Helicopter Parenting Is To Deny Your Children Opportunities To Grow In The Real World By Doing For Them What They Can And Should Be Doing For Themselves

Helicopter Parenting is to hover over your grown children in an attempt to save them from problems, but what you accomplish is to prevent your children from learning and growing.

This phenomenon, though it relates more specifically to baby boomer parents and how they try to over-protect, over-relate to and become overly involved in the lives and problems of their grown children, particularly in matters related to their children’s colleges and universities; the parental habits, thoughts and attitudes that leads to Helicopter Parents can be traced to earlier and repeated interactions in the child-parent relationship and can thus serve as a gentle warning for parents with children of all ages.

Any parent who tries to over-protect their children may be doing their children a disservice without knowing it. This page is dedicated to those parents who want to best for their children and who may be tempted to short circuit their children’s growth in an attempt to protect them from the very forces that will allow their children to grow and mature and gain self-confidence and faith in their own abilities to face difficult challenges and succeed all the same.

Helicopter Parenting, as the name implies, relates to parents who hover over their children, in this context mostly ‘Generation Y’ young adult children (born between 1974 and 2000 as a general rule), waiting to swoop in and save their children from all harm and accident, or possibly waiting to fight their children’s battles with University Admission Departments, College Professors or even with prospective employers once their children are ready to graduate with a degree and enter the workforce in a permanent way.

This Parenting Style is also known as “Curling Parenting” (an attempt to sweep all obstacles out of the paths of their children), “Lawnmower Parenting” (an attempt to smooth out and mow down all obstacles confronting their children), or simply “Overparenting”.

The ‘Generation Y’ children whom the Baby Boomers, or ‘Generation X’ parents are Helicopter Parenting in a misguided effort to protect, are also known as the ‘Millennial Generation’ or the ‘MTV Generation’ (Youth of the late 20th century), and are identified as those children who grew up and are now familiar and at ease with modern modes of communications, media, and digital technologies. This is significant since Helicopter Parenting is a modern phenomenon made possible and often driven by the use (or overuse) of cell phone communication between parent and child.

In this discussion the term ‘children’ will apply to mature children of university age (ages 18 to 24 or thereabouts) and not to younger children who are still in need of additional parental help and supervision that often is no longer appropriate or needed by the older or even grown children this page is meant to address.

Among the many Parenting Styles that exist today, Helicopter Parenting, to my way of looking at it, is a hybrid parenting style composed of elements of the Permissive Parenting Style and the Authoritarian Parenting Style.

Though often born of a sincere and heart-felt parental desire to help and assist their children to get ahead in life, and frequently the direct result of a close, open and honest parent-child relationship akin to what is produced using the Authoritative Parenting Style, Helicopter Parenting actually does the opposite and harms and retards the growth and learning of the very children these parents desire to protect, promote and enable.

Iraq - © The U.S. Army

Helicopters And Aid – A Creative Example

In order to better understand how Helicopter Parenting creates dependent children who in turn become fragile and insecure adults who are not fully capable or prepared to deal with the challenges of the adult world they must now navigate successfully, let us use a modern example of a military helicopter in Iraq (to represent Helicopter Parents), and the citizens of Iraq whom the said helicopter is intending to serve (representing the young adult to grown children this page deals with).

Note: This is NOT to imply that the good people of Iraq are children or anything of the sort. This is ONLY used as an example that is easily understandable and hence made to illustrate an important parenting principle that all parents can benefit from.

To make this parenting point, a military helicopter is very useful to aid in large assignments that are out of the scope or ability of the Iraqi people on the ground. In cases of a medical emergency, for example, the helicopter can swoop in and take a sick or injured person quickly to the hospital and save a valued life.

This same helicopter can deliver doctors and medicines at a moment’s notice to halt the spread of a dangerous infection that can threaten a whole town or group of villages.

In cases of a true emergency, a military helicopter is very useful and can do a great deal of good to a great many people.

Every good thing has the capacity to be overused or abused, however, and so also can this helicopter become a hindrance to the people on the ground if it does for them what they could or should be doing for themselves.

To continue our example, what if every time the people on the ground needed water, instead of going to the river or digging wells of their own, the helicopter swooped down and delivered bottled water for everyone’s needs? Instead of depending on themselves for their present and future water needs, the people would now come to expect the helicopter to bring them water when they needed it.

Instead of learning to be self-sufficient and learning to solve life’s problems on their own, the helicopter, by doing for the people what they could and should be doing for themselves and by solving problems for them that they could and should be solving for themselves, the helicopter’s attempts to help are actually retarding the people’s ability to provide for themselves and to solve life’s problems for themselves.

Though this may be a silly example (and though you may even be able to come up with a better example to better make the point I am making), this is none-the-less what happens every day when over-eager Helicopter Parents swoop in and solve problems and fight battles that rightly belong to their maturing children to fight and solve and overcome and learn from for themselves.

A true life example comes from the Florida fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico.

