Bonus content: Why are helicopter parents?
Are they (we) just kinda lazy? Or is there something else going on?
Almost since the term “helicopter parent” floated up into the lexicon, there has been a desire to understand why. Why do parents hover? What motivates parents to intervene on their children’s behalf, or expend effort and energy to do things that kids could — and probably should — do themselves?
I’ve read most of the arguments about why parents engage in helicoptering. In fact, this very newsletter exists in large part because of the reading, thinking and reflecting I’ve done to try to understand why I engage in this behavior — behavior that I know to be less than ideal for me, my child, my family, my relationships, etc.
I find some arguments more compelling than others, and I was eager to read Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s take this on in her newsletter for The Cut, “Brooding,” which asks, “Are Helicopter Parents Actually Lazy?”
Here’s what I think about this question:
First, I think Jezer-Morton identifies some of the really important features of helicopter parenting, and why parents engage in it. I couldn’t agree more with her that helicoptering is, in its own weird way, “the path of least resistance.” She quotes Dr. Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and host of the “How Can I Help?” podcast from iHeartRadio, who notes that “Sometimes it’s harder to parent your kids to become independent than it is to helicopter — it can be exhausting, and it can be time-consuming.” I think this is spot-on.
“Letting kids make mistakes, and being there to support (and clean up after) them, can be more work than doing everything yourself,” Jezer-Morton writes, and, yes. Absolutely. It’s fricking HARD to sit on your hands and watch as your kid fumbles through something, or experiences frustration, or comes home upset because they forgot to turn in their homework, or whatever else we feel compelled to swoop in and fix for them (which will vary by age, and temperament, and lots of other factors).
The same can be said of approaches like gentle parenting, which actually require us as parents to a) manage our own emotional reactions to situations; b) think long-term instead of just reacting in the moment; and c), as Jezer-Morton notes, be willing to face the opinions of other parents who may not agree with our approach to a situation.
“It doesn’t take only energy and attention to teach your kids to navigate independence safely, “ she writes. “It takes a certain willingness to accept that someone out there might think you’re a bad parent.”
What if we’re not just lazy?
What’s missing here for me, though, is the recognition of the ways in which helicopter parenting and its close cousin, concerted cultivation, are adaptive responses to changing societal expectations about the roles of parents and children. To put that another way: I don’t think parents are lazy, or foolish, or short-sighted, or unnecessarily anxious. I think they are, in many ways, doing exactly what is expected of them — and often being handsomely rewarded for it.
The sociologist Jessica Calarco wrote in 2020 about instances in which teachers “selectively enforced rules, using evidence of ‘helicopter’ parenting to determine which students ‘deserved’ leeway and lenience. Those decisions, in turn, contributed to inequalities in teachers’ punishment and evaluation of students.” Schools often tacitly or openly encourage parental behaviors that border on the helicopterish, including checking in on students’ grades, attendance, and assignments “as often as possible.” So this is one domain where helicopter parents hold valuable social capital — which many would be loathe to set aside.
Schools, too, often see things Jezer-Morton’s way: I’ve often heard educators make comments suggesting that parents aren’t doing their job, aren’t really parenting or raising kids “these days” in the way they would expect. This is seen as an absence, a lack of labor or effort on the parents’ part. But I struggle to square this idea, of “lazy” parenting, with the lived reality of every parent I know, who is out there parenting their ass off.
Every mom and dad I know has been busting their butts every damn day to get their kids up, dressed, fed, out the door, homework done. They are signing the homework folder and sending in snacks on Tuesday for the class party and remembering when registration opens for summer camp and making sure the blue T-shirt goes into the wash before Friday because Friday is Spirit Day and scheduling the dentist appointments and maybe also somehow earning a living and, occasionally cleaning the house.
We’re all just getting through the day. And maybe we’re not doing our best work. But there are a lot of reasons for that, and not all of them are easy to solve.
It doesn’t feel like laziness. What it does feel like is a capacity issue. I don’t know a single parent who’s at full capacity right now. Before the pandemic, who knows, because that was a different timeline. But now? We’re all just getting through the day. And maybe we’re not doing our best work. But there are a lot of reasons for that, and not all of them are easy to solve.
The precarious parent
Writing for Jacobin, Megan Erickson clocks the term “helicopter parent” as arriving on the scene in 1989. (You can see one example of its early use in this Scripps-Howard News Service article that warns of the dangers of hovering.) So this is not a new debate, and I think that’s a very salient feature. If it were just a matter of parents needing to know better so they could do better, it might not have proved to be such a persistent practice.
So why are we all still hovering? Erickson notes that overparenting can be driven by very real fears and worries about what could happen if a parent were to step back and let their child fumble or fail.
“The fear felt by parents of all classes that their children’s class status is more precarious is real, even among the middle and upper classes,” she writes.
Of course, class status is less obviously connected to some of the scenarios Jezer-Morton describes, like deciding whether to let your seventh-grader ride the bus on his own. But the feeling of precarity is a profound motivator that can influence any number of decisions, both small and large.
“What explains the sudden emergence of ‘helicopter parents’ and ‘tiger moms,’ after many of today’s parents had much more relaxed childhoods in the 1970s and 1980s?,” Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibottiwrite in their excellent 2019 book “Love, Money and Parenting.” “Our answer is that economic incentives have changed, largely as the result of a rise in economic inequality that took place during the same period. … In societies where there is a large gap between the rich and the poor, parents perceive more pressure to push their children to excel in school and end up with lucrative and stable careers.”
If children represent parents’ investment in the future, the 21st-century helicopter parent is the equivalent of an investor who compulsively checks his or her portfolio: she knows she shouldn’t do it, but she simply can’t stop herself. After all, anxiety doesn’t make us more rational; quite the opposite. But still, this anxiety hasn’t come out of nowhere. Today’s parents can see that the stakes are high, and they can also see that the old ways don’t seem to be working anymore.
So I think there are a lot of reasons we are still tying our kids’ shoes for them when they are 7 years old and nagging them about their homework every night and following them a block behind as they walk home from school. But mostly, I think it is because we get rewarded when we do these things, and often lack the capacity to accept the alternative. And to me, that speaks to more than just laziness.