There is a difference between being a parent who still has some role in the kid’s lives and a helicopter parent, one to me is healthy, the other one is not so much.
Helicopter parenting assumes that the parent always knows best and based on that, has the right to make decisions for the kids about everything, which is ridiculous, being a parent doesn’t make one a god and, b)it also doesn’t allow the kid to find what works for them and also to take their lumps when things don’t work so well. My dad always said you can’t take their falls for them, as much as you want to, and he was right, any parent who loves their kid wants them to be unhappy, to have a skinned knee, a broken heart, experience setbacks, but you can’t help that…and in the end, trying to shield them will foul them up.
What happens when the kid has a setback in life? What if that dream job the helicopter parent kind of forced them into turns out to be like most jobs, where setbacks happen, where not everyone sees him/her for the brilliant kid the parents ‘knows’ them to be, what if gasp they find they actually don’t want to be an engineer/a scientist/an investment banker/an accountant/a lawyer/a doctor, whatever the parent decided was ‘perfect’ for them. The worst part about helicopter parenting is that it often is all about the parent and little about the child, it is the parent fulfilling their wishes and desires on the kid, whether it be a career in something they wanted to do themselves (doctor, baseball player, whatever, sports are often the worst with that), or worse, the parent looking to the future and saying “if my kid becomes X he will do really really well, and then he can take care of me” , it is very narcissistic while pretending to be what is best for the kid.
Being involved is another story, the irony with that is there are a lot of parents who seem to think raising a kid is providing a roof over their heads, food on the table, and after that, anything beyond letting the kid founder in the surf is ‘overparenting’ (I used to belong to a really liberal church, the guy who was the pastor there talked about parents who were too involved because of the way we were in their lives,supporting them and so forth, not helicopter parenting…and this is the guy who had a son who sort sort of a foul up, who when he was somehow graduating college they figured out he had no life skills…being involved means giving the kid autonomy to me as much as possible, given their age, it is very different with a 5 year old then with a 15 year old, it means suggesting things for them to try and sometimes, yes, ‘strongly encouraging’ them to do it (like my S with little league, which he admits now was a good experience), while also respecting their opinions as much as possible. It means outside of putting your foot down when you think something is really bad (like the kid at 14 wanting to go hitchhiking with a group of kids you aren’t too thrilled with), it is talking to the kid, telling them what you feel about something and helping them make a decision, and if it turns out the decision led to less than stellar results, helping the kid dust themselves off.
We smooth the way in many ways, but there will always be bumps and needs to be. By for example making sure they are well prepared to do something, whether it is sports or hiking or sailing or whatever, it can help them gain confidence and not have the big ‘gotcha’ when they try it, but there will still be bumps. Being involved is encouraging the kid to stretch themselves, to try for something that may be beyond their reach, but also being realistic it will be hard, and being there when it may get rough. The key thing is the kid get used more and more to making their decisions and accepting the consequences, good and bad, that is life, as a parent more and more, especially as adults, it is to be there as a resource/information/comforting and helping to pick up the pieces if it goes south, emotionally and otherwise as the kid wants, but it isn’t to run their life, tell them who to marry, where to live, where to work, etc, just not our place.
What I really despise about helicopter parents is parents who set up this idea that there is only one path to take, it is one chosen to minimize risk, one where the kid does things simply because it fits that ‘chosen path’, I see those kids all the time and they don’t end up happy. Friend of mine belongs to a fairly famous mega church (here in NYC, weird place for it), and he does pastoral counseling (he is perfect for it, neat guy, has faced more challenges in his life then 10 other people would have dealt with), and he talks about these kids of the helicopter parents, who are bred for ‘success’ (the get into an ivy become a high level professional make a lot of money that is life kind of thing), and are at the church to hear a message for the first time in their lives that there is more to life than that, and that mistakes and failures are part of being human.
Is there a magic line between helicopter parenting and being a supportive parent? Like most things, it will vary, but with most helicopter parents I have seen, it is kind of like the old story in the Supreme Court, where a judge said he couldn’t define what porn was but knew when he saw it, same thing here, it is usually pretty obvious (like the parent at a music school audition who after their daughter auditioned, ran into the room (a major, major no no) and proceeded to yell at the panel in a combination of English and French Canadian that her daughter’s audition wasn’t long enough, they didn’t ask her to play the right things, she hadn’t enough time to warm up…and I know that to be a fact, because she did this after my son had come into the room to do his audition…).
