Why Don't Self-Interested Arguments Against Helicopter Parenting Deter Parents?

the case against overparenting isn't all social or philosophical

even I find this illustration a little mean, blame Getty Images

Here’s a fun story about a very young Bob Dylan’s days in Madison, Wisconsin, where he stayed with my (unimpressed) father and his roommates.

For the New York Times, Jessica Grose details how new online grading systems allow parents to track the progress of their children not from year to year, semester to semester, report card to report card, but week to week or even day by day. The results are depressingly predictable, in today’s parenting environment. There’s stress for students and teachers alike, a collapse in interest in learning in and of itself, an adversarial relationship between parents and teachers, and the rise of “hyperchecking,” where parents complain about each and every single grade that isn’t an A. The piece is about K-12, but Grose notes that parents are increasingly seeking access to college online gradebooks, which seems crazy to me; as someone who’s taught a lot of college classes, the idea of someone constantly monitoring a student’s grade with the mindset of a litigious lawyer sounds awful. But then again, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Here’s a piece about helicopter parenting extending into the college years to the extent that the parents are arranging social calendars. Of their college-age children.

I’ve been thinking about these issues for some time - I considered shopping a proposal for an anti-helicopter parenting book called Your Kid Sucks, but for some strange reason my agent dissuaded me - and what I can’t stop wondering is why parents don’t stop doing this stuff for the good of their kids themselves. There are social and philosophical critiques to be made of helicopter parenting, some very good ones. But we never need to wonder why people choose to pursue selfish interests over social or philosophical ones. What consistently surprises me is that parents keep puttering along in the clouds above their kids, binoculars in hand, when there seem to be really compelling arguments against doing that for reasons that are completely aligned with the selfish interests of the kids. I get ignoring social responsibility for the sake of your kid; it’s hard to understand ignoring what’s best for your kid for the sake of your kid.

There’s the social case to be made against helicopter parenting, of course. If you wanted to define the essential moral project of human beings in the broadest terms possible, you could do worse than “put others before self.” Aggressive parenting allows people to juke this basic logic - parents who act as though their child’s best interest is the only important criterion are, in a literal sense, putting someone else before themselves. “Hey, I may be disadvantaging already-disadvantaged kids with my hyperactive parenting, but I’m doing it for a greater cause than myself.” And the intrinsic (genetic) dedication to the good of one’s child obliterates the broader social concerns once freed from the guilt of traditional for-myself selfishness. But hyper-parenting still reflects selfishness, putting your own kin above the interest of everyone else, especially in cases where the harm done to society is a lot bigger than the benefit to your child. Academic malfeasance like the Varsity Blues scandal has obvious negative social consequences, for example, while those specific kids faced only going to slightly less competitive or desirable schools had there been no fraud in their applications. Less directly illicit behavior, like grade grubbing - which, among other things, inevitably benefits the students with the parents who are the most aggressive and who hold the most social capital - are a greyer area, but ultimately do more to unbalance an already-unbalanced system. If these parents were confronted with the opportunity to do this for themselves, I genuinely think that most of them would decline, out of a sense of social obligation. But once it’s “for my kid,” it’s no holds barred.

I think absolutely all parenting contains a little narcissism, and that’s OK; it’s probably a part of our genetic endowment that helps compel parents to nurture their children, and anyway parenting is a tough job that we shouldn’t expect people to perform with no sense of self-satisfaction. But it is one of those quirks of our social order that the parents who are the most politically progressive, who most ardently advocate for a society that serves all of our people, are often also the most unapologetic about putting their thumb on the scale for their own children. Plus, the sort of second-order selfishness of parenting allows for the sidestepping of more philosophical objections to helicopter parenting. These objections are less about the social good of others and more about the content of our individual characters. These include personal values such as the notion that we just should, as human beings, be able to live with a degree of independence in youth; that we just should experience hardship and the consequences of our actions to better appreciate what it means to be alive; that we just should, as human beings, secure our own interests to whatever degree we’re able, without help from above, including in school; that we just should operate as though we are but one in a broad collection of human beings, all of whom matter as much as we do, for our own spiritual good. The thing about these personal values is that they’re only motivating if they are indeed personal - that is, these might sway an individual, but not even occur to their parents, and in our system parents have remarkable ability to obstruct the agency of their kids. They can do the dirty work the kids might not do for themselves.

Those concerns are largely abstract and easily ignored by an anxious parent. What I can never quite grasp is why the self/child-interested arguments don’t move them, either. As many people have pointed out, resilience is a key human attribute that has to be developed through exposure to pain, failure, and setback. Academics like Jonathan Haidt have assembled a lot of empirical evidence to this effect. The entire process of learning involves gradually exposing young people to more and more challenge and more and more responsibility so that they may take them on without supervision in the future. Parents who have so meticulously governed the lives of their children that said children have never known pain, failure, or setback are thus doing them a disservice. Similarly, I would be deeply worried for the social future of a college-age adolescent whose parent is arranging playdates for them; how will they ever develop the necessary skills to have an active social life on their own? Overparented children can develop a lifelong expectation that someone else is going to come along and solve every problem for them when they need it; they can end up unable to grapple with the fact that the world isn’t always fair, and face confusion and heartbreak when no one can fix whatever’s hurting them. The children of helicopter parents, in my experience, can often be susceptible to the influence of overbearing people, particularly those in a position of authority, because they’re used to being led by an overseer. Etc.

Grose’s piece includes several references to risks hyperactive grade surveillance can pose to the well-being of over-parented kids.

They’re stripping their teenagers of the opportunity to develop the agency needed to succeed as adults: High school used to be a time when students were taking more responsibility for their grades and schedules, but for some families, online grade books can shift that.

