The old ways just sound generic authoritarian jerkassery. Not bad enough to harm a child, or to make them hate you as an adult, but that doesn't mean you aren't being a jerk. Destroying your child's possessions isn't okay as a punishment for doing something actually bad, let alone listening to music you don't want them to. (I have precomitted to never care about my daughter's taste in music or her hairstyle, both are dumb things not worth fighting over)
My understanding of how parenting in traditional societies works is that you've already failed if you need to order your kids to do things, regardless of whether they respond to that order with "yes" or "no." Kids from an early age are interested in what their parents are doing and offer to help, the key screw-up parents make is discouraging kids who are too little to do it right from helping them. They need to understand that kids need to screw up in order to get it right, if you discourage them because they screw up you extinguish the helping instinct.
The short of it is that you are taking a metaphor literally. Saying lyrics are "poisonous" just means they are offensive, it doesn't mean they are a literal mind poison, and that listening to them will "inject" a poisonous idea into the listener's mind. Minds and ideas don't work like that. Most people recognize that is true for adults, but stubbornly insist without evidence it must still be true for kids and teens.
I happen to think that organic food is a scam, but I can definitely see what progressive parents are thinking. They believe (correctly) that having sex is fun and harmless if done responsibly, so to stop their kids from having sex responsibly is depriving them of a source of joy for no good reason. They likely also think pot use is harmless if done responsibly (this I am not sure I agree with them on, it's probably safe for adults but I think the affect of pot on developing nervous systems is understudied). By contrast they think (falsely) that non-organic food is full of literal poisons.
As you can probably tell, I am not some sort of hippie progressive parent. I am a dispassionate, calculating parent who thinks the evidence is often on the hippies' side, even though I find their general outlook annoying.
I also think another factor is that people in our society often subconsciously believe that sex and sexualization stains the honor of women, even if they do not consciously endorse that. Even people who claim to be feminists seem to act like they think this is true. People who believe this look insane to people who do not, they try to "protect" women and girls from things that are not harming them. People who do not believe this often look misogynistic to people who do, because they are willing to tolerate the staining of women's honor. I think that is another reason progressive parents might confuse you, it seems to you that they're failing to protect their children from harm, when really they just don't believe any harm is being done.
For the most part, I agree what you wrote. Fortunately, my wife didn't belong to any social media mother's groups, so we didn't have all of that external pressure on us.
I think item 4 is the one that is most frustrating for me. My wife and her mother are both wonderful people, but they were never a 12 year old boy doing idiotic 12 year old boy things. They just don't get it.
I think there is just way, way more pressure on moms with regard to being a parent. When I would take my kids to the grocery store as infants, I would get compliments and praise for being such an amazing dad even if the kids were fussy and grubby. In the same situation, my wife would receive boatloads of unsolicited advice and negative vibes. As a result, she would probably seem to an outsider like an uptight mom, changing clothes and cleaning kids for a trip to the store, but that was the feedback loop.
I also experienced that curious double standard. I received compliments as a father out with my always well-behaved kids that I'm pretty sure mothers wouldn't.
The other assumptions: that mothers are the primary caregiver. I was my kids' primary caregiver most years. That when fathers are responsible for their kids, my care would be referred to as babysitting, not parenting.
One of my favourite activities was to take my kids and some friends out on PD days (weekdays when school is out) to museums. Chances are there would be at least 2 distinct shades of skin, yet the kids were of similar age. I would invariably get asked if all the kids were mine, usually by a senior. I would reply: "2 girlfriends", just to enjoy the brief, shocked reaction.
I don't know if I fully believe this about the criticism and perceived slights because in my experience most moms are ridiculously sensitive to statements and way to prone to take offhand comments or advice meant to be helpful as judgment/criticism. I do agree that dads get admiration simply for not being deadbeats (because a lot of them ARE deadbeats) but a lot of moms are also exquisitely oversensitive to this kind of stuff. I work with some moms who DNGAF and will just declare that they and their kids suck and make a joke of it, and no one cares and if anything finds them more likeable. It's not like people are gossiping about them being bad moms. I think you have to kind of buy into and care about that kind of thing for it to actually happen. And honestly I have never in my life heard someone talk about another mom for being neglectful or whatever...when people talk bad about moms it's ALWAYS in the other direction about them being a helicopter mom. So I'm not sure I really buy the supposed pressure bc it seems self imposed, at least in large part.
What you’re describing is not egalitarianism. In fact, basically 100% of those moms complain constantly that they have to make every single decision and their husband basically just follows them around like an extra child. It’s tough to believe men who are like ‘actually I’m very risk tolerant and believe in the value of grit’ when they’re totally unwilling to stick their necks out in family decision making and just go along to get along.
Many men (and some women) have learned the wrong lessons from feminism and the increasing power of women: that they are not allowed to have an opinion on a traditionally female-dominated area like childrearing, lest he act the overbearing male, inserting his opinion into what women know better.
I think people aren't very logically consistent, though. From observing family members who have this dynamic, it's true that she's sick of being the parent in charge and making all the decisions, but it's also true that she gets mad and pulls rank when he does speak up. And also true that he rarely speaks up and needs to grow a spine. They both reinforce the pattern and they both hate it.
Oh, 100%. I’m definitely not claiming that the mothers in these types of relationships are just as much to blame for this vicious circle. I only find it ironic when fathers are like “the neuroticism of my family life is entirely my wife’s fault.” It’s like “lol, see what you did there.?” And, of course, this makes it so much worse, because if an already neurotic parent knows that EVERYTHING is their responsibility, that they will have to take the heat alone for any false move, then they become a lot worse.
Many of these men ‘go along to get along’ because their wives hold the whole family hostage with their emotions, refusing to be civil until they get their own way. Perpetuating the myth of fathers as these bumbling Homer Simpson’s that don’t care about how their children are raised is just as ridiculous as portraying women as faultless angel mothers who must nail themselves to the cross of motherhood every time they pack a lunch or drive their kids to school. Real life answers are more complex than that.
I can personally remember my parents having a few arguments that broke along these lines - my Mom concerned my brother and I were in danger, and my Dad concerned we were going to grow up to be weak cowards (he used a more colorful term) if we were babied.
I think this is spot on, though I will say the ONLY reason for the gender imbalance here is social conditioning. I'm sure that is what you mean, but it really is why women tend to be the bigger helicopter here. Women are also more likely to reduce employment or stay at home when kids are young, what do you do with that time? It is consumed with the needs of your kids and you seek out people who are in the same boat.
I disagree here ..women go through profound hormonal changes when they give birth and it literally rewires their brains. Not so much for dads. Women also simply have more negative emotions (anxiety etc) than men...this is well studied. Testosterone is a mood booster. Women are actually simply more likely to experience more worry, fear, and anxiety...on a biological basis bc of their hormones and wiring, when faced with the same circumstances as men, and it's not social conditioning. I used to go to a bodybuilding gym (I wasn't one but most there were), they all took testosterone, and the women besides growing huge muscles and getting lower voices would all talk about how different their emotions and interests and drives became.
Plus I'm just witnessed way too many women, like my sister, who were once free spirited, assertive, confident and independent turn into completely different people after they had a kid...worried, obsessive, anxious...and then revert back to their old personality once the kid was 17 or so. The dads personalities didn't change that much, they adjusted to the new lifestyle but didn't seem like almost different people.
You bring up some interesting points, and I will say maybe my last comment was too strictlI would love to see studies that show that this is 100% due to biological reasons and not at all due to social conditioning. Anxiety can absolutely worsen with social conditioning. We put so much pressure on mothers and far less on fathers, even in this modern era, there is no way that does not factor significantly into how people behave. As for the "brain rewiring" thing, the studies like the one in Nature suggest it does occur after preganancy but it only lasts for about 2 years. Look, I'm not suggesting that hormones don't play a role into our overall well-being, and women do experience fluctuations during their menstrual cycle, so yes, you do have a point. That being said, it sounds like your sister just wasn't as carefree as she outwardly seemed. I'm speaking from experience. People think I am very confident, assertive, etc. But I have experienced a lot of anxiety internally most of my life. Treatment has helped, but I know it is something I have to combat when it comes to raising kids.
Oh I'm definitely not arguing that NONE of it is social conditioning or social norms/pressure. Just that I think it's both and it's sort of a self reinforcing cycle.
In other words, for example, if women collectively decided they wanted to try to end this (and I do think most of the social pressure comes from other women or even their own moms) they would have to make a concerted effort to work somewhat against their "default" tendencies, in the same way one has to work against say their natural tendencies to overeat for example. I think for men they could much more easily decide to stop this behavior and it wouldn't be that hard for them, or require them to overcome biological/wired in tendencies.
The extra energy and enhanced mood/optimism that testosterone provides is really unfair and not talked about enough. You would have to give men some type of depressant that made them have 20% less energy or lower moods for them to experience what it's like for women. This all used to be common knowledge and the science supports it, but we've all somehow forgotten what is fairly obvious and common sense, bc we all want to believe in gender equality. I mean, you COULD pretty easily give men that experience, as it's what happens if they take estrogen.
Nature didn't make women the same as men because if it did, way too many babies and young kids would die (judging by the not-small portion of men who are perfectly fine with abandoning or neglecting their own kids, absent serious social pressure and penalties).
This is all spot on. I recently complained to my brother that I'm the parent generally in favor of discipline and letting negative consequences play out (putting me firmly in least-favorite parent status.) He was like, no shit you're the guy, it's usually like that.
We both live in hyper-progressive areas and know a lot of wives that out earn husbands, etc, so I was surprised to learn how sticky these roles are.
Luckily my wife and I both are too lazy to really land on the worst of this parenting style.
Joseph Campbell noted it. That all successful cultures had this process of mother's child, father's child and then adult. And those cultures that skipped any of these steps ended up with adult age children that never develop adequate self-sufficiency.
