Are You a Helicopter?
Do you hover? Ever felt entitled to question a coach, teacher, doctor or therapist? Think your child should never be corrected, is perfect, or is the second coming? Spend almost as much time at school as your child does? You may be a "helicopter parent", says University of Saint Louis School of Medicine study.
So where's the ethics here? Without raising awareness of this new phenomenon in the family, parents may be raising a new generation of children who are, according to HealthExperiment.com, unassertive, without a role for themselves in the world, immature, and without self-reliance.
When I was growing up in a less PC era, we called these kids "sissies" and "mama's boys and girls".
The implicit argument is that parents have a moral responsibility to butt their noses out when it comes to their children's lives as to allow them to develop into mature human beings on their own--not to smother or coddle them or over-determine their lives.
Oddly I'm hearing Willie Nelson in the background, "Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be...." Wait, maybe in the 21st century the song should be sung, "Copters, don't let your babies grow up to be sissies..."
How times have changed.
Summer Johnson, PhD.
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My daughter was always a mama's girl (and daddy's girl) and homebody. I made her go away to college so she would have to stand on her own two feet. And that first semester was rough - she called me, crying, more times than I could count because the typical stupid college bureaucracy was so frustrating and the grownups so intimidating. But now that she's a senior I just get the stories about the problems she had to solve after the fact. It would have been real easy to let her live at home and go to college in our city, and never have to learn to cope, but that's not what parenting's about.
- by Laura(southernxyl) on Sep 26, 2008 at 6:16 PM | link
It's actually Saint Louis University, not University of St. Louis.
- by WJ on Sep 27, 2008 at 3:46 PM | link