Many students now rely on both their parents and the technology itself as crutches.

“Part of executive functioning and personal management is understanding what’s the right time and place to have a conversation versus not. And so students do need to develop that,” she said.

Wallace said parents shouldn’t be driving a wedge between kids and teachers because it makes children feel as if they’re “in the middle of an acrimonious divorce.”

the issue is that too many parents see their children’s grades as the ultimate reflection on themselves and their parenting. Even though their oversight may be well-meaning, it’s blinding them to the unintended consequences of their hovering. We need to think carefully about the long-term implications, Miller said, “and we need to think about the anxiety, the lack of privacy and the impediments to the development of independent executive functioning that are occurring when we are essentially delegating a portal to manage all of the deadlines and expectations about K-12 work.”

I’m sure there are many individual students who wouldn’t particularly suffer in these ways. But many would; all of the concerns expressed seem entirely plausible to me. Of course there’s also the little question of whether any of this is fair to teachers, to schools, or to peers, but as I said we’re concerned with self-interest here. The mystery is, why are more parents not motivated by the arguments that appeal to the well-being of their kid? Why don’t more parents consider the possibility that their aggressive parenting style will hurt their child and drop the frenetic worrying, the endless lawyering with schools and teachers, the overly-structured days, the constant vigilance against stranger danger in a world where kids have never been healthier or safer? Why don’t these concerns - certainly debatable, but sensible, and articulated by a growing chorus of commentators - why don’t these concerns seem to change parental behavior?

On the one hand, it’s tempting to say that it’s just hard to go first, that there’s a certain path dependency to parenting styles and that after you spent the first 10-ish years as a fretful and overinvolved parent, it’s hard to just let go. And for a certain strata of parent, overparenting probably just looks like what parenting is - they lack other models. The trouble with this reasoning is that we have a different style of parenting in comfortably recent memory; indeed, a lot of this current generation of helicopter parents were raised themselves by very laissez faire parents. (In the summer my father would unleash us in the morning to wander the fields and forests and then bellow for us to come home in the evening.) Perhaps there’s a lot of Oedipal complexity there, for some people, but you’d think there would also be a lot of parents who would be amenable to being gently told, “Children were set free far more than you’re willing to do with your kids and ended up just fine, for most of history.” We could very easily keep the not-smoking-and-drinking evolution of modern parenting while allowing for the fact that violent crimes against children committed by strangers are vanishingly rare (and rarer still for affluent children) and for the fact that overwhelming evidence suggests children have a level of natural academic potential that will do more to determine their school outcomes than anything else.

I think there’s two issues. The first is that, unless you’re a single parent, you can’t unilaterally change parenting styles; your coparent will certainly have their own say. And then you have the peer effects, which I suspect are what’s really hard to resist - people really don’t want to look like bad parents in the eyes of other parents, and to a truly unfortunate degree, our communal definition of the best parenting is more or less the most parenting. What I’ve found, personally, is that a lot of parents feel that they have to constantly stress and worry over their kids, and become hostile when they’re told they don’t have to. If they aren’t stressing, what will the other parents think?

Years ago I wrote a post about childhood food allergies. I was reacting to a piece in Harper’s that argued that such allergies are seriously over-diagnosed. There were a few components to my argument, but a big observation is simply that doctors have every reason to say that a kid does have allergies and almost none to say that he doesn’t. If you as a doctor say that a kid has an allergy and he doesn’t, no one will ever find out, and even if they do, there’s no consequences. If you say that a kid doesn’t have an allergy and he does, then there’s a very good chance that there’s a sizable lawsuit coming your way. (Harper’s also noted that the company that makes EpiPen is a very active funder of “allergy awareness” groups.) So I laid all of this out and said that kids were probably routinely being diagnosed with food allergies they didn’t have. And parents got so, so mad. I got an immense number of emails over that piece, relative to other pieces of that era. A number of parents wrote me indignantly to say that their kid did actually have an allergy, and it was very serious indeed! To which I replied, as gently as I could muster, that they were therefore not the kids I was talking about. To say that a given childhood condition is more rare than believed - we might also nominate, say, autism - is not to say anything about the difficulty of managing that condition for those who do have it. But people didn’t want to hear it. There was a profound sense that telling parents they should worry less was somehow an act of aggression.

With The Cult of Smart, too, I often emphasized a certain optimistic viewpoint on the notion of intrinsic academic ability: if your child has a strong tendency to occupy a given academic percentile despite various interventions, it allows for parents to worry less about maximizing grades and test scores and to instead work with their child to discover what they enjoy and to experience the fun of learning in a dramatically lower-stress way. (In fact, in the long genesis of that book, there was a period of time where this was meant to be the basic packaging of the argument, and I considered titles like Chill Out, Mom & Dad and Just Keep Them Alive!) There, too, parents generally didn’t react well to the idea that most parental stress was unnecessary. Certainly there are a lot of elements of the book that are tendentious and debatable, but it seemed that some correspondents were put out by that basic message - your kid will be what they will be, in school, so love them regardless of how smart they are and help guide them to a satisfying life. And I think this stems from a very understandable anxiety that parents have about how good of a job they’re doing. Our culture is relentlessly judgmental towards parents, after all. The more a parent worries, the more they likely feel like they’re doing something. But, I think, a correction is long overdue.

Readers always tell me that my perspective will change when I have my own kid, someday. No doubt it will. (And no doubt I am motivated to have one in part by my own tangled self-interest.) But I do believe that I’ll try to parent more like my own parents did, and I think a lot of parents want to be more liberal and loosen the reins a little bit; they just find it difficulty to do so. The beauty of things having gone so far in the direction of over-parenting is that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. We don’t have to be too critical towards helicopter parents. We should, though, help them come back down to earth.