I think it is clear that the change to western society that put women in charge has resulted in the middle piece going away.
So that means that half of Gen X never developed sufficiency, since absentee fathering was the norm. But, people are resilient, and so this seem rigid in a quasi-spiritual kind of way.
Being a Gen-X latchkey kid to a working single mother meant the middle part wasn’t “mother’s child” per se. My particular case was also that my mom wasn’t the super cuddly type; I’m pretty happy how it turned out.
Our son just turned 5, and is in Kindergarten because he was born right on the cutoff date, and *man* is this playing out right now: Mom’s group on Facebook; incredibly long list of vitamin supplements; frustration at me if I don’t give an opinion, shooting me down if I do.
I don't know why it would be a cancellable opinion...this is almost 100% about moms, not dads. I don't see how anyone could even refute that with a straight face.
Dads simply don't care that much what other people think about their parenting. Mom's do. Dads also don't sacrifice as much of their emotional and physical health to have kids, so there's not as much resentment, frustration, guilt, and anxiety all bound up in the whole thing that leads to crazy behavior.
I love and have empathy for my mom friends and siblings, but honestly they are almost all semi insufferable to be around and I've just gotten used to waiting it out til their kids are older and they become sane again. Even the ones who KNOW all the things Freddie talks about in this piece and think of themselves as the "sane" ones...aren't. They're extremist germophobes who think they need to sanitize their floors daily (probably creating some of those allergies with their excessive sanitization), or they're ridiculously wrapped up in every tiny minor emotional reaction from their kid, or they're unbelievably sensitive to the slightest whiff of a possible implied slight or criticism of their kid. Many of them actually seem borderline crazy (and didn't before they had kids).
For the most part the only moms I can stand to be around are the ones too busy with their full time plus jobs to be like this. It's the privileged stay at home or part time/easy job moms that are the worst with this, by far.
As a suburban, coastal mom in the thick of it, this is SO TRUE.
I have one more observation to add, and that is that a lot of suburban moms are women who used to have high powered careers and either quit or massively scaled back. These are women who have never not been overachieving. For the first time in their lives they are not getting accolades.
All that intense Girl Boss energy and professional insecurity needs somewhere to go.
I'd like data showing that the most politically progressive do more helicopter parenting than those of other political perspectives with comparable education and income.
Have you been to a travel sports game recently? I think you are right about income being a predictor of overly involved parents, but I think that trend just manifests itself in different ways across different communities.
Yeah I don’t think helicopter parenting correlates that strongly with progressive politics. Asians (both in the US and notoriously in Korea, Japan, India and urban China) have some of the most extreme parenting cultures and they also tend to be very conservative (we just don’t recognize it because we associate ‘conservative’ with white fundamentalist Christians, but many non-Western cultures are far more conservative than our mainstream).
We have a 7, 4, and 1 year old. We are thankfully parenting in an age in which there is much research on the benefits of letting kids resolve conflicts and play on their own, so we've tried to do that. But man, the pressure from other parents to intervene, to hyper-schedule, to make sure everyone else knows that you are trying to parent—the pressure is incredible. I tend to think most parents would gladly let their children have more independence and room; it's the shame they're implicitly threatened with that prevents it.
And tbh I don't know how much of that pressure is conscious. It could be that if you gather 100 parents in a room 75 of them would privately agree with this post. But they think others don't (because people honestly don't talk to each other anymore, much less about parenting), so they act accordingly.
I badly wanted my kids to have the kind of free-range childhood I had, where my brother and I roamed the neighborhood in the afternoons, weekends, and all summer, playing wide-ranging imaginative games with a mixed-age group of kids. But it was impossible in our NJ suburb. All the other kids, from a very young age, were busy with sports, classes, camp, and other schedules and adult-supervised activities. The streets were a ghost town after school. The only way my kids could interact with other kids was for me to enroll them in activities too.
Can you describe some concrete examples of exactly what this "social pressure" consists of? Or what implicit threats you mean? Bc my observation if that parents never think THEY'RE the helicopters. They almost universally think it's OTHER parents judging and pressuring them. This really makes no sense.
Furthermore it kind of doesn't make sense bc why would you even care what they think? I'm not being blase as I realize people often have very good reasons for caring what others think..bc it directly impacts their professional reputation and career trajectory, or whether they're liked by whatever group they want to be part of. But why does it matter what other parents think? Are you afraid they won't invite you to parties or something? Do you even go to parent parties? How would it effect you if they thought your parenting were a bit lax?
I'm not trying to be rude or challenge you here, I'm honestly just confused and would like to hear some concrete examples so I can understand.
When my wife and I were entering the child-raising years, we were really uncomfortable watching this tendency unfold among our friends. All these "Baby Einstein" and sign-language learning videos were the rage, and they were part of a larger project of trying to engineer an advanced kid. Even then I shuddered at what would become of these poor children. Even now, I have friends who have kids in grad school and they are always looking at their offspring's location on their phones. Horrifying. And as an aside, I always thought that much of the sign-language learning products allure was pure self-interest. It did not come from a place of trying to serve the Deaf community, primarily anyway. It was about social distinction and this idea that it would make their kid linguistically smarter.
The baby sign language stuff sounds worthwhile, if only to reduce the frustration of trying to figure out why the baby is crying even though you appear to have addressed all their basic needs.
Yea, I do remember that being one rationale for it. I have no memory of it ever working for anyone though. That's not to say it didn't happen, of course.
In my experience, the most intense helicopter parents appear to be over-educated stay at home parents (where I live, that is usually a mom). To give up career ambitions after all the investment in grad school etc naturally creates a drive toward overactive parenting and a hyper focus on kids. Plus, that competitive, striving mindset doesn't just get turned off. This is ratcheted up to a whole other level when competitive pre-school, grade school, high school is part of the equation.
And I get it. When one of my kids fail, or are treated unfairly, it is really hard to not step in and try to fix the problem.
Stepping back, the word "parenting" shows the problem. I'm never "husbanding" or "brothering" as those relationships are understood to be part of being in a family. I strive to be a good parent while avoiding parenting.
I can't agree. You're arguing against the verb 'to parent', as distinguished from the noun 'parent'.
You can be a parent without every parenting, but not a good one. Because children are vulnerable minors, parenting are the acts fulfilling a duty of care. Husbands and brothers operate in a relatively egalitarian family relationship, with no explicit duty of care - so we call their actions 'loving'.
I suspect the rise in the use of the word "parenting" likely mirrors the outbreak of overbearing parents micromanaging their kids. Because "parenting" focuses on parents' plans and influence while I think being an effective parent is much more about reacting and being present in the moment.
I remember the first time I went to a PTA meeting at my oldest daughter's preschool in Fairfield and I lasted about 10 minutes. Those moms were way too intense. I had just quit my own High Achieving Manhattan job, too, but I was enjoying being lazy and had zero desire to get involved in something that sounded more like another team project at work than planning a preschool Halloween Party. I quietly slipped out when I could and was like, "Oh, hell no not this again." LOL.
Honestly, as a manager, it’s depressing to see people who were raised in the helicopter milieu coming into the workforce. I value independent, critical thinking candidates and it’s getting tougher to find them.
Helicopter parenting has knock-off effects that last far beyond K-12 and I wish parents could see that.
100%, this is becoming an issue in almost every workplace. I went to the doctor's office today and was chatting with two nurses who were telling me that their young new hires have been a nightmare the past couple years, how they call in sick constantly and take "mental health breaks" with no seeming concern for their job security, etc. There were not wizened old blowhards complaining either, they were in their late 30s, both with their own kids, and kept saying they're really concerned with the new generation that's starting out.
I'm 61 and my parents were laissez faire about my grades. In fact, my father once asked my headmaster why I was getting good grades without seeming to do much homework.
There are two different thought streams in your essay and I want to distinguish them as the differences can be subtle.
1) There's over-parenting that deprives children of resilience and agency.
2) Then there's providing children with the benefits of your social capital (your network) and financial capital.
Done the wrong way at the wrong age, 2) can have the same effect as 1). But done the right way and at the right age, 2) can be helpful rather than harmful to your children.
Both 1) and 2) are selfish, but it is the rare privileged parent who wouldn't provide 2) in some form.
I'm interested in the implicit difference in what Freddie talks about between "helicopter parenting" and other forms of extremely overbearing parenting. When I grew up I associated it with conservative and especially fundamentalist parents, motivated by (1) worrying constantly about their kid's moral status and (2) worrying about how they looked to other churchgoers. I remember a fifteen-year-old girl on my block whose parents yanked her out of public school and put her in a Baptist private school mid-year because she'd been caught dating. Other kids I knew weren't allowed to have bedroom doors because their parents' version of Christianity taught that kids would use privacy only for sin. Pastors' kids had it the worst.
I recognize how this is different from what Freddie's describing - it's authoritarian rather than killing with kindness. But I am interested in how very progressive parents ended up similarly overbearing. (I also do not think this is limited to very progressive parents - I know plenty of normies who have those GPS trackers on their phones and follow their kids' movements from work all day.)
I wonder if it's because, like fundamentalists whose life is their church, people who have strong ideological alignment with their social circles also worry about their standing with the other parents in that community.
I grew up in a very conservative Church, too (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.). My mom was/is actually pretty cool, though. I think she has always been secure enough in her own beliefs and her ability to pass them on that when we were kids she had no problem raising us in a ideologically diverse neighborhood and sending us to public school. When it came to friends who didn't share our lifestyle (she was an interior designer so there were *a lot* of gay men in my childhood LOL) she was just sort of like "its a free country, everyone does their thing."
And they were the least helicopter-y parents ever. My childhood was delightful.
I think I have a very secure relationship with religion because of this.
The school parent portals send out emails and text messages with every missed assignment. The schools are sending out the negative report, nudging parents to correct their kids behavior.
