Age of Appropriateness for Helicopter Parenting Behaviors

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Helicopter Parenting (HP) occurs when parents exhibit developmentally inappropriate levels of control, problem-solving, or assistance toward their children (Segrin et al., 2012) and is associated with poorer adjustment in emerging adults (Leung & Busiol, 2016). Most HP scales have been designed for emerging adults, yet overparenting exists across all ages; similar constructs (e.g., overprotection, overinvolvement) are even examined in parents of toddlers (Moller et al., 2016). Fully understanding HP therefore requires identifying the age at which HP practices become developmentally inappropriate and individual differences in such perceptions. For instance, youth who have more experience with a parenting practice may view it as more normative (Gershoff et al., 2010) and tend to approve more of it (Barnett et al., 1996). The current study examined the ages at which emerging adults believe HP practices become developmentally inappropriate and predictors of these perceptions.
Participants were 233 moderate diverse U.S. college students (Mage = 22.33, SD = 2.93; 84% female, 61% Caucasian). Participants rated 35 items adapted from existing HP scales (Lowe et al., 2015; Padilla-Walker et al., 2012; Schiffrin et al., 2014) in terms of their own experience with such parenting (on a 1-5 scale); they also indicated the last age they believed each behavior was appropriate. Items were divided into Assistance (“My parents assist with my academic advising”), Monitoring (“My parents monitor or try to decide how much time I spend studying”), and Health (“My parents look for doctors, dentists, or other health care professionals for me”) categories based on a prior EFA from this same dataset (Rote et al., 2018). Reliability was good for ratings of experienced HP (αs = .83-.87.) and age of appropriateness (αs = .86-.89).
Three people indicated that all items for at least one form of HP were always acceptable and 19 people indicated they were never acceptable and were excluded from additional analyses. A repeated measures ANCOVA was then run on the remaining 211 participants with HP type as the repeated measure and experience with assistance, monitoring, and health HP as covariates. There was a significant main effect of HP type and significant interactions with each form of HP experience (see Table 1). Participants believed direct assistance HP was acceptable until about age 16, monitoring HP until about age 17, and health behaviors until about 19.5 years of age. Experience with HP predicted later acceptance of HP behaviors but only for the type of HP behavior to which one was exposed (see Figure 1).
Results demonstrate that young adults consider HP behaviors assessed on common HP scales to be appropriate until late adolescence (and into early adulthood for health assistance). These findings support that HP behaviors are not wholly inappropriate forms of parenting, but rather developmentally inappropriate parenting behaviors, and as such likely differ from the types of behaviors assessed in overparenting scales for young children. Moreover, greater experience with a given form of HP appears to somewhat normalize perceptions of that parenting practice, but not other forms of HP.

Authors

• Jordan Elizabeth Cooper, University of South Florida
  Presenting Author

• Wendy M Rote, University of South Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cidnee Hall, University of South Florida
  Non-Presenting Author