Though I haven’t received any menacing phone calls from parents, Mom and Dad are clearly fueling my students’ relentless demand for A’s. It’s a learned behavior. I know, because I’m guilty of inflicting on my son the same grade pressure that now plays out before me as a university professor.

Last fall when my Arlington high school senior finally got the nerve to tell me that he’d gotten a C in the first quarter of his AP English class, I did what any self-respecting, grade-obsessed parent whose son is applying to college would do. I cried. Then I e-mailed his teacher and made an appointment for the three of us to meet. My son’s teacher was accommodating. She agreed that if my son did A work for the second quarter, colleges would see a B average for the two quarters, not that ruinous C.

There’s a term for the legions of parents like me. The parents who make sure to get the teacher’s e-mail and home phone number on Back to School Night. The kind who e-mail teachers when their child fails a quiz. The kind who apply the same determination to making sure their child excels academically that they apply to the professional world.

We are called "helicopter parents" because we hover over everything our kids do like Secret Service agents guarding the president. (My son refers to me as an Apache attack helicopter, and he’s Fallujah under siege.) Only we aren’t worried about our kids getting taken out by wild-eyed assassins. We just want them to get into a "good" (whatever that means) college.