That triggers some helicoptering.
Growth comes through opposition and failure. It is very difficult to let one's child get hurt but it is necessary.
Haidt claims that the reduction in family size plays a role. With 10 kids, you might have a few screw ups, but some will do good.
Yeah, the framing of this post is ridiculous. I have to sign a sheet every single week affirming I looked at my child's grades for that week online (since they no longer send home graded papers).
Parents using that information to argue with and berate the schools and teachers is a separate issue (though even that I have more sympathy to than this post gives it - maybe the schools are great in suburban New York, but in bum-eff Louisiana where I live the education has been ... inconsistent, to put it kindly. I don't argue with grades, but I have had to intervene to get my kids remedial instruction or other support where they just weren't getting and never would from the school and kept failing in the meantime).
I don't think it's ridiculous at all. And your interventions are almost certainly not making any difference for your kid's eventual performance percentile.
Parents are being harassed by schools to force the parents to get on the kids to do busy work. Schools are pushing parents to intervene with their kids, to be extra hall monitors and teacher's aids. The schools, aided by technology, is pushing this.
This is very different from helicopter parents. It has gotten much worse since Covid.
None of the teachers I know want this either. I think it is a small cohort of overinvolved parents turned policy makers (and probably whoever is selling the software) who pushed for "transparency" and now everyone is stuck with the terrible result. You and Freddie are talking about the same nonsense.
That's fine. But the premise of the post is this new system allowing week-to-week monitoring is somehow the result of helicopter parenting, when it's not. Checking their grades weekly online is what my kids' school requires - at a crummy school system here in the south where the issue with parents is them not giving a shit or bothering to send their kids at all, not helicopter parenting.
I honestly thought the system was implemented to reduce accountability, not facilitate parental involvement. The system it replaced wasn't quarterly report cards. It was weekly signed papers, where they'd send home paper copies of all the kids' graded assignments from the previous week.
The new, electronic system now just gives the grade but not the test itself - which is in a different online system not linked to from the one with the grades, making it harder for a curious parent to see what actually happened (and thus harder to complain). In addition to the effect of not requiring parents to sign on to an online platform in the first place, rather than sending home paper they can react to, which eliminated a big chunk of review right off the top.
God it's so sad. I also had the "go out in the morning and come back at night" early childhood, I have friends who are well aware of the pitfalls of helicopter parenting, but they're scared to leave their kids alone, in part because people drive giant tanks and drivers don't expect little people to be roaming around by themselves. It's all just sad! You never see bands of kids running around playing by themselves unless they're late-age teens. You almost never see kids climbing trees and if they are there's an adult below them literally holding their hands out if they fall. It's also this fucked up culture where strangers NEVER interact with other people's kids. Part of what made "go out all day by yourself" possible is that other adults like neighbors etc. were watching you for outrageous misbehavior or dangerous situations. And I wonder how class plays into it. Because it's not just ridiculous bougie parents, you don't see kids in poorer neighborhoods out playing alone...
I'm not a parent, but if I were, the giant tank cars speeding through neighbourhoods would be one of the #1 things that would make me hesitant about letting my prospective children roam about freely. I take my nephews out trick or treating every year, and there are frequently psychopaths blasting through residential streets on the one night you're supposed to look out for kids on the roads.
As someone who's been a dad for a couple years now, I don't disagree with any of this, and I certainly don't plan to hit this level of helicopter parenting at any point. But the one thing I think is missing is how difficult it is to let your child be upset and uncomfortable in the moment. It's absolutely true that kids need to sit with discomfort sometimes and deal with it, but the benefits of resilience are always going to be an abstraction on some level; it's always going to be something you understand but don't feel, whereas the feeling of your child being upset is so, so visceral. I'm a vaguely-robotic autist and I still struggle with it all the time.
I think this is it -- and I think people have always had this instinct. But my theory is that in the past, people had more kids and simply couldn't tend to all of their needs at once and just had to let them figure things out themselves more often. Now that people have fewer kids it's easier to helicopter.
There was also just an actual poverty-based role to it that's often absent in helicopter parents. I have friends with dairy farms who let their kids sit in front of tablets for a couple hours a day because they just need them out of the way while they manage large animals and heavy machinery. I let my kids climb on the furniture and wrestle with each other, while shouting at them from the other room to stop, because I need to fix crap in my house myself and not pay $300 for a plumber to come in. If you're a stay-at-home mom and your husband makes $300,000/year, just sitting there reading a book while your kid gets in trouble feels lazy. You might feel guilty about quitting your job, or bored. You're probably not letting him watch Paw Patrol all day while you take care of things - you quit your job to Parent Him Right and it's really hard to do nothing. My great grandparents probably wished they could leave their cows in the fields every time my grandpa hiccupped, too, but they just couldn't. They had to be constantly busy and either find a confined way to keep the kids occupied or let them tag along and discipline them (corporally, if necessary) to keep them from getting killed or costing the farm a ton of money by breaking stuff.
Having more kids definitely helped me avoid some helicopter parenting. If you have a partner and only 1 or 2 kids, you likely can schedule your kids endlessly, whereas it takes herculean effort if you have 4 or more.
It can advantage the kids too, oddly. My fourth child is much more of a free spirit (or rather, a stereotypical boy), and he gets to be, in part because I'm tired, exhausted and too busy. It's lucky for him that he wasn't my first, when I would have had more time to apply a more authoritative approach.
I don't know if they DID always have this instinct. I am almost certain my parents did not give a shit and it certainly didn't make them viscerally hurt on an empathetic level when I was upset as a kid. If often just really annoyed and pissed them off. Same with my friends and their parents. There was a lot more "I'll give you something to cry about" back then, and expectations of controlling your emotions so you don't piss off your parents.
In fact, now that I think about it, I recall my friend's parents purposely inventing faked consequences for things just to upset their kid and teach them a lesson. Like my friend left her bike on the driveway, and her parents took bike to Salvation Army and told their daughter it was stolen, to teach her not to leave it out again. She cried for hours and they were very proud of that result.. that kind of thing wasn't at all unusual. At my swim lessons at the YMCA when it was a kid, the instructors would make every single one of us cry every lesson and the parents thought it was hilarious...I have photos my dad took of a bunch of five year olds lined up in swimsuits crying. But hey, we all learned to swim and jump off the diving board.
I think parents really did not used to care so much about their kids being upset. Something has changed. Maybe just there were more unwanted births back then and more people who didn't want to be parents, I'm not sure. The lots of kids things doesn't fully explain it either. My dad had my brother when I was 17 and the way he raised him was SOOO different. He was a hundred times more indulgent and involved and helicopters. That was the same guy. He just changed with the culture or perhaps older parents are more likely to be like this.
I was born very late 70s so yeah, mostly raised in the 80s and first half of the 90s. My brother was born mid 90s and the way he was raised (by same parents and same daycare I went to) was already very VERY different from me and much more intensive and indulgent.
Also my sister was born in 1970 and things were even harsher for her. Since my siblings are so spread apart (25 years between first and last) it's a pretty interesting comparison within the same family and we were all treated very differently, from borderline neglect and very harsh treatment of the first to over indulgence resulting in a pretty spoiled kid with the last. Of course I was in the sweet spot middle so I don't turned out perfect. ;)
But the same family also reflected not just cultural trends because my parents were way too young with their first and very old with their last (mid 40s). They were also poor students when they had their first and upper middle class professionals by their last. So all the trends...being older, more money and education, and cultural trends towards helicoptering worked together.
The results between the three of us siblings are almost exactly how you'd expect, though we all turned out fine. Youngest is definitely a bit spoiled and helpless/entitled. My sister who had a very harsh childhood didn't really helicopter her own kids but she is very involved in their lives and a beat friend type with zero discipline. I think a lot of older Gen X perhaps reacted to their own harsher upbringing by trying to be much nicer to their kids. Maybe those kids will swing back in the other direction if it doesn't end up working out for them, who knows.
Hmm. I think you need to give examples of what you mean by letting "your child be upset and uncomfortble". You can still "intervene" as a parent if your child fails, the point is to do it in non-helicopterish ways that don't send the message that "my kid is always right."
So, let's say Sally fails to make the basketball team or Johnny doesn't get a leading role in the school play, you can take them out to lunch and a movie, comfort them, and persuade them to work on their skills and try again next year. You don't have to go speak to the basketball coach or drama teacher. In this way you acknowledge the setback and try to figure out ways for the child to succeed in the future. Then, the child independently works on making the team or getting a good part in the school play.
This could also mean acknowledging that maybe basketball isn't Sally's thing and she should focus on tennis or that Johnny should help with costuming or devote more time to the videos he's making.
Honestly, as much as no parent wants to see their child unhappy, I have a really hard time understanding parents who think they can prevent their children from ever experiencing discomfort and that some state of perma-happiness is the way to go through life. Isn't that just straight-up fantasyland?
Intervening as a parent when a child fails by comforting them is often a failure of parenting though. Letting failure hurt is an important part of growth.
To be clear though, I'm not disagreeing with helping youth assess so they can decide on next steps. That kind of facilitation is good parenting.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s in suburban Detroit. In my community, if you didn’t make the team, your parents said something like “better luck next time.” Nobody got taken to the movies.
Hmm. I don’t find “better luck next time” to be especially helpful treatment for a kid or an adult. If you wouldn’t be so callous as to say that to a friend who just lost a big promotion, why promote it as a way to treat a child?
As much as I think most helicopter parenting is nuts, pointlessly hard ass parenting is hardly the solution.
I feel exactly the same. A parent’s role is both provide comfort and care (so the child feels they have a safe and secure starting point)
and to impart the tools and skills and habits of character that can allow a child to succeed. None of that requires emotional abuse or being a hard ass or any of that bullshit.