Years ago when the Florida fishing fleets were large and the catches plentiful, the seagulls that lived in this area were the daily recipients of ‘free food’, as the fisherman would routinely throw small or otherwise undesirable fish that had been killed in the nets to waiting seagulls who would hungrily follow the boats out into the Gulf and back to ports in Florida again.

This went on for years and years during the ‘good years’ of the Florida fishing industry, and for generations and generations of Florida seagulls who never had to fish for a living, but were given their keep for free. Seagull parents never taught their seagull young to fish for themselves since what they wanted they always got without effort from someone who knew how to do it.

When the Florida fishing industry fell on hard times there was a rash of seagulls that literally starved to death, even though there was still enough fish in the sea to provide for their needs and more.

These seagulls starved to death because they had never learned to do for themselves what they should have been allowed to do for themselves, and what initially looked like ‘help’ from the fisherman in the form of free fish was actually a harm to the seagulls who were handicapped by the lack of experience and who later starved to death with a Gulf full of fish they no longer knew how to gain access to.

This is in essence the harm that results when well-intentioned parents swoop in to solve the problems and fight the battles that their children need to be solving and fighting and winning in order to learn how to survive and succeed in the real world they are now tasked with living in.

It is also well known that when a chick, or baby chicken, begins to peck through its shell in order to hatch, if a human helps the chick to break through the shell, that chick will die. Chicks that do not fight through their own shells to hatch do not have the strength to live.

The best of intentions are capable of leading to the worst of results.


Some Final Thoughts on Helicopter Parenting

There are three main categories of Helicopter Parenting, which are as follows:

• The Agent

This is a parent who acts like an agent for their young adult child, promoting their virtues and talents to those at the University, questioning Professors on test scores and possible grades for their children, and even trying to negotiate starting salaries with potential employers once the degree has been earned.

• The White Knight

This is a parent who, like a knight in shining armor, is ready to protect and defend their children from the ‘dragons’ of life at a moment’s notice. Also like knights, they prefer to be humble and behind-the-scenes with their deeds of parenting valor, and often retreat as quickly as they arrived once the foe has been vanquished and their child saved from struggle and growth.

• The Black Hawk

This is a parent who will stop at nothing to ‘Helicopter Parent’ their child in any way possible, even if that means writing term papers for them, helping them cheat on exams, or anything else they think needs doing, be it ethical or not or even legal or not. These are the ‘Ninja Assassins’ of the Helicopter Parenting world, and one can only guess at the lessons their children must be learning from their ‘Black Hawk’ actions.

As previously mentioned, the over-use of cell phone communications between parents and child is often cited as a contributing factor in the creation of Helicopter Parenting. This occurs when older children away at school or in the workforce call their parents multiple times a day to discuss the happenings of the day, and to complain about their college professors, difficult classes, challenging work environments, mean bosses and so forth and so forth.

This constant contact can lead any caring parent to want to take matters into their own hands, to convert into a Helicopter Parent if they weren’t one already. So the solution to this dilemma is to limit your cell phone conversations with your young adult children living away from home to three separate 30 minute conversations a week (This is a general rule, but a good rule that seems to work in practice).

Parents need to remember that no matter how often you speak with your children (the more the better is the general rule we are always touting on this web site), parents need to remember that it is NOT the conversation with your child that is the issue or even the problem, but it is a parent’s desire to solve their child’s problems for them that is the problem and the issue.

Loving parents will WANT their children to face, struggle with and ultimately overcome hard challenges in life, for that is how everybody grows and improves and becomes stronger.

Parents, be there to guide and direct your children when they come to you with their problems, but DON’T take away your children’s growth by solving their problems for them. Instead, TEACH your child to be a problem solver on their own; a self-starter and independent worker as it were in the game of life.

Remind your children that you as the parent will always be there for them, but that this is their life to live and grow and learn from, and that you cannot do any of that FOR THEM.

Whatever motivates Helicopter Parenting, be it extreme love or extreme guilt or a lack of faith in your child’s ability to face and overcome the normal obstacles of adult living, now more than ever all parents everywhere need to realize that our children can grow only if we allow them the opportunities to do so.

A few hard knocks is often a good thing in a person’s personal progression in life. As a loving parent you can be there for your child when they get a hard knock trying to figure out some aspect of life for themselves, but by all means don’t rob your child of the opportunity to grow by trying to clear away all the obstacles of life by which that growth is made possible.

Growth requires personal resistance to difficult circumstances, which creates in each of us the comforting knowledge that we can take what life has to offer, and that we are capable of getting back up even if we are occasionally knocked off our feet.

Your children can learn to be happy, healthy, strong and independent adults in no other way.

Helicopter Parents everywhere, get out of your adult children’s way and allow them to grow and succeed.

Note: This video appears to repeat itself after the first segment is over but this is NOT the case, though the introduction IS repeated in the middle of this video.

Helicopter Parenting is seen by some as a virtue, and by others as a necessity within certain limits. I see Helicopter Parenting as missing the opportunity to allow your children to grow, and even to experience some controlled failures, while still under the safety of your parental guidance and loving influence.

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