The question came from an audience member after a speech. She was sending her first child off to college and wanted to know whether she should join one of the Facebook parents' groups that have become a fixture of the American university experience. Arthur Brooks, writing in his Free Press column dated August 17, 2026, had a clear answer: no.
Brooks frames the issue through a story about his own family — specifically, a 2022 Sunday night phone call from his middle son, then on active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps, calling from Las Vegas on a borrowed phone. The predicament involved losses at the blackjack table, a dispute with casino security, and the theft of his pants, along with his valuables. Brooks and his wife used social media to locate one of his son's Marine friends still out on the Strip, direct-messaged him the son's whereabouts, and had him back on base in California before morning.
The point of the story, Brooks makes clear, is not a ringing endorsement of social media as a parenting tool. It is a single, extreme case — a young man without identification, without a phone, with hours until he had to report for duty. The platform solved a genuine emergency. That is not what college parents' groups are for.
What they are for, in practice, is the management of ordinary friction: a grade a student doesn't like, a roommate conflict, a dining hall complaint. 'Let the kiddo deal with it himself if he gets a grade he doesn't like,' Brooks writes. The groups, in his telling, are engines of parental anxiety dressed up as community. They do not make children's lives better. They do not make parents' lives better. They extend the reach of helicopter parenting into a setting specifically designed to begin the work of separation.
Brooks is a professor at Vanderbilt and a number-one New York Times best-selling author. His Free Press column is titled 'The Pursuit of Happiness.' The audience member who asked the question was not, it turned out, looking for a story about stolen pants in Las Vegas. She was looking for permission — or a warning.
Brooks gave her the warning.
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The piece is a small thing, as columns go. But it points at something the institutions themselves have largely refused to say plainly: college is supposed to be the first real test of a young person's capacity to manage their own life. Every mechanism that routes parental intervention around that test — however well-intentioned, however efficiently organized on Facebook — is a tax on the student's development, paid in the currency of experience they never accumulate.
Follow the incentive. The groups persist not because they produce better outcomes for students, but because they reduce parental discomfort in the short term. That is a trade-off worth naming. Brooks names it. The record, as he presents it, is not ambiguous.
