Helicopter Parenting

The other day, my brand new boss innocently asked me if I missed having my son, who is away for the summer working at an amusement park, close by.

“Oh, God, no,” I said, which was not at all the response she was expecting. I am sure that, for a moment, she thought I was a monster who hated her own child. Until I explained.

“I actually think that he does better when he has the opportunity to get out from under my fingertips,” I said. Which is true. I want everything to be perfect, all the time, and, as young people are hapless little bunnies, stumbling around, knowing nothing, I tend to overdirect when I see things going off course.  That's annoying to everyone. My little hapless bunny prefers to put things back on course in his own way, and usually does. Eventually.

Not everyone parents the way I do, however. In my son’s generation, there’s a term called “helicopter parents.” It describes parents who hover over their children, making sure that their kids are never without an advocate, a relentless supporter, and always have someone to fully cushion the inevitable bruises and bumps that occur along the road. In my community, parents were expected to helicopter; that was a sign of good parenting. Here’s the problem: studies are beginning to show that it is not.

I learned this from an article describing a number of studies that have been specifically conducted to assess the impact of helicopter parenting (also known as overparenting). The studies showed, according to this article, that “...parents who felt more anxiety about their children and more regret about their own missed goals led to greater overparenting. At the same time, they found that kids who were overparented were more likely be anxious and narcissistic and to lack coping skills.”

Yipes!

By the time my own child was in high school, I had to almost stop completely engaging with other parents, because of the competitive environment that existed, under the guise that the parents were helping their kids. I actually remember the day I decided this was going to happen: our sons, sixth graders, were playing a youth-league baseball game, and there was concern that our team would not make it into the playoffs, because that would “hurt their chances,” to develop their skills for their (apparently) bright future in baseball. “Well,” I said, stating the obvious, “it’s not like any of these kids are being scouted for the majors.” I cannot tell you how many horrified looks I got. These were parents who had their untalented kids in private lessons, several league teams, and with all of the best equipment available. Guess how many of these kids are in the majors today? None. Guess how many even played on the high school baseball team? Very few.

Something I said frequently to my son, his teachers, and other parents, was this: “I am not trying to raise a successful high-schooler. I’m trying to raise a successful human being.” I’ve always felt that part of that includes letting kids make mistakes – sometimes big ones – and then allowing them to figure out how to fix those mistakes. Is that easy? No! It sucks big ones! But what is better: a child who fails when he is sixteen and learns to get up again, or an adult who fails at age twenty-six, and has no skills to make things right on his own?

The beauty of non-helicoptering is this: as my hapless bunny’s 20th birthday approaches, I can say to him, more and more often, “You did this.” When he gets a job, signs a lease, pays his bills, prioritizes, solves problems, fixes things, and (finally!) gets good grades, I know that it’s because he has done it, not me. Isn’t that what parents really want, anyway? For our kids to develop wings of their own – short and stubby though they may be at first – rather than always have to hitch a ride on our helicopters?