Hard ass? Yikes. Emotional abuse? Are you kidding me? The catastrophizing of every day failures is abuse. Letting your kid know by your reaction that whether or not they got on varsity pom pom isn’t going to matter in a few years is how you teach them to roll with the punches.
I have so much to say about this. Prefatory throat-clearing: I am decidedly not a helicopter parent; I try to parent much as I was parented, with some patches. My girls are 19 and 17, and both have commented positively on the amount of freedom I allow/ed.
First, this "helicopter parenting" is, by and large, a rich urban/suburban problem. We brought up the girls for most of their lives in a middle-income rural Minnesota community, and intense helicoptering just is not seen there. This is, almost exclusively, a professional-managerial class (and above) problem. In fact, it's infuriating to see commentators say that the problem with this generation is the lack of play or the lack of freedom without realizing that this is only a problem in their bubble, and can't really be held responsible for broader issues.
Second, the fact that this is a PMC issue points us to the real problem. It's really an escalation spiral arising from a competition for finite resources. We moved to a nice rich suburban school district in the last couple of years, in part to help prepare my youngest for college. (Well, that was the excuse. Long story.) The amount of helicoptering here, of course, is bewildering. But the problem is that, in the short term, it gets results. More helicoptering helps get that GPA just a little higher than the other person's. It helps their college resume just a little bit more. And so they have a chance of scoring that big Ivy education or whatever that the other guy lacks. Never mind that it can cripple kids socially or in their employment--in the short term, it makes a difference. We can always fix problems on the back end.
And as a parent, watching these others get ahead feels TERRIBLE. It's not that you are worried how you look in the eyes of other parents; it's that you're terrified in your own eyes that you haven't done enough for your own child. I can tell myself to "trust the process" as much as I want, but it's really hard to look in the mirror and worry that you haven't done enough to put your kid in the best position to succeed relative to all these other overachievers.
All that said: I've withstood the temptation and haven't changed my behavior that much. (The somewhat spendy ACT tutor aside, but even that was only a couple sessions.) And when my eldest reports back from college on how well-adjusted she is compared to a lot of her peers, I feel like I'm doing the right thing. But it's not easy to remember.
I agree with all of this, but since our kids will be applying to the same colleges as the hyper-groomed kids of the PMC, I still feel that pressure. On a similar note, I've avoided the massive pay-to-play sports world, while my sons' peers and competitors are working with private trainers and driving/flying to tournaments etc. And, my son just got cut from the freshman basketball team. I suspect that the networking and polish from the private team influenced the school tryouts. As you said, it made me feel TERRIBLE and I'm not sure if I would handle things differently if I had the chance to go back and change my approach.
A really good player will make the team regardless. I think it gets trickier for the 11th and 12th spots on the bench. Some kids play basketball year-round on various private teams. Those kids look the part and are playing at the peak of their (often limited) abilities at the time of the tryout. Also, high school coaches make money in the off-season coaching on travel teams, often getting to know the kids who later wish to join the school team. Plus, expensive gear looks good. Which is a long way of saying that if my son performed better, he would have made the team, but, when there are 25+ freshman trying out for 12 spots, I think there are a lot of factors at play.
(And, "Really?" followed by "I'm not doubting you..." is definitely expressing doubt.)
Just because coaches tell their teenagers that "only the best players will make the team" and the other inspirational egalitarian stuff doesn't mean they're immune to the outside pressures that influence the reality of those decisions.
Oh, the sports thing is so bad. I’m watching my friends’ kids, with no especial athletic ability, demanding and expecting to play on these club competition travel teams in addition to normal extracurricular teams because that’s what everyone else does. And that applies to rural towns too. (OMG, the hockey racket in northern Minnesota is THE WORST.)
I've said it before: travel sports is a pyramid scheme.
I played college baseball and I believe sports/competition is really good for kids, especially boys. I just balk every time I consider the travel sports option, since I know it is a scam. But there is no denying it can have short term benefits, which is hard to swallow.
Is it really only a PMC thing though? Are rural towns full of kids playing outside unsupervised? I'm sure they are compared to the upper middle class kids, but what about compared to 30 or 50 years ago? My impression is that this stuff is much more extreme among the upper middle class and above, but it's still shifted in the helicopter direction among all classes. I mean I live in NYC, and you typically don't see kids or early teens around unsupervised. In any old picture of NYC you do, and this applies to all classes.
I would agree that the direction has shifted somewhat in rural towns, but to a far lesser extent. (We were the most free-range of parents in our neighborhood, but not that much, and not at all for early teens.)
I can’t speak to working-class urban people, though.
Also we should note the increasing impact of video games and other in-house entertainment here as a confounding variable.
I live in Utah in the type of PMC affluent suburb that Freddie would absolutely hate, and there are TONS of kids playing outside at all ages, unsupervised, all the time here. In the summer it's constant and they're out there all day and then after dinner til the sun goes down. They're doing scavenger hunts and doorbell and dash games, playing kickball and roller blade hockey in the street, climbing trees and building jumps for their bikes, drawing with chalk on the sidewalks, and just generally running around yelling and screaming all the time in packs with no parents, and often a dog or two with them. These are mixed age groups of kids from about age 5 to 11 (the teenagers are in their own groups). I've lived in two other neighborhoods that were less affluent and more working/middle class and it was the same.
But people here do still have larger families of often 3 kids and sometimes 4, with almost no only children. I guess social norms and culture must make a big difference. One thing that makes it easier is that the neighbors all know each other and are friendly. Also Utah has an actual free range law in place that says parents can't get in trouble for their kids being out by themselves. Also it's a pretty strong norm here that parents do NOT want their kids to be spoiled or "soft". They expect that kids will break bones and get scraped up bc that's normal. So kids still play outside unsupervised here and teenagers still get jobs, even when their parents are orthodontists or lawyers. It's really nice. When my east coast friends come out to ski they're amazed.
True, these kids are mostly LDS (I am not). Though I wonder exactly what elements contribute here? It's not like LDS families have any less technology (in fact Mormons seem more pro tech than average and they always have the newest gadgets) so it's not like these kids don't also have tablets and screens etc. I guess just having more kids is a big factor, bc more kids definitely works against helicoptering. And also knowing most of your neighbors and trusting them. Though like I said the UT legislature actually adopted a free range kids law about a decade ago, so it seems like it's important value here.
Probably about a third of my neighborhood is NOT Mormon, and I have to say, the rest of us really benefit from the Mormons (at least that's how I feel). Bc they all go to church together each week, it makes the neighborhood a much more friendly and trusting place in general...my neighbors have my door codes to feed my cat and bring in packages if I'm out of town, we all help each other with projects, and there are neighborhood "walkabouts" once a month where people put out snacks and everyone walks around visiting. The LDS seem like a bulwark against certain (to me) negative cultural trends and keep a lot of the good things you hear about from the 1950s going.
Yeah I’m in a middle-income suburb in the rust belt (a few actual farmers, lots of subdivisions with McMansions, only one high school with ~800 kids) and there’s tons of helicoptering.
Oh, wow I feel you on that second to last paragraph.
I'm a Midwesterner (small town, Swedish Lutheran, raised to value humility and frugality. Totally not special.). We now live in suburban CT and send our kids to Catholic school.
I was SO proud of my autistic daughter for making honors for her first marking period of sixth grade. Then I went to the ceremony and saw that more than half her class had *high honors*. And I had a moment of "am I not doing enough?"
I had to consciously nip that thought in the bud.
My daughter entered kindergarten years ago with a thick IEP. She struggled with changing schools during COVID. Kids make fun of her because of her autism. She dealt with girl bullying. A particularly savage helicopter mom, who didn't think kids on the autism spectrum "belonged" in private school and thought my daughter "annoyed" her son, tried to bully us out of the school.
My daughter goes upstairs everyday with her backpack and just diligently does her work. She has no more IEP, no accommodations. She is 100 percent self motivated. Honor Roll was HER goal, not ours. She earned that completely on her own without parental intervention.
And when they announced her name for "honors", it didn't matter that she came after all the "high honors" kids. She squealed with delight and ran up to the stage smiling the biggest smile.
And I was like "yeah, I'm doing everything right."
You nailed it: the perception that to parent *best* is to parent the *most*.
I think there’s also a micro/macro issue. Any individual act of helicopter parenting seems entirely reasonable on its own. It’s only the larger pattern that is problematic.
And there is enormous social pressure focused on the micro, but not the macro. Witness the brutal criticism of John Roderick, a.k.a. Bean Dad.
Social pressure against macro helicopter parenting skews abstract, with every individual denying they have an overall problem.
The old ways just sound generic authoritarian jerkassery. Not bad enough to harm a child, or to make them hate you as an adult, but that doesn't mean you aren't being a jerk. Destroying your child's possessions isn't okay as a punishment for doing something actually bad, let alone listening to music you don't want them to. (I have precomitted to never care about my daughter's taste in music or her hairstyle, both are dumb things not worth fighting over)
My understanding of how parenting in traditional societies works is that you've already failed if you need to order your kids to do things, regardless of whether they respond to that order with "yes" or "no." Kids from an early age are interested in what their parents are doing and offer to help, the key screw-up parents make is discouraging kids who are too little to do it right from helping them. They need to understand that kids need to screw up in order to get it right, if you discourage them because they screw up you extinguish the helping instinct.
The short of it is that you are taking a metaphor literally. Saying lyrics are "poisonous" just means they are offensive, it doesn't mean they are a literal mind poison, and that listening to them will "inject" a poisonous idea into the listener's mind. Minds and ideas don't work like that. Most people recognize that is true for adults, but stubbornly insist without evidence it must still be true for kids and teens.
