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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When people talk about the world being “less safe” they’re usually talking about crime as defined by the police (murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery, etc.). But those crime rates have been falling sharply ever since their peak in the ’90s (white collar and corporate crime has been skyrocketing, but that’s a different discussion), so the world is not actually less safe, it’s more safe. So where does the perception of “less safe” come from? It must be from the media because otherwise why would it be so pervasive? Ask yourself why the media tries to convince us that we are less safe. Cui bono?
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these helicopter parents, usually use the persuasions of “it’s for your own good”, to FORCE their young to listen, and being raised in this sort of a high-pressure environment, the children of these helicopter parents became, incapable of handling everything on their own, which feeds to their parents’ beliefs of “I know you can’t hack it, that’s why you need me”, and these parents, they don’t think what they’re doing is bad for their young, because they got it so deep in their minds, that what they’re doing to their children is “for their own good”, and there’s no way out for the children who grew up in these kinds of environments, unless the younger generations have a strong sense of awareness of their upbringing being bad, and make that conscious decision to NEVER pass this same behavior down to their own next generation too, but unfortunately, this is unlikely the case.
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Helicopter parents inhibit their children’s social and emotional development. Then, when their child turns eighteen, they send them off to college where many of them “flame out” because they never learned how to manage their own behavior when they are independent.
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And that constant supervision also follows kids into adulthood. A friend of mine told me he had received phone calls from parents of young employees they had to fire for not working hard enough. I can’t imagine being a parent and making a phone call like that.
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I don’t want you to rain on the parade of people that question other people’s parenting habits, but I wonder if the phrase helicopter parents was invented by people who did not want the king’s messenger looking through their window. In my 40 years of teaching, I encountered many levels of parental involvement, some of which I considered appropriate and some seem too intrusive or too uninvolved. Often, however, I experienced changing my position on a student when I learned something about the subject I did not know.
We had a wonderful child late in life, and I am sure some of her teachers thought we were to watchful of her development. But we are human. We only had one chance to do it right. Give parents a break. And give teachers a break. If we were all gods, we would be perfect (unless, of course, we were Greek gods, in which case we would exhibit all the foolishness associated with humans).
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Exactly! Thank you! “Helicoptor parents” has become a meaningless phrase that no one can even properly define but is used to demean an entire generation whose parenting styles are not the same. And also to demean the younger generation.
My kid went to a high school full of academically motivated students. I was surprised that new parents were still strongly encouraged by the administration to keep an eye on their children’s schoolwork, but I was glad that wasn’t portrayed as a negative thing. Should the administration be disparaged as “helicopter administrators”?
Now “helicopter parents” are blamed for their kids flaming out at college – something that has happened to students since college began.
Are they also to blame for the fact that this generation of young people are embracing progressive ideals and rejecting the right wing values of the majority of older Americans who voted for Trump?
No doubt some parents are over the top, especially during the college years. But the “toughness” of their kids has little to do with parenting style. And one doesn’t make a resilient kid by checking out as a parent. I greatly dislike when people throw around the words “helicopter parenting” in a way that seems to include parents like you, Roy, because you might be more watchful than a hands off parent. There is nothing inherently wrong with that and it is arguably better parenting than hands off. As with everything else, it depends on the kid.
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I remember the backlash when Dr. Spock’s “too permissive” childrearing philosophy was blamed for creating a generation of coddled, spoiled kids.
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