This article warns that “helicopter parents,” those who hover over their children, actually are causing their children to be more anxious, more dependent, less confident.

Journalist Evelyn Hart reports on a paper that was published in 2023 but didn’t get much attention. It says that helicopter parents are stressing out their children.

I definitely did not have helicopter parents. I was one of eight children, and no one was sure where we were between the end of the school day and dinner time. Everyone magically appeared at dinner time. I was a child in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and my parents set us free. They were working. That was the parenting style at the time. I carpooled to school, and after school I was on my own. I would get on my bicycle and set off to see friends or just to take a long ride.

Times have certainly changed. Younger parents–my children–want to know, need to know, where their children are. Who are they with? Is there an adult present? How will they get home? Are they safe?

Somehow the world seems less safe than when I was a pre-teen and teen. Maybe parents are more worried because the world is less safe.

What do you think?

Hart writes:

A generation praised for toughness may have been shaped by something far less comforting: the everyday absence adults rarely admit mattered.

They were the kids who walked to school alone, settled their own playground disputes, and heard “be back by dinner” as the only rule. That kind of childhood has largely vanished, replaced by a world where parents can track their children’s location down to the driveway. Now a comprehensive meta-analysis published in Development and Psychopathology has put hard numbers behind what many have suspected: when parents hover too closely, their children’s mental health may pay a price.

Open the link to read her summary of the study.