On an August Sunday 35 years ago, I moved into my freshman-year college dorm. My parents, who had traveled with me from Southern California to New England, took me to buy my first winter coat and snow boots, along with a houseplant that the store clerk described as “hard to kill,” and then we made our way to campus. My new roommate invited me to go shopping for Blu Tack so that we could hang posters in our room. I hugged my parents goodbye and headed out.

This was a fairly typical beginning to 1980s college life. Parents waved from the curb, cried in the parking lot, and maybe sent a care package two weeks later. I scheduled weekly calls with my parents for Sunday evenings, phoning from our room’s landline before heading to dinner. The college experience was marked by rupture, the sometimes messy yet necessary transition from dependence to independence.

These days, the break looks different. And in some cases it doesn’t look like a break at all.

A new term has entered the lexicon of college administrators: the trailing parent. These are the mothers and fathers who follow their children to campus—not just metaphorically, with daily texts about grades, outfits, or friendship drama, but physically. They rent an apartment in Atlanta, Austin, or Boston for four years, a pied-à-terre to facilitate frequent visits. They buy a condo in Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles so that their sophomore can have a place to crash—and so that they can drop by their kid’s place with soup when the sniffles arrive. Some parents trail their study-abroad kids across the world, moving for a semester to Florence or Barcelona to be close by “just in case.”

College administrators and other education colleagues in my circle have told me that although such stories used to be noteworthy, they’re now so common as to barely raise an eyebrow. One recalled that the mom of an Ole Miss first-year stayed in the family’s new campus-adjacent apartment last fall to provide logistical and moral support during sorority rush, lending her daughter a hand in fixing hair or nursing a hangover. A Colorado couple whose daughter had a rocky freshman year told the Associated Press that they bought an apartment in Portland, Oregon, and moved there to live with their daughter while she attended college.

The paradigmatic helicopter parent hovered from a distance and in most cases didn’t follow their child to college. The trailing parent touches down. Danielle Lico, who spent two decades working in student affairs at George Washington University, told me about a mom who several years ago rented a downtown-D.C. condo near campus to live with her daughter, whom she even walked to class. “We had to tell the mom that she wasn’t actually permitted to sit next to her kid in class,” Lico said. “She would sit outside of the classroom, and then they would walk back to the apartment together every day for four years.”

[Read: The ethos of the overinvolved parent]

Not all college students love having their parents close by. The administrator of a study-abroad program told me about a mom who moved to France for proximity to her daughter. For weeks, the mother phoned the program’s office, asking to arrange a visit. The daughter refused and didn’t return her mother’s calls. Eventually, the mother gave up and flew home to the United States. Reddit is full of similar accounts: One commenter shared an anecdote about a kid who transferred colleges to get away from his parents, after they bought a home next to his campus.

Some colleges appear to be subtly trying to head off parental overengagement. Brie McCormick, who runs residential life at Northeastern University, told the campus publication Northeastern Global News that she encourages families not to let their kids visit home early in the school year. An overseas-study program on whose board I serve asks moms and dads not to visit until the winter holidays, explaining that children need to establish roots in their new country, uninterrupted. Jason Campbell-Foster, the dean of students at Boston University, wrote in a school publication that he urges parents to trust the scaffolding they’ve built, to “have confidence that you’ve chosen a place that cares for your child, that wants them to be successful, and that will give them the space and support that they need to learn from mistakes.”

Even parents who don’t trail physically are finding new ways to insert themselves into the college experience—starting with dorm rooms, as The Atlantic has reported. When my daughter began college, this fall, she had seemingly consumed hours of TikTok videos about dorm-room decor; she knew the right “fairy lights” to buy and how to elevate her bed for more storage. When I grumbled about some of the purchases (“I didn’t need a plush throw for my dorm room”), she shared that some students’ parents had hired decorators, and that her mom and I had gotten off easy.

Parents who were used to keeping track of their child’s academic progress during high school sometimes seek the same level of engagement when their child is in college. A friend who teaches at Stanford was recently packing up his notes at the end of a class when he noticed an undergraduate standing at the lectern. When he made eye contact with the student, she thrust a cellphone into his hand. “It’s for you,” the student mumbled. It was the student’s mother, calling to complain about a grade on a paper. (I wonder where this ends. One day, might we see parents joining the workforce alongside their 20-somethings, setting up cubicles down the hall? Don’t worry, honey. I’ll be in the break room if you need me.)

Whether parents are physically in the same city as their college student, surveilling their child via GPS, or simply in daily phone or text contact with them, I worry about how all of this proximity is affecting kids. What seems like an act of devotion risks undercutting a central purpose of college.

[Read: The new age of endless parenting]

Every generation finds new ways to parent, and every generation frets about it. Maybe the trailing parent is simply the next logical step in an era when adolescence stretches longer. Or maybe it’s something more worrisome: an inability to let go, to allow children the gift of separation. An important step toward adulthood is the experience of stumbling—sometimes badly—and discovering that you can stand on your own. It might be hard for an undergraduate to develop independence if their parents are constantly available, helping them navigate every crisis. “We would certainly have parents call anytime we did sorority or fraternity rush and somebody didn’t get into the chapter they wanted,” Danielle Lico told me, and parents would hire “high-powered lawyers to get their kids out of trouble.” If a student is in a spat with a roommate or doesn’t get into a class they want to take, that’s a chance for them to learn to cope with conflict and setbacks—which they won’t get to do if they jump to asking for direction from home.

Many colleges and universities have informal parent Facebook groups, which function as a clearinghouse for questions and provide a window into the psyche of modern moms and dads. “Have any of your kids experienced a mouse problem in the dorms?” “My student doesn’t want to go to office hours because the professor (who is visiting from another school) is awful.” “If the bathroom doesn’t have hand soap … who do the kids call??” These are all normal concerns a college student might ask about. Yet these forums seem to imply that the responsibility for answering these questions lies with parents rather than with their kids.

An unspoken message from the trailing parent is: We don’t think you can handle college on your own. A 20-year-old who grows accustomed to dropping off laundry with a parent each weekend might conclude that they’re not yet ready for the world. But college is, among other things, an exercise in independence. As much as it’s important for students to learn Russian history and statistics, it’s even more important for them to learn to be adults.

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