Happiness from Helicopter Parenting? Domestic and Global Perspectives

• In Event: Other World(s): Childhood, Nation, and the Price of Feeling Good

Abstract

What is good parenting and what is too much? Recently educators, psychologists, sociologists, and even employers have identified the phenomenon of helicopter parenting, whereby parents intervene in matters of their children’s wellbeing to the extent that, critics charge, children are pampered in unprecedented ways and insufficiently prepared to meet life’s responsibilities as healthy adults. Are parents justified in being so emotionally involved in their children’s success and happiness? This paper explores manifestations of helicopter parenting in popular culture and literature, relates the practice to theories of children and childhood, and places it in a global as well as domestic perspective.

Helicopter parenting may be understood as an emotional investment balanced between protection and control. On the one hand, it represents children as vulnerable and endangered, needy and deserving of parental engagement and support. On the other hand, it views children as threatening and even monstrous, capable of harming themselves and others if left to their own devices, whether they are in cars, college, or using credit cards. Hovering parenthood is thus based both in fear for, and fear of, the child. Likewise, responses to this phenomenon stem from conflicting needs to strengthen the emotional connection between parent and child, and to affirm the child’s individuality and accountability. If early American Puritan parents sought to break the will of the child--assumed depraved--to ensure dependence and compliance, and romantics practiced loving, firm moral suasion to win the child--assumed divine--to the parent’s point of view, then the post-modern phenomenon of helicopter parenting blurs the lines between child and adult, intertwining the happiness of both, and extenuating the period from childhood to adulthood.

Defenders of helicopter parenting cite social and economic challenges such as an increasingly litigious society; an inconsistent, unforgiving juvenile justice system; highly competitive and overly regulated school environments; confused and checkered laws about the age at which children can enlist, drink alcohol, establish credit or set up Facebook accounts; and supervised play structures that inhibit children from learning how to negotiate. The risks of these social hazards are exacerbated with learning disabilities or non-normative family structures such as adoption or divorce; children with deficient executive function or emotional delays are more likely to make mistakes and not realize their consequences until after the fact. Helicopter parents provide benevolent buffers for these children.

Helicopter parenting is criticized as an American phenomenon--a luxury outgrowth of a heterogeneous society in which parents have choices not available in many parts of the world. Yet it has global implications, rooted, for example, in worldwide recession and difficulty finding first employment. An act of protectionism or isolationism with parallels on a global scale, it is an exercise of adult power that may mime US dominance in the world. But it can also represent serious engagement with children, a rejection of the “me” generation, and a return to community and tradition: in many parts of the world parental involvement with children’s education and job decisions are accepted as the unquestioned norm.

Author

• Carol Singley, Rutgers University, Camden (NJ)