I happen to think that organic food is a scam, but I can definitely see what progressive parents are thinking. They believe (correctly) that having sex is fun and harmless if done responsibly, so to stop their kids from having sex responsibly is depriving them of a source of joy for no good reason. They likely also think pot use is harmless if done responsibly (this I am not sure I agree with them on, it's probably safe for adults but I think the affect of pot on developing nervous systems is understudied). By contrast they think (falsely) that non-organic food is full of literal poisons.
As you can probably tell, I am not some sort of hippie progressive parent. I am a dispassionate, calculating parent who thinks the evidence is often on the hippies' side, even though I find their general outlook annoying.
I also think another factor is that people in our society often subconsciously believe that sex and sexualization stains the honor of women, even if they do not consciously endorse that. Even people who claim to be feminists seem to act like they think this is true. People who believe this look insane to people who do not, they try to "protect" women and girls from things that are not harming them. People who do not believe this often look misogynistic to people who do, because they are willing to tolerate the staining of women's honor. I think that is another reason progressive parents might confuse you, it seems to you that they're failing to protect their children from harm, when really they just don't believe any harm is being done.
“You ever watch…gladiator movies, Davey?”
That's awesome.
For the most part, I agree what you wrote. Fortunately, my wife didn't belong to any social media mother's groups, so we didn't have all of that external pressure on us.
I think item 4 is the one that is most frustrating for me. My wife and her mother are both wonderful people, but they were never a 12 year old boy doing idiotic 12 year old boy things. They just don't get it.
I think there is just way, way more pressure on moms with regard to being a parent. When I would take my kids to the grocery store as infants, I would get compliments and praise for being such an amazing dad even if the kids were fussy and grubby. In the same situation, my wife would receive boatloads of unsolicited advice and negative vibes. As a result, she would probably seem to an outsider like an uptight mom, changing clothes and cleaning kids for a trip to the store, but that was the feedback loop.
I also experienced that curious double standard. I received compliments as a father out with my always well-behaved kids that I'm pretty sure mothers wouldn't.
The other assumptions: that mothers are the primary caregiver. I was my kids' primary caregiver most years. That when fathers are responsible for their kids, my care would be referred to as babysitting, not parenting.
One of my favourite activities was to take my kids and some friends out on PD days (weekdays when school is out) to museums. Chances are there would be at least 2 distinct shades of skin, yet the kids were of similar age. I would invariably get asked if all the kids were mine, usually by a senior. I would reply: "2 girlfriends", just to enjoy the brief, shocked reaction.
On some level that just feels downstream of social pressure being a stronger force in women's lives across basically all domains.
I don't know if I fully believe this about the criticism and perceived slights because in my experience most moms are ridiculously sensitive to statements and way to prone to take offhand comments or advice meant to be helpful as judgment/criticism. I do agree that dads get admiration simply for not being deadbeats (because a lot of them ARE deadbeats) but a lot of moms are also exquisitely oversensitive to this kind of stuff. I work with some moms who DNGAF and will just declare that they and their kids suck and make a joke of it, and no one cares and if anything finds them more likeable. It's not like people are gossiping about them being bad moms. I think you have to kind of buy into and care about that kind of thing for it to actually happen. And honestly I have never in my life heard someone talk about another mom for being neglectful or whatever...when people talk bad about moms it's ALWAYS in the other direction about them being a helicopter mom. So I'm not sure I really buy the supposed pressure bc it seems self imposed, at least in large part.
What you’re describing is not egalitarianism. In fact, basically 100% of those moms complain constantly that they have to make every single decision and their husband basically just follows them around like an extra child. It’s tough to believe men who are like ‘actually I’m very risk tolerant and believe in the value of grit’ when they’re totally unwilling to stick their necks out in family decision making and just go along to get along.
He said it was inegalitarian, didn't he?
Many men (and some women) have learned the wrong lessons from feminism and the increasing power of women: that they are not allowed to have an opinion on a traditionally female-dominated area like childrearing, lest he act the overbearing male, inserting his opinion into what women know better.
I think people aren't very logically consistent, though. From observing family members who have this dynamic, it's true that she's sick of being the parent in charge and making all the decisions, but it's also true that she gets mad and pulls rank when he does speak up. And also true that he rarely speaks up and needs to grow a spine. They both reinforce the pattern and they both hate it.
Oh, 100%. I’m definitely not claiming that the mothers in these types of relationships are just as much to blame for this vicious circle. I only find it ironic when fathers are like “the neuroticism of my family life is entirely my wife’s fault.” It’s like “lol, see what you did there.?” And, of course, this makes it so much worse, because if an already neurotic parent knows that EVERYTHING is their responsibility, that they will have to take the heat alone for any false move, then they become a lot worse.
Many of these men ‘go along to get along’ because their wives hold the whole family hostage with their emotions, refusing to be civil until they get their own way. Perpetuating the myth of fathers as these bumbling Homer Simpson’s that don’t care about how their children are raised is just as ridiculous as portraying women as faultless angel mothers who must nail themselves to the cross of motherhood every time they pack a lunch or drive their kids to school. Real life answers are more complex than that.
I can personally remember my parents having a few arguments that broke along these lines - my Mom concerned my brother and I were in danger, and my Dad concerned we were going to grow up to be weak cowards (he used a more colorful term) if we were babied.
I think this is spot on, though I will say the ONLY reason for the gender imbalance here is social conditioning. I'm sure that is what you mean, but it really is why women tend to be the bigger helicopter here. Women are also more likely to reduce employment or stay at home when kids are young, what do you do with that time? It is consumed with the needs of your kids and you seek out people who are in the same boat.
I disagree here ..women go through profound hormonal changes when they give birth and it literally rewires their brains. Not so much for dads. Women also simply have more negative emotions (anxiety etc) than men...this is well studied. Testosterone is a mood booster. Women are actually simply more likely to experience more worry, fear, and anxiety...on a biological basis bc of their hormones and wiring, when faced with the same circumstances as men, and it's not social conditioning. I used to go to a bodybuilding gym (I wasn't one but most there were), they all took testosterone, and the women besides growing huge muscles and getting lower voices would all talk about how different their emotions and interests and drives became.
Plus I'm just witnessed way too many women, like my sister, who were once free spirited, assertive, confident and independent turn into completely different people after they had a kid...worried, obsessive, anxious...and then revert back to their old personality once the kid was 17 or so. The dads personalities didn't change that much, they adjusted to the new lifestyle but didn't seem like almost different people.
You bring up some interesting points, and I will say maybe my last comment was too strictlI would love to see studies that show that this is 100% due to biological reasons and not at all due to social conditioning. Anxiety can absolutely worsen with social conditioning. We put so much pressure on mothers and far less on fathers, even in this modern era, there is no way that does not factor significantly into how people behave. As for the "brain rewiring" thing, the studies like the one in Nature suggest it does occur after preganancy but it only lasts for about 2 years. Look, I'm not suggesting that hormones don't play a role into our overall well-being, and women do experience fluctuations during their menstrual cycle, so yes, you do have a point. That being said, it sounds like your sister just wasn't as carefree as she outwardly seemed. I'm speaking from experience. People think I am very confident, assertive, etc. But I have experienced a lot of anxiety internally most of my life. Treatment has helped, but I know it is something I have to combat when it comes to raising kids.
Oh I'm definitely not arguing that NONE of it is social conditioning or social norms/pressure. Just that I think it's both and it's sort of a self reinforcing cycle.
In other words, for example, if women collectively decided they wanted to try to end this (and I do think most of the social pressure comes from other women or even their own moms) they would have to make a concerted effort to work somewhat against their "default" tendencies, in the same way one has to work against say their natural tendencies to overeat for example. I think for men they could much more easily decide to stop this behavior and it wouldn't be that hard for them, or require them to overcome biological/wired in tendencies.
The extra energy and enhanced mood/optimism that testosterone provides is really unfair and not talked about enough. You would have to give men some type of depressant that made them have 20% less energy or lower moods for them to experience what it's like for women. This all used to be common knowledge and the science supports it, but we've all somehow forgotten what is fairly obvious and common sense, bc we all want to believe in gender equality. I mean, you COULD pretty easily give men that experience, as it's what happens if they take estrogen.
Nature didn't make women the same as men because if it did, way too many babies and young kids would die (judging by the not-small portion of men who are perfectly fine with abandoning or neglecting their own kids, absent serious social pressure and penalties).
These are interesting points, but it doesn't jive with my expectation that, in the past, most child rearing was done by women.
Like, I don't think 1950s moms were arguing grades with teachers.
This is all spot on. I recently complained to my brother that I'm the parent generally in favor of discipline and letting negative consequences play out (putting me firmly in least-favorite parent status.) He was like, no shit you're the guy, it's usually like that.
We both live in hyper-progressive areas and know a lot of wives that out earn husbands, etc, so I was surprised to learn how sticky these roles are.
Luckily my wife and I both are too lazy to really land on the worst of this parenting style.
Joseph Campbell noted it. That all successful cultures had this process of mother's child, father's child and then adult. And those cultures that skipped any of these steps ended up with adult age children that never develop adequate self-sufficiency.
I think it is clear that the change to western society that put women in charge has resulted in the middle piece going away.
So that means that half of Gen X never developed sufficiency, since absentee fathering was the norm. But, people are resilient, and so this seem rigid in a quasi-spiritual kind of way.
Being a Gen-X latchkey kid to a working single mother meant the middle part wasn’t “mother’s child” per se. My particular case was also that my mom wasn’t the super cuddly type; I’m pretty happy how it turned out.
Our son just turned 5, and is in Kindergarten because he was born right on the cutoff date, and *man* is this playing out right now: Mom’s group on Facebook; incredibly long list of vitamin supplements; frustration at me if I don’t give an opinion, shooting me down if I do.
I don't know why it would be a cancellable opinion...this is almost 100% about moms, not dads. I don't see how anyone could even refute that with a straight face.
