Do you see any helicopters over children? Helicopter parents are all around us!

in #psychology7 years ago

Are parents sometimes overparenting their children? How many modern parents are behaving like helicopters? And how this affects their child?

In psychological terms, overparenting implies excessive parent involvement and anxiety for the child's mental state and adaptive capacity. This also includes difficulties in separating the child from the parents, which are particularly obvious as the child leaves the house, or goes to kindergarten and school. This includes early care about entering pre-school programs, challenges for teachers and administrators in primary and secondary schools, insisting on formalized extracurricular participation and high school achievement, overscheduling and micromanaging children’s time, and almost manic pressure on a child to be mature and be ready to enroll in top universities.

We can see this phenomenon also as a controlling parenting which represents a compromised formation between care and aggression. So, nowadays we have term "Helicopter Parents" as a colloquial term used to describe parents who are too involved and who are hovering over their child, ready to cope and resolve any problem that their child has at any time.

According to Anderegg, a child therapist and professor of psychology at Bennington College, parents of today are excessively concerned about their children. A number of factors including an increase in older parents, smaller families and media hype surrounding topics like school violence have contributed to this rise in parental anxiety. Worrying about children also comes from unresolved issues in the parents' own lives. We can see that parents are concerned about adequate daycare, drug abuse, and ensuring that children attend the right schools. Parents are obsessively overseeing their children's activities or worrying about their accomplishments instead of parenting within an atmosphere of moderate firmness, empathy, and an understanding of each individual child's temperament.

According to some studies, children who are overprotected by their parents have low self-esteem because they have low to none experience of earning their own success. They tend to believe that their friendships and success at school are fake because parents have always tried to provide everything for them. For example, if they had difficulty in making friends, parents would organize a party for them and invite all students from the school, or if they had difficulty learning, they would pay private lessons with the best teachers. Other studies show that high child protection by parents is associated with higher levels of delinquency both in boys and girls.

Children who are overprotected can feel hopeless and constantly search for help from significant adults such as parents, teachers, and psychotherapists because the overwhelming help by their parents has left them without their own skills necessary in life.

When parents turn the frustration of the child into an angry phone call or e-mail addressed to the school, the child is prevented from engaging in very important moments of maturation that come from own frustration, loss, and disappointment. Furthermore, when parents try to completely remove the reality of the outside world from the child's experience, they influence the process of mental maturation and create an inner world that is not able to tolerate disappointment and rejection. Such an inner world always seeks to externalize negative and disturbing feelings, thus delaying successful integration into a difficult, competitive, and sometimes hostile external world.

Sigmund Freud used to say that parental love, which is so moving, and at the bottom so childish, is nothing but the parent’s narcissism born again. In other words, parental love is associated with parental self-esteem. When a parent overprotects his own child, that represents the parent’s own narcissism or their fear of separating from the child.

What do you think?

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Have a wonderful day, week, and life!

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I’m a mum of 3 and a business owner.
I support my kids and ensure they get good nutrition, get homework done etc.

No idea what they are wearing or even who their teachers are at school. I ask just before interviews when I need to know.

If you take care of the large issues, the small ones just disappear.

All in all, busy working parents don’t have time to be helicopters but yes like you I see if a lot

I agree with you 100%, @xeniaioannou, taking care of the most important issues helps kids successfully sort out the minor ones on their own.

And yes, the real challenge of refraining from being a helicopter parent is mostly on the people who don't have a job and/or multiple kids.

Thank you for the meaningful comment and resteem. : )

You're right. Helpful post !

I think a lot of what Freud said was complete rubbish, however helicopter parenting is very real.

I once saw a parent of a 3(ish) year old child, who was happily toddling along on the grass at the park, he then broke out into a toddler-type run, and the mum freaked out, saying; 'no, no, be careful!'

I gave her the benefit of the doubt that maybe the child had brittle bone disease or something, however it wouldn't surprise me if she was a helicopter mum.

Interestingly enough, modern tech could help us all become helicopter parents. Just get a drone to hover above your child at all times, ready to swoop down on any danger they may face! :-)

Cg

I would bet that she's an Apache Helicopter Mom, thanks for sharing the story.

Here's a proposal for one of your future musings: "Will AIs do parenting for us in the future?" : )

Whatever is unresolved within us will manifest in our parenting skills.

Unfortunately, our society has an abundant supply of adult children, who then create a hyper protective ring around their own children because they are still incapable of embracing their own independence.

Babies making babies, as Sly Stone would say.

I love your interpretation. We do tend to fulfill our own unfulfilled needs or complexes through our children and babies making babies is quite a vicious cycle!

Thank you for the thoughtful comment, @colinhoward. : )

I am not a parent yet but i find this post very interesting and educating.

Hearing "Helicopter Parents" for the first time.

Thank you, I'm glad you like it! The term is quite funny to me. : )

@lifenbeauty keep up your post sir very useful.

We keep learning. I know 'helicopter parenting' to be "over pampering". In this part of the world, couples with just a child will tend to helicopter parent the child mostly because they are yet to have other children. Our society place premium on having good number of children. Any child in such circumstance gets anything he/she wants at the snap of the finger. I quite agree with you.