On helicopter parenting
Many parents are starting to wake up to the insanity of “helicopter parenting,” always striving to hover over their children, even as they get to be teenagers, in order to protect them from largely-imagined evils and to push them to be hyper-competitive. Helicopter parenting takes many forms, including over-scheduling children with enrichment activities and classes and fretting at each and every indication that a child is less than perfect.
When I was a child, I was fortunate that my parents sent me off to take guitar lessons for a half-hour per week. I appreciated that opportunity. Other than that one activity, though, I was pretty much on my own. I played a bit of soccer in grade school, but my parents almost never went to the games or practices, nor did I expect them too. Nor did most other parents attend most of of the games. There were no such things as “select” leagues, where parents would convince themselves that their child was the next Pele, justifying three games every weekend in far flung locations, some of them out-of-state.
As a child, I was allowed considerable time to do whatever I wanted, or to do nothing at all. When I was in the mood to play sports, it was usually a pick-up game, where the children knocked on doors to round up other players, choose the teams, gather their own bats and balls, officiated their own disputes and tend to their own minor injuries. During the summer we sometimes played sports most of the day, yet there were no parents anywhere to be seen. We were allowed to make lots of mistakes, thus allowing us to really learn many things, including how to really understand other people.
This was a refreshingly wonderful way to handle things, when looking in retrospect. This was much better than having 20 parents each driving one-hour round trips to watch their 15 fourth graders play 50 minutes of officially refereed soccer. To be sure, I think that team sports can be a good thing. It’s all the hovering parents that seems creepy. If most of the parents had shown up and shouted constant encouragement at my games as a 10-year old, I wouldn’t have felt loved–I would have wondered what was wrong with all of them. After all, it’s only a game, especially for young children.
Whenever you find middle or upper class families these days, things are entirely different than they were for me. Many parents simply won’t leave their kids alone; they are too terrified that if left to their own, their children will lose their competitive edges and miss out on the best college, the best job, or the best spouse. The schools that are “good” are too often those that dump several hours of daily homework on small children. Children are too often deemed to need special camps and tutoring, instead of allowing them to explore such things as cooking and critters in the back yard or nearby creek on their own. And the whole sordid phenomenon of helicopter parenting is thoroughly permeated with rampant consumerism.
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This week, Time Magazine has taken on helicopter parents in an impressively detailed article titled “The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting.” One of the people featured in the Time article is Lenore Skenazy, who advocates “Free Range Kids.”:
[T]oo many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with “How can you let him go to the store alone?,” she suggests countering with “How can you let him visit your relatives?” (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) “I’m not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn’t be prepared,” she says. “But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources.” Besides, she says with a smile, “a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It’s nowhere you’d want to be.”
In the Time article, you can read that there has been a 25% drop in playtime (for 6-to-8 year olds) from 1981 to1997, while the amount of homework has doubled.
As Sting sings, if you love them, you’ve got to set them free. Otherwise, they’ll never learn to think for themselves and they’ll never turn be allowed to turn into the persons they were destined to become. Because the central message of helicopter parenting is that you don’t trust your children, helicopter parenting is a better way to ruin your child than to help your child. It’s a way to prevent your children from learning by playing, failing and then playing and failing some more. It’s a way to stifle cognitive development, by stealing play time from them.
It too often seems that all of this attention is forced onto children by parents who are working long hours away from their children and trying to make it up by lavishing perfection on their children. Regardless, too many of those who engage in helicopter parenting are not really hovering about for the sake of their children, no matter how much they protest. Rather, as the Time article suggests, they are focused solely on melding trophy children as an attempted display of their own parenting prowess.