Dads simply don't care that much what other people think about their parenting. Mom's do. Dads also don't sacrifice as much of their emotional and physical health to have kids, so there's not as much resentment, frustration, guilt, and anxiety all bound up in the whole thing that leads to crazy behavior.
I love and have empathy for my mom friends and siblings, but honestly they are almost all semi insufferable to be around and I've just gotten used to waiting it out til their kids are older and they become sane again. Even the ones who KNOW all the things Freddie talks about in this piece and think of themselves as the "sane" ones...aren't. They're extremist germophobes who think they need to sanitize their floors daily (probably creating some of those allergies with their excessive sanitization), or they're ridiculously wrapped up in every tiny minor emotional reaction from their kid, or they're unbelievably sensitive to the slightest whiff of a possible implied slight or criticism of their kid. Many of them actually seem borderline crazy (and didn't before they had kids).
For the most part the only moms I can stand to be around are the ones too busy with their full time plus jobs to be like this. It's the privileged stay at home or part time/easy job moms that are the worst with this, by far.
As a suburban, coastal mom in the thick of it, this is SO TRUE.
I have one more observation to add, and that is that a lot of suburban moms are women who used to have high powered careers and either quit or massively scaled back. These are women who have never not been overachieving. For the first time in their lives they are not getting accolades.
All that intense Girl Boss energy and professional insecurity needs somewhere to go.
I'd like data showing that the most politically progressive do more helicopter parenting than those of other political perspectives with comparable education and income.
Have you been to a travel sports game recently? I think you are right about income being a predictor of overly involved parents, but I think that trend just manifests itself in different ways across different communities.
Yeah I don’t think helicopter parenting correlates that strongly with progressive politics. Asians (both in the US and notoriously in Korea, Japan, India and urban China) have some of the most extreme parenting cultures and they also tend to be very conservative (we just don’t recognize it because we associate ‘conservative’ with white fundamentalist Christians, but many non-Western cultures are far more conservative than our mainstream).
We have a 7, 4, and 1 year old. We are thankfully parenting in an age in which there is much research on the benefits of letting kids resolve conflicts and play on their own, so we've tried to do that. But man, the pressure from other parents to intervene, to hyper-schedule, to make sure everyone else knows that you are trying to parent—the pressure is incredible. I tend to think most parents would gladly let their children have more independence and room; it's the shame they're implicitly threatened with that prevents it.
And tbh I don't know how much of that pressure is conscious. It could be that if you gather 100 parents in a room 75 of them would privately agree with this post. But they think others don't (because people honestly don't talk to each other anymore, much less about parenting), so they act accordingly.
What do they call that, a first mover problem?
I badly wanted my kids to have the kind of free-range childhood I had, where my brother and I roamed the neighborhood in the afternoons, weekends, and all summer, playing wide-ranging imaginative games with a mixed-age group of kids. But it was impossible in our NJ suburb. All the other kids, from a very young age, were busy with sports, classes, camp, and other schedules and adult-supervised activities. The streets were a ghost town after school. The only way my kids could interact with other kids was for me to enroll them in activities too.
Can you describe some concrete examples of exactly what this "social pressure" consists of? Or what implicit threats you mean? Bc my observation if that parents never think THEY'RE the helicopters. They almost universally think it's OTHER parents judging and pressuring them. This really makes no sense.
Furthermore it kind of doesn't make sense bc why would you even care what they think? I'm not being blase as I realize people often have very good reasons for caring what others think..bc it directly impacts their professional reputation and career trajectory, or whether they're liked by whatever group they want to be part of. But why does it matter what other parents think? Are you afraid they won't invite you to parties or something? Do you even go to parent parties? How would it effect you if they thought your parenting were a bit lax?
I'm not trying to be rude or challenge you here, I'm honestly just confused and would like to hear some concrete examples so I can understand.
When my wife and I were entering the child-raising years, we were really uncomfortable watching this tendency unfold among our friends. All these "Baby Einstein" and sign-language learning videos were the rage, and they were part of a larger project of trying to engineer an advanced kid. Even then I shuddered at what would become of these poor children. Even now, I have friends who have kids in grad school and they are always looking at their offspring's location on their phones. Horrifying. And as an aside, I always thought that much of the sign-language learning products allure was pure self-interest. It did not come from a place of trying to serve the Deaf community, primarily anyway. It was about social distinction and this idea that it would make their kid linguistically smarter.
Look, come after Baby Einstein and I will END YOU.
Baby Einstein is the best.
When else can I use the screen as a babysitter and not feel like a bad dad while doing my own thing for a blessed few minutes?
(Half-kidding, of course.)
No no, I've been there! I just think it's just as good (actually way better) to put them in front of re-runs of Scooby Doo and The Golden Girls. :)
The baby sign language stuff sounds worthwhile, if only to reduce the frustration of trying to figure out why the baby is crying even though you appear to have addressed all their basic needs.
Yea, I do remember that being one rationale for it. I have no memory of it ever working for anyone though. That's not to say it didn't happen, of course.
In my experience, the most intense helicopter parents appear to be over-educated stay at home parents (where I live, that is usually a mom). To give up career ambitions after all the investment in grad school etc naturally creates a drive toward overactive parenting and a hyper focus on kids. Plus, that competitive, striving mindset doesn't just get turned off. This is ratcheted up to a whole other level when competitive pre-school, grade school, high school is part of the equation.
And I get it. When one of my kids fail, or are treated unfairly, it is really hard to not step in and try to fix the problem.
Stepping back, the word "parenting" shows the problem. I'm never "husbanding" or "brothering" as those relationships are understood to be part of being in a family. I strive to be a good parent while avoiding parenting.
Not to mention, Mompetition and The Mommy Wars.
I can't agree. You're arguing against the verb 'to parent', as distinguished from the noun 'parent'.
You can be a parent without every parenting, but not a good one. Because children are vulnerable minors, parenting are the acts fulfilling a duty of care. Husbands and brothers operate in a relatively egalitarian family relationship, with no explicit duty of care - so we call their actions 'loving'.
I suspect the rise in the use of the word "parenting" likely mirrors the outbreak of overbearing parents micromanaging their kids. Because "parenting" focuses on parents' plans and influence while I think being an effective parent is much more about reacting and being present in the moment.
Yes!
I remember the first time I went to a PTA meeting at my oldest daughter's preschool in Fairfield and I lasted about 10 minutes. Those moms were way too intense. I had just quit my own High Achieving Manhattan job, too, but I was enjoying being lazy and had zero desire to get involved in something that sounded more like another team project at work than planning a preschool Halloween Party. I quietly slipped out when I could and was like, "Oh, hell no not this again." LOL.
Honestly, as a manager, it’s depressing to see people who were raised in the helicopter milieu coming into the workforce. I value independent, critical thinking candidates and it’s getting tougher to find them.
Helicopter parenting has knock-off effects that last far beyond K-12 and I wish parents could see that.
Hey, I'm an independent critical thinker. You ought to hire me!
100%, this is becoming an issue in almost every workplace. I went to the doctor's office today and was chatting with two nurses who were telling me that their young new hires have been a nightmare the past couple years, how they call in sick constantly and take "mental health breaks" with no seeming concern for their job security, etc. There were not wizened old blowhards complaining either, they were in their late 30s, both with their own kids, and kept saying they're really concerned with the new generation that's starting out.
Great post.
I'm 61 and my parents were laissez faire about my grades. In fact, my father once asked my headmaster why I was getting good grades without seeming to do much homework.
There are two different thought streams in your essay and I want to distinguish them as the differences can be subtle.
1) There's over-parenting that deprives children of resilience and agency.
2) Then there's providing children with the benefits of your social capital (your network) and financial capital.
Done the wrong way at the wrong age, 2) can have the same effect as 1). But done the right way and at the right age, 2) can be helpful rather than harmful to your children.
Both 1) and 2) are selfish, but it is the rare privileged parent who wouldn't provide 2) in some form.
Excellent observation.
please tell your agent I would pre-order your book
I'm interested in the implicit difference in what Freddie talks about between "helicopter parenting" and other forms of extremely overbearing parenting. When I grew up I associated it with conservative and especially fundamentalist parents, motivated by (1) worrying constantly about their kid's moral status and (2) worrying about how they looked to other churchgoers. I remember a fifteen-year-old girl on my block whose parents yanked her out of public school and put her in a Baptist private school mid-year because she'd been caught dating. Other kids I knew weren't allowed to have bedroom doors because their parents' version of Christianity taught that kids would use privacy only for sin. Pastors' kids had it the worst.
I recognize how this is different from what Freddie's describing - it's authoritarian rather than killing with kindness. But I am interested in how very progressive parents ended up similarly overbearing. (I also do not think this is limited to very progressive parents - I know plenty of normies who have those GPS trackers on their phones and follow their kids' movements from work all day.)
I wonder if it's because, like fundamentalists whose life is their church, people who have strong ideological alignment with their social circles also worry about their standing with the other parents in that community.
I think your last paragraph nails it. I think there is also an element of insecurity.
Strong Outward Ideological Commitments + insecurity = authoritarianism.
I grew up in a very conservative Church, too (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.). My mom was/is actually pretty cool, though. I think she has always been secure enough in her own beliefs and her ability to pass them on that when we were kids she had no problem raising us in a ideologically diverse neighborhood and sending us to public school. When it came to friends who didn't share our lifestyle (she was an interior designer so there were *a lot* of gay men in my childhood LOL) she was just sort of like "its a free country, everyone does their thing."
And they were the least helicopter-y parents ever. My childhood was delightful.
I think I have a very secure relationship with religion because of this.
The school parent portals send out emails and text messages with every missed assignment. The schools are sending out the negative report, nudging parents to correct their kids behavior.
That triggers some helicoptering.
Growth comes through opposition and failure. It is very difficult to let one's child get hurt but it is necessary.
Haidt claims that the reduction in family size plays a role. With 10 kids, you might have a few screw ups, but some will do good.
