Imagine you’re lying on your purple-felt couch, under a big warm blanket, watching “Looney Tunes” (this may be bringing back memories of your childhood but I’m actually thinking about last Thursday night).

Now imagine a piercing yell coming from upstairs saying, “Go do your homework!” Sure, if you’re bound to be a business or law major, you might have just been given an important lesson in discipline; however, the next big animations creator might have just had his inspiration stolen.

But stealing a kid’s creative drive is only one, and not even the biggest reason to fear helicopter parents.

In American culture, the difference between success and the failure is ambition, and where does ambition come from? Not from nagging parents.

Ambitious kids come from parents who teach the importance of education, rather than telling them school is something you must do. The most successful students understand that they’re in school for their own benefit, not for their parents’ happiness.

Though most kids realize the importance of schoolwork for their future by junior year, I still hear kids say they hide in their rooms for three hours a day playing Angry Birds or staring at the wall because they’re trying to trick their parents into thinking they’re doing homework.

In an  Oracle-conducted survey taken of 270 students, 67 percent said their primary motivation to do well is college/their future. Yet in the same survey, 22 percent of students say that their primary motivation to do well in school is their parents.

So if parents have the power to make or break their kid’s life, what is the best approach mom and dad can take for their child’s education? According to David Hartman, South social worker, there’s no single answer to producing success.

Hartman makes a great point; some kids may respond healthily to their parents’ lack of care in their studies, while others may not. For instance, not having anyone at home to push you further in your studies could help you learn a lot about independence and working hard for yourself. Yet others may respond by neglecting work, signing up for classes below their academic level, or by not showing up to class at all.

Parents should exercise both angles. A kid that isn’t pushed to work hard isn’t in a position to be successful, yet at the same time, parents should not be too involved in their kids’ lives.

Seth MacFarlane, creator of TV shows Family Guy  and American Dad!, was  encouraged by his parents to pursue his creativity.

If MacFarlane’s parents had stunted his creativity, or had told him not to waste his time drawing comics for the newspaper and instead start doing his real school work, then we would have been robbed of nine seasons with the Griffin family.

Without his mom, MacFarlane wouldn’t have applied to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he set the foundation for Family Guy.“I got the RISD application in the mail,” MacFarlane said in a 2003 interview with IGN.com. “I literally had the [application]over the garbage can. I said, ‘I don’t need to apply to this place, right? I’ve already gotten into the other place.’ She goes, ‘Well, what the [heck].

Why don’t you just fill it out?’”

It is MacFarlane’s mother’s strategy that all parents should undertake.

A parents’ job in a student’s life is to make him his most successful. One thing that all parents must know is kids don’t run on fear, they don’t run on extremely high expectations. Kids run on positive encouragement.