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

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?

If you liked this post, then you would probably also like my recent article: “Chocolate Zombie Apocalypse” - The Science Behind Sugar Addiction.

Image sources: 1, 2.