Yeah, the framing of this post is ridiculous. I have to sign a sheet every single week affirming I looked at my child's grades for that week online (since they no longer send home graded papers).
Parents using that information to argue with and berate the schools and teachers is a separate issue (though even that I have more sympathy to than this post gives it - maybe the schools are great in suburban New York, but in bum-eff Louisiana where I live the education has been ... inconsistent, to put it kindly. I don't argue with grades, but I have had to intervene to get my kids remedial instruction or other support where they just weren't getting and never would from the school and kept failing in the meantime).
I don't think it's ridiculous at all. And your interventions are almost certainly not making any difference for your kid's eventual performance percentile.
Parents are being harassed by schools to force the parents to get on the kids to do busy work. Schools are pushing parents to intervene with their kids, to be extra hall monitors and teacher's aids. The schools, aided by technology, is pushing this.
This is very different from helicopter parents. It has gotten much worse since Covid.
None of the teachers I know want this either. I think it is a small cohort of overinvolved parents turned policy makers (and probably whoever is selling the software) who pushed for "transparency" and now everyone is stuck with the terrible result. You and Freddie are talking about the same nonsense.
I blame administration and the tech providers.
That's fine. But the premise of the post is this new system allowing week-to-week monitoring is somehow the result of helicopter parenting, when it's not. Checking their grades weekly online is what my kids' school requires - at a crummy school system here in the south where the issue with parents is them not giving a shit or bothering to send their kids at all, not helicopter parenting.
I honestly thought the system was implemented to reduce accountability, not facilitate parental involvement. The system it replaced wasn't quarterly report cards. It was weekly signed papers, where they'd send home paper copies of all the kids' graded assignments from the previous week.
The new, electronic system now just gives the grade but not the test itself - which is in a different online system not linked to from the one with the grades, making it harder for a curious parent to see what actually happened (and thus harder to complain). In addition to the effect of not requiring parents to sign on to an online platform in the first place, rather than sending home paper they can react to, which eliminated a big chunk of review right off the top.
God it's so sad. I also had the "go out in the morning and come back at night" early childhood, I have friends who are well aware of the pitfalls of helicopter parenting, but they're scared to leave their kids alone, in part because people drive giant tanks and drivers don't expect little people to be roaming around by themselves. It's all just sad! You never see bands of kids running around playing by themselves unless they're late-age teens. You almost never see kids climbing trees and if they are there's an adult below them literally holding their hands out if they fall. It's also this fucked up culture where strangers NEVER interact with other people's kids. Part of what made "go out all day by yourself" possible is that other adults like neighbors etc. were watching you for outrageous misbehavior or dangerous situations. And I wonder how class plays into it. Because it's not just ridiculous bougie parents, you don't see kids in poorer neighborhoods out playing alone...
I'm not a parent, but if I were, the giant tank cars speeding through neighbourhoods would be one of the #1 things that would make me hesitant about letting my prospective children roam about freely. I take my nephews out trick or treating every year, and there are frequently psychopaths blasting through residential streets on the one night you're supposed to look out for kids on the roads.
As someone who's been a dad for a couple years now, I don't disagree with any of this, and I certainly don't plan to hit this level of helicopter parenting at any point. But the one thing I think is missing is how difficult it is to let your child be upset and uncomfortable in the moment. It's absolutely true that kids need to sit with discomfort sometimes and deal with it, but the benefits of resilience are always going to be an abstraction on some level; it's always going to be something you understand but don't feel, whereas the feeling of your child being upset is so, so visceral. I'm a vaguely-robotic autist and I still struggle with it all the time.
I think this is it -- and I think people have always had this instinct. But my theory is that in the past, people had more kids and simply couldn't tend to all of their needs at once and just had to let them figure things out themselves more often. Now that people have fewer kids it's easier to helicopter.
There was also just an actual poverty-based role to it that's often absent in helicopter parents. I have friends with dairy farms who let their kids sit in front of tablets for a couple hours a day because they just need them out of the way while they manage large animals and heavy machinery. I let my kids climb on the furniture and wrestle with each other, while shouting at them from the other room to stop, because I need to fix crap in my house myself and not pay $300 for a plumber to come in. If you're a stay-at-home mom and your husband makes $300,000/year, just sitting there reading a book while your kid gets in trouble feels lazy. You might feel guilty about quitting your job, or bored. You're probably not letting him watch Paw Patrol all day while you take care of things - you quit your job to Parent Him Right and it's really hard to do nothing. My great grandparents probably wished they could leave their cows in the fields every time my grandpa hiccupped, too, but they just couldn't. They had to be constantly busy and either find a confined way to keep the kids occupied or let them tag along and discipline them (corporally, if necessary) to keep them from getting killed or costing the farm a ton of money by breaking stuff.
God I wish you could get a plumber here to come and fix a small thing for less than $2000-3000. One of the things I miss about living in TN
Having more kids definitely helped me avoid some helicopter parenting. If you have a partner and only 1 or 2 kids, you likely can schedule your kids endlessly, whereas it takes herculean effort if you have 4 or more.
It can advantage the kids too, oddly. My fourth child is much more of a free spirit (or rather, a stereotypical boy), and he gets to be, in part because I'm tired, exhausted and too busy. It's lucky for him that he wasn't my first, when I would have had more time to apply a more authoritative approach.
I don't know if they DID always have this instinct. I am almost certain my parents did not give a shit and it certainly didn't make them viscerally hurt on an empathetic level when I was upset as a kid. If often just really annoyed and pissed them off. Same with my friends and their parents. There was a lot more "I'll give you something to cry about" back then, and expectations of controlling your emotions so you don't piss off your parents.
In fact, now that I think about it, I recall my friend's parents purposely inventing faked consequences for things just to upset their kid and teach them a lesson. Like my friend left her bike on the driveway, and her parents took bike to Salvation Army and told their daughter it was stolen, to teach her not to leave it out again. She cried for hours and they were very proud of that result.. that kind of thing wasn't at all unusual. At my swim lessons at the YMCA when it was a kid, the instructors would make every single one of us cry every lesson and the parents thought it was hilarious...I have photos my dad took of a bunch of five year olds lined up in swimsuits crying. But hey, we all learned to swim and jump off the diving board.
I think parents really did not used to care so much about their kids being upset. Something has changed. Maybe just there were more unwanted births back then and more people who didn't want to be parents, I'm not sure. The lots of kids things doesn't fully explain it either. My dad had my brother when I was 17 and the way he raised him was SOOO different. He was a hundred times more indulgent and involved and helicopters. That was the same guy. He just changed with the culture or perhaps older parents are more likely to be like this.
Lol all fair points. When did you grow up, the 80s? I grew up in the 90s and this seems about 20% more "tough love" than I ever saw in my childhood
I was born very late 70s so yeah, mostly raised in the 80s and first half of the 90s. My brother was born mid 90s and the way he was raised (by same parents and same daycare I went to) was already very VERY different from me and much more intensive and indulgent.
Also my sister was born in 1970 and things were even harsher for her. Since my siblings are so spread apart (25 years between first and last) it's a pretty interesting comparison within the same family and we were all treated very differently, from borderline neglect and very harsh treatment of the first to over indulgence resulting in a pretty spoiled kid with the last. Of course I was in the sweet spot middle so I don't turned out perfect. ;)
But the same family also reflected not just cultural trends because my parents were way too young with their first and very old with their last (mid 40s). They were also poor students when they had their first and upper middle class professionals by their last. So all the trends...being older, more money and education, and cultural trends towards helicoptering worked together.
The results between the three of us siblings are almost exactly how you'd expect, though we all turned out fine. Youngest is definitely a bit spoiled and helpless/entitled. My sister who had a very harsh childhood didn't really helicopter her own kids but she is very involved in their lives and a beat friend type with zero discipline. I think a lot of older Gen X perhaps reacted to their own harsher upbringing by trying to be much nicer to their kids. Maybe those kids will swing back in the other direction if it doesn't end up working out for them, who knows.
+100
I know this sounds patronizing, but it really is a “you’ll understand when you’re a parent “ kind of thing.
Hmm. I think you need to give examples of what you mean by letting "your child be upset and uncomfortble". You can still "intervene" as a parent if your child fails, the point is to do it in non-helicopterish ways that don't send the message that "my kid is always right."
So, let's say Sally fails to make the basketball team or Johnny doesn't get a leading role in the school play, you can take them out to lunch and a movie, comfort them, and persuade them to work on their skills and try again next year. You don't have to go speak to the basketball coach or drama teacher. In this way you acknowledge the setback and try to figure out ways for the child to succeed in the future. Then, the child independently works on making the team or getting a good part in the school play.
This could also mean acknowledging that maybe basketball isn't Sally's thing and she should focus on tennis or that Johnny should help with costuming or devote more time to the videos he's making.
Honestly, as much as no parent wants to see their child unhappy, I have a really hard time understanding parents who think they can prevent their children from ever experiencing discomfort and that some state of perma-happiness is the way to go through life. Isn't that just straight-up fantasyland?
Intervening as a parent when a child fails by comforting them is often a failure of parenting though. Letting failure hurt is an important part of growth.
To be clear though, I'm not disagreeing with helping youth assess so they can decide on next steps. That kind of facilitation is good parenting.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s in suburban Detroit. In my community, if you didn’t make the team, your parents said something like “better luck next time.” Nobody got taken to the movies.
Hmm. I don’t find “better luck next time” to be especially helpful treatment for a kid or an adult. If you wouldn’t be so callous as to say that to a friend who just lost a big promotion, why promote it as a way to treat a child?
As much as I think most helicopter parenting is nuts, pointlessly hard ass parenting is hardly the solution.
