Helicopter Parents: Grounding Your Natural Instincts

March 6, 2009

Hovering? Give her security, yes; but space, too.

“Helicopter Parents” are parents who hover over their children. We don’t mean the proud mommy or daddy standing over the cake at the birthday party for their five-year-old child. We mean the nervous mom who goes with her 23-year-old son to a job fair.

Sound familiar?

If so, guess what: You’ve had lift-off.

As to whether or not this phenomenon is good for your child, in better times doctors would give a resounding “No.” But recently researchers have been reassessing the cause and effect of this phenomenon. They argue that in today’s society, late adolescence and early adulthood is so filled with complex issues that there are good reasons for parental concern–

And therefore their involvement as well.

In an economy that’s in a free-fall, many family therapists are seeing the positive side of very close parent – child relationships. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families, recognizes a dividend to helicopter parenting that is becoming more apparent with time, namely the enduring friendship forged between two generations, that at times have had sharply differing views. “Obviously, there are horrible extremes that helicopter parents can go to, where they don’t allow their children to succeed or fail on their own; but in the majority of cases, this increased closeness between parents and kids is found among healthy students, not unhealthy ones.”

Another researcher, Jillian Kinzie, the associate director of Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, who helped conduct a national survey in 2007 at 750 colleges and universities, told the Globe that she was “astonished” at findings that indicated how successful many of the students of helicopter parents were. Kinzie says that the research results were re-examined with the thought that something was wrong.

But the findings stood up to a second review.

Kinzie said of the surveyed students: “They tended to have more interactions with the faculty. They tended to be involved in active learning, collaborative learning, more often than their peers.”

That’s not to say deep concerns over the nature of helicopter parenting don’t exist. Susan Newman, author of Nobody’s Baby Now: Reinventing Your Adult Relationship With Your Mother and Father, told the Globe, “I’ve seen a lot of these children who are parented in the helicopter manner who can’t make a decision. They are calling home constantly: ‘I don’t get along with my roommate, what should I do? My roommate ate my food, what should I do?’”

Indeed, one helicopter parent who has a child living in a college dorm, told the Globe that she had over 400 phone conversations with her daughter in the month of January alone.

In his book, Children Are from Heaven, John Gray suggests that we develop a new set of skills that he calls, “positive parenting.” As opposed to helicopter parenting where the monitoring of a child is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week endeavor, John says, we should focus on awakening and developing a child’s innate ability to know within themselves what is right and what is wrong. “It’s simply wrong for us to think that we will be there to answer our children’s questions and needs as the years go by. Our higher responsibility is to prepare them by nurturing their innate ability to know themselves and to distinguish on their own between right and wrong.

“There is no denying,” John concludes, “that helicopter parents are deeply devoted to the success of their children, the question is, what is the best path to finding that success? In my view, there is no greater reward in life than seeing your children succeed in making their own dreams come true.”

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Other MVL Parenting Articles:

How an Empty Nest Can Improve Your Marriage

Sex Education, Part 1: What Both Parents and Teens Should Know

Sex Education, Part 2: Answering Tough Questions

The Five Essential Messages of Positive Parenting

Parents, Beware of the Feelings Trap

When Your Child Meets a Challenge

To learn more about the power of positive parenting, visit the John Gray library for your own copy of Children Are From Heaven

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Posted in Parenting