Television shows like “Saturday Night Live” often portray scenes where parents learn of teenagers corrupting society and engaging in scandalous activity which leads the parent to believe her own child is being corrupted, causing her to swoop intrusively into her child’s personal life.
 A “helicopter parent” is a term used to describe parents who over-manage their children’s lives. They fly into the school to constantly check up on their child or go into defense mode when a student has a problem with a teacher or a coach.
 Where, exactly, is the line drawn between being a good parent keeping an eye on a child and a parent that is overbearing and hovering in a child’s life?
 More and more parents are checking grades on Infinite Campus daily, e-mailing teachers asking about scores on homework and tests and calling the different offices to keep an eye on their children.
 Staff in the main office indicate there are a number of parents who call daily to check on students, making sure their children are in class or if they are behaving. Some parents stop in the building four or five times a week to see how their students are doing.
 “It is not always bad to be a helicopter parent,” said principal Chuck Bredlow. “It can be just good parents checking up on their kids.”
 According to Bredlow, parents of freshman and sophomores are more likely to demonstrate behaviors associated with being a helicopter parent.
 Bredlow, a father of two, says that typically when parents send a first child off to high school, they tend to get scared and the hovering is at its peak. After the first child is through high school, the hovering begins to decrease with the other children.
 With the advance of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, parents have more access to their student’s personal lives.
 “My mom Facebook stalks me 24/7,” junior Sandy Mitchell* said. “She has to know what, where and who I am with all the time.”
 Mitchell says she would consider her mom a helicopter parent. She says her mom lives on Infinite Campus and is on her case about grades at all times.
 “I don’t have any personal freedom with my mom. She even talks to my friend’s parents before I can hang out with them,” she said. Mitchell says that this over-parenting started when she got her car.
 Having a helicopter parent is not always a bad thing, according to junior Randi Cuevas.
 “My dad wants me to do the best I possibly can and live the life he did not have growing up,” Cuevas said. Her dad, Rich, is an ex-Marine and that helped shape his protective instincts for his daughter.
 Cuevas says her dad monitors her grades, calls her teachers constantly and has frequent meetings with her guidance counselor.
 “He can be overbearing at times,” Cuevas said, “but I am thankful he cares.” She is the youngest of seven, which she believes contributes to her father’s assertive attitude toward her studies and personal life.
 Counselors and administrators are not the only ones who deal with helicopter parents on a regular basis.
 “As a teacher and a coach, I receive phone calls and e-mails daily regarding students,” business teacher Angie Rubel said. Some of the parents call to see how students scored on a test or quiz, if they showed up for class, why they did not get a position on the squad or other issues that Rubel has not always been aware of.
 According to Rubel, a mother of two, parents who micromanage students’ lives can have negative effects on their children’s ability to become independent.
 The hovering doesn’t always stop in high school; helicopter parents are following their children to college.
 “They’re always around their kids’ life, kind of on the fringe, always making sure things go the way they need to go and not really allowing the kids to figure out solutions to problems on their own,” clinical psychologist Mark Crawford told cnn.com.
 According to Crawford, parents are not doing their children favors when they constantly hover over their lives.
 Students need to prep themselves for the adult world and need to be able to problem solve without their parents holding their hand; when they do this effectively, much of the over-parenting diminishes.
 Georgia Tech director of admissions Ingrid Hayes told cnn.com that they are looking for the students themselves to take the center stage of the application process.
 Hayes and her staff receive daily calls from anxious parents who want to know how their child’s application stacks up to others. According to Hayes, helicopter parents are a bigger part of the admissions process than ever.
*not her real name