I feel exactly the same. A parent’s role is both provide comfort and care (so the child feels they have a safe and secure starting point)
and to impart the tools and skills and habits of character that can allow a child to succeed. None of that requires emotional abuse or being a hard ass or any of that bullshit.
Hard ass? Yikes. Emotional abuse? Are you kidding me? The catastrophizing of every day failures is abuse. Letting your kid know by your reaction that whether or not they got on varsity pom pom isn’t going to matter in a few years is how you teach them to roll with the punches.
I grew up in 80s and 90s suburban Detroit too (Birmingham) and pretty much everyone “made the team”. Never saw any “better luck next time” attitudes.
Comforting, as I define it, doesn’t take away hurt. It just shows you that your parents still love you and life goes on.
I have so much to say about this. Prefatory throat-clearing: I am decidedly not a helicopter parent; I try to parent much as I was parented, with some patches. My girls are 19 and 17, and both have commented positively on the amount of freedom I allow/ed.
First, this "helicopter parenting" is, by and large, a rich urban/suburban problem. We brought up the girls for most of their lives in a middle-income rural Minnesota community, and intense helicoptering just is not seen there. This is, almost exclusively, a professional-managerial class (and above) problem. In fact, it's infuriating to see commentators say that the problem with this generation is the lack of play or the lack of freedom without realizing that this is only a problem in their bubble, and can't really be held responsible for broader issues.
Second, the fact that this is a PMC issue points us to the real problem. It's really an escalation spiral arising from a competition for finite resources. We moved to a nice rich suburban school district in the last couple of years, in part to help prepare my youngest for college. (Well, that was the excuse. Long story.) The amount of helicoptering here, of course, is bewildering. But the problem is that, in the short term, it gets results. More helicoptering helps get that GPA just a little higher than the other person's. It helps their college resume just a little bit more. And so they have a chance of scoring that big Ivy education or whatever that the other guy lacks. Never mind that it can cripple kids socially or in their employment--in the short term, it makes a difference. We can always fix problems on the back end.
And as a parent, watching these others get ahead feels TERRIBLE. It's not that you are worried how you look in the eyes of other parents; it's that you're terrified in your own eyes that you haven't done enough for your own child. I can tell myself to "trust the process" as much as I want, but it's really hard to look in the mirror and worry that you haven't done enough to put your kid in the best position to succeed relative to all these other overachievers.
All that said: I've withstood the temptation and haven't changed my behavior that much. (The somewhat spendy ACT tutor aside, but even that was only a couple sessions.) And when my eldest reports back from college on how well-adjusted she is compared to a lot of her peers, I feel like I'm doing the right thing. But it's not easy to remember.
I agree with all of this, but since our kids will be applying to the same colleges as the hyper-groomed kids of the PMC, I still feel that pressure. On a similar note, I've avoided the massive pay-to-play sports world, while my sons' peers and competitors are working with private trainers and driving/flying to tournaments etc. And, my son just got cut from the freshman basketball team. I suspect that the networking and polish from the private team influenced the school tryouts. As you said, it made me feel TERRIBLE and I'm not sure if I would handle things differently if I had the chance to go back and change my approach.
A really good player will make the team regardless. I think it gets trickier for the 11th and 12th spots on the bench. Some kids play basketball year-round on various private teams. Those kids look the part and are playing at the peak of their (often limited) abilities at the time of the tryout. Also, high school coaches make money in the off-season coaching on travel teams, often getting to know the kids who later wish to join the school team. Plus, expensive gear looks good. Which is a long way of saying that if my son performed better, he would have made the team, but, when there are 25+ freshman trying out for 12 spots, I think there are a lot of factors at play.
(And, "Really?" followed by "I'm not doubting you..." is definitely expressing doubt.)
Just because coaches tell their teenagers that "only the best players will make the team" and the other inspirational egalitarian stuff doesn't mean they're immune to the outside pressures that influence the reality of those decisions.
Oh, the sports thing is so bad. I’m watching my friends’ kids, with no especial athletic ability, demanding and expecting to play on these club competition travel teams in addition to normal extracurricular teams because that’s what everyone else does. And that applies to rural towns too. (OMG, the hockey racket in northern Minnesota is THE WORST.)
I've said it before: travel sports is a pyramid scheme.
I played college baseball and I believe sports/competition is really good for kids, especially boys. I just balk every time I consider the travel sports option, since I know it is a scam. But there is no denying it can have short term benefits, which is hard to swallow.
Is it really only a PMC thing though? Are rural towns full of kids playing outside unsupervised? I'm sure they are compared to the upper middle class kids, but what about compared to 30 or 50 years ago? My impression is that this stuff is much more extreme among the upper middle class and above, but it's still shifted in the helicopter direction among all classes. I mean I live in NYC, and you typically don't see kids or early teens around unsupervised. In any old picture of NYC you do, and this applies to all classes.
I would agree that the direction has shifted somewhat in rural towns, but to a far lesser extent. (We were the most free-range of parents in our neighborhood, but not that much, and not at all for early teens.)
I can’t speak to working-class urban people, though.
Also we should note the increasing impact of video games and other in-house entertainment here as a confounding variable.
Your point about video games, etc being a confounding variable is important.
I think it was a rich thing, and as far as people want to emulate rich people, it continues to be adopted down socioeconomic hierarchies.
This. Also, the aims and modes of the PMC dominates schools, and from schools, many other choices flow.
Where do you live in NYC? Where I lived in Queens for a decade there were teens everywhere. Same in the Bronx where I work.
Yeah of course there are teens everywhere. I'm talking about kids and early teens.
Elementary age I don't see that much, but early teens for sure. A lot of middle school kids in NYC take the subway to school.
I know. All I'm saying is when you look at an old photograph of NYC there are just way more kids and 12-13 years out and about.
I live in Utah in the type of PMC affluent suburb that Freddie would absolutely hate, and there are TONS of kids playing outside at all ages, unsupervised, all the time here. In the summer it's constant and they're out there all day and then after dinner til the sun goes down. They're doing scavenger hunts and doorbell and dash games, playing kickball and roller blade hockey in the street, climbing trees and building jumps for their bikes, drawing with chalk on the sidewalks, and just generally running around yelling and screaming all the time in packs with no parents, and often a dog or two with them. These are mixed age groups of kids from about age 5 to 11 (the teenagers are in their own groups). I've lived in two other neighborhoods that were less affluent and more working/middle class and it was the same.
But people here do still have larger families of often 3 kids and sometimes 4, with almost no only children. I guess social norms and culture must make a big difference. One thing that makes it easier is that the neighbors all know each other and are friendly. Also Utah has an actual free range law in place that says parents can't get in trouble for their kids being out by themselves. Also it's a pretty strong norm here that parents do NOT want their kids to be spoiled or "soft". They expect that kids will break bones and get scraped up bc that's normal. So kids still play outside unsupervised here and teenagers still get jobs, even when their parents are orthodontists or lawyers. It's really nice. When my east coast friends come out to ski they're amazed.
"But LDS members" is probably a fair rebuttal to almost any generalization out there.:)
(I'm a nonbeliever myself, but I worked with a bunch of Mormons at one of my jobs and retain a great fondness for them.)
True, these kids are mostly LDS (I am not). Though I wonder exactly what elements contribute here? It's not like LDS families have any less technology (in fact Mormons seem more pro tech than average and they always have the newest gadgets) so it's not like these kids don't also have tablets and screens etc. I guess just having more kids is a big factor, bc more kids definitely works against helicoptering. And also knowing most of your neighbors and trusting them. Though like I said the UT legislature actually adopted a free range kids law about a decade ago, so it seems like it's important value here.
Probably about a third of my neighborhood is NOT Mormon, and I have to say, the rest of us really benefit from the Mormons (at least that's how I feel). Bc they all go to church together each week, it makes the neighborhood a much more friendly and trusting place in general...my neighbors have my door codes to feed my cat and bring in packages if I'm out of town, we all help each other with projects, and there are neighborhood "walkabouts" once a month where people put out snacks and everyone walks around visiting. The LDS seem like a bulwark against certain (to me) negative cultural trends and keep a lot of the good things you hear about from the 1950s going.
Yeah I’m in a middle-income suburb in the rust belt (a few actual farmers, lots of subdivisions with McMansions, only one high school with ~800 kids) and there’s tons of helicoptering.
Oh, wow I feel you on that second to last paragraph.
I'm a Midwesterner (small town, Swedish Lutheran, raised to value humility and frugality. Totally not special.). We now live in suburban CT and send our kids to Catholic school.
I was SO proud of my autistic daughter for making honors for her first marking period of sixth grade. Then I went to the ceremony and saw that more than half her class had *high honors*. And I had a moment of "am I not doing enough?"
I had to consciously nip that thought in the bud.
My daughter entered kindergarten years ago with a thick IEP. She struggled with changing schools during COVID. Kids make fun of her because of her autism. She dealt with girl bullying. A particularly savage helicopter mom, who didn't think kids on the autism spectrum "belonged" in private school and thought my daughter "annoyed" her son, tried to bully us out of the school.
My daughter goes upstairs everyday with her backpack and just diligently does her work. She has no more IEP, no accommodations. She is 100 percent self motivated. Honor Roll was HER goal, not ours. She earned that completely on her own without parental intervention.
And when they announced her name for "honors", it didn't matter that she came after all the "high honors" kids. She squealed with delight and ran up to the stage smiling the biggest smile.
And I was like "yeah, I'm doing everything right."
That's lovely. :)
You nailed it: the perception that to parent *best* is to parent the *most*.
I think there’s also a micro/macro issue. Any individual act of helicopter parenting seems entirely reasonable on its own. It’s only the larger pattern that is problematic.
And there is enormous social pressure focused on the micro, but not the macro. Witness the brutal criticism of John Roderick, a.k.a. Bean Dad.
Social pressure against macro helicopter parenting skews abstract, with every individual denying they have an overall problem.