I get it. I’m a few years past sending my kids off to college. But have things really changed that much? It seems so when I hear stories about what some families are doing.

A neighbor’s daughter is about to be a freshman at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She’s very excited about attending, although with some understandable and normal apprehensions. A friend of hers will also be attending Wheaton, and her friend’s mom has chosen to rent an apartment in the tiny town of Norton, Mass., for the first month of school, in case her daughter needs something.

When I heard about this, my reaction was: “Are you serious?” Now, my neighbor’s daughter wants her mom to rent an apartment, too. My neighbor told me that her daughter is even playing the “if you were a good mother” card. Thankfully, my neighbor put her foot down and explained to her daughter that she’ll be just fine and that there’s no need for her to have her mother within spitting distance.

But this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of parents taking extreme measures. I remember reading about how one mom insisted on sleeping on an air mattress in her daughter’s room for the first week of college. Wouldn’t you like to be the other roommate in that dorm room?

We’ve all heard about the tiger moms and helicopter parents, but there’s a new moniker. “Snowplow Parents” describes parents who are willing to plow down anything or anyone who gets in the way of their child achieving success.

Yes, these are the parents who cause other parents, and even their own children, to roll their eyes in disgust. Snowplow parents terrify parent-orientation leaders because these types of parents will hijack a discussion and drown out everyone else.

Kari Kampakis is the author of a great book called “Prepare the Child for the Road, Not the Road for the Child.” She is a proponent of letting kids experience failure.

“It’s hard not to clear every obstacle in our children’s path so they can be happy now — getting what they want, when they want it — and buck the current trends,” Kampakis said. “But when we clear the road for a child, we make their life too easy. We don’t allow them to build life-coping skills they’ll need down the road to handle life’s realities.”

Kampakis said that our children are facing Little League stress at this point in their lives, but soon they’ll be moving up to the big leagues, and if we don’t provide them with the tools to cope with the Little League stresses, there’s not much chance they’ll survive big league stresses.

Lee Shulman Bierer is an independent college adviser based in Charlotte, N.C. Visit her website College Admissions Strategies.