adult children. Through tracking apps, online portals and Facebook groups, separation has become optional. The result is a generation of parents who cannot stop parenting, even when they are supposed to.
While the stories from the parent Facebook group are hilarious, they also reflect something unsettling. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychoology found that helicopter-style parenting is linked to higher levels of anxiety and depression in college-aged adults, and a 2023 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships linked excessive monitoring to school burnout, lower self-confidence and a decreased ability to handle everyday challenges. While the parent chat posts make for great comedy, they also point to a deeper problem: parental obsession can lead to student regression.
Posts read like transmissions from a suburban command center. They discuss flair, Dartmouth traditions and your lost mouthguard. They seek roommates for you, coordinate playdates to combat your loneliness and condemn the Walmart delivery driver who made you leave Foco to get your package. One mom seeks a “personal assistant” to get you to the library while another debates your major and career choice. With each post, parents chime in with solidarity, sympathy and logistical advice. It is part Yelp review, part group therapy and part small-scale surveillance state.
The surveillance confession is a unique genre. One mom posts, “I cannot stop checking my son’s location on Life360. Am I overreacting?” Support pours in: “Track away, Mom!” “I just tracked mine, she’s at foco.” Another spy mom confesses that Life360 “keeps this mama sane.” One parent even admits she nearly called the police after her son “disappeared” from the app, and changed her cell carrier to better track him. It would be funny if it were not so intrusive. We deserve privacy. Recall the last time you had a sneaky link … it may not be that sneaky after all.
Forget whatever regret you felt the next morning. The real outrage is that none of us consented to having our private lives monitored and broadcast like campus gossip. A late night out, a bad grade, an illness or mold in your room should not become a case study for parents who treat Facebook like a neighborhood watch. Our lives are not theirs to report on, and parents tracking us and narrating our lives to an audience of thousands should make every student furious. We deserve the right to mess up, struggle and live without a panel of adults refreshing Life360 or judging from the sidelines. The jokes write themselves, but the violations are anything but funny.
The Dartmouth parent pandemic is connected to our campus community, lurking in the shadows where it harvests intel. Yet, perhaps it is not always bad after all. The love of your life could be discovered through a parent-orchestrated playdate. And if you want intel on the guy you are talking to, you might get more information by searching his last name in the chat than by Googling him. You could learn that he is dumbfounded by Acting 1 or waltzing home each night at 2 a.m. — hopefully because of you, but who knows! But if during Winterim your dad asks you about the Dartmouth SEVEN… tell him to delete Facebook.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
