Mothers Who Hover
Are You a Helicopter Parent?
October 21, 2008
By Karen Nitkin
It’s ever-so difficult to find the fine line between being an involved parent and one who is overprotective or “goes too far.”
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YahooMyWebIf being a helicopter parent means helping your children succeed, then Owings Mills mother of three Halaine Steinberg pleads guilty.
The term “helicopter parent” has become the salvo du jour in the increasingly tension-filled standoffs that seem to pit parents against educators and one parenting style against another.
But Steinberg, who teaches composition to seniors and is a college counselor at Beth Tfiloh, the 1,000-student school in Baltimore with classes from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, thinks the term is being thrown around too easily these days.
“Involved parents who are appropriately wanting to monitor their children’s education are being slapped with this label,” she says. “This is a term where it makes it very easy for parents who don’t want to feel so involved to make themselves feel better by calling the other parents helicopter parents.”
Though the phrase is not new, it has become popular recently. The Web site Word Spy gives the first citation as a 1991 Newsweek article on buzzwords, which defined a helicopter parent as a “nosy grown-up who’s always hovering around” and is “quick to offer a teacher unwanted help.”
Since then, the phrase (also commonly “helicopter mom” but rarely “helicopter dad”) has come to represent a certain type of protective parent who argues with teachers over less-than-perfect grades, delivers violins to schools when their children forget them, provides too much help with college essays and even sits in on job interviews with their young-adult children.
Everybody has a story of a parent who goes too far. Steinberg says the college officials she talks to complain that parents are telephoning the professors to demand higher grades for their children.
Mary Turos, founder of Confident Student, which helps middle school and high school children with learning difficulties, sees helicopter parenting as a growing problem. She tells of one father who did homework for his 10th-grade daughter and another story of a job candidate who left an interview to consult with his mother, who was waiting outside in her car.
“It’s really become an epidemic,” she says. One reason for all this hovering is that “we’ve become a very protective culture,” she adds. Mothers are bombarded with terrifying warnings, starting with nutrition advice delivered before the child is born and continuing on with the dangers of poorly installed car seats and unhelmeted bicycle riding.
That can make it hard for parents to allow their children to take what Turos calls “safe risks.” If they forget to bring their homework to school, she says, don’t deliver it.
But Steinberg thinks parents act out of love and concern and ought to be given a break. She wrote a commentary on the subject, which appeared in The Sun newspaper in April. “Enough of labeling as ‘difficult’ the father who calls a teacher to ask why his son failed the biology final,” she wrote. “Enough of rolling eyes at the parents who spend time researching the colleges for which they foot the bills.”
She says the response to her column was overwhelmingly positive, with parents e-mailing to praise her for daring to say that “parent involvement is actually a good thing.”
Steinberg says she had no reservations about helping her children with their college applications. “Some kids need their parents to get them motivated, other kids are able to motivate themselves,” she explains. “The inclination of a parent is to step in and fill a void.”
One school of thought urges against that, she says, on the assumption that if parents step aside, kids will have no choice but to do what needs to be done. But what if they don’t, she asks. “The stakes are high. If they’re not going to download those applications, what have you gained?”
Turos, a former teacher herself, says parents can be involved in their children’s education without earning the helicopter label. The key is to provide useful information without criticizing the teacher. Instead of complaining about a grade, she advises, ask what you can do to help your child grasp the material. Or better yet, teach your child how to ask the teacher for help in a constructive way. (Saying “I don’t get it” is not constructive.)
And don’t be shy about letting the teacher know about your child’s learning styles or any at-home issues that can affect classroom performance, Turos says.
Lisa Earle McLeod, a columnist who lives in Atlanta, has also weighed in on the topic of helicopter parenting, writing a piece recently that noted her own ambivalence about when to step in and when to let her children figure things out for themselves. “The line between supporting and suffocating is blurry at best, and I’ve certainly erred on both sides of it,” she wrote.
But she ultimately landed on the side of stepping back. “A helicopter mom’s job is to make sure her kids don’t experience a single moment of pain, frustration or disappointment during their childhoods,” she wrote. “And for some unfathomable reason, she believes this will somehow better prepare her child for life as an adult.”
How to be Helpful, Not Helicoptery
Tips from Mary Turos:
- Allow your child to take safe risks, where failure won’t harm them. This doesn’t mean playing with fire or crossing a a busy intersection. It means if a child forgets to bring a book report to school, let the child face the consequences. Don’t bring the report to school.
- Make sure your child has appropriate household responsibilities, something they do every day, and not just when mom or dad asks. “That’s a big one, because that builds self esteem,” Turos says.
- Give your child limits and boundaries. Provide two or three choices for an afternoon activity and let the child choose one. That gives the child a feeling of empowerment. “Don’t give them unlimited choices because their brains just can not handle it,” she says.
- Give kids time to experience the world “instead of going from swimming lessons to piano practice to a group play date to movie time,” Turos says. Build some down time into your child’s schedule.
- If your child has trouble in school, don’t give them the answers. Instead, help the child come up with specific questions and strategies to bring to the teacher.
- Model the behaviors you want by breaking large tasks into small steps or finding solutions to problems that seem daunting. “If we’re faced with some kind of challenge, kids pick up more on what they see us doing than what we tell them to do,” Turos says.
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As a teacher at three universities in my area, I have seen the mentality of students change into one in which students believe that they should dictate what happens in a classroom, because they paid for it. They are also obsessed with the letter A, whether they have earned it or not, when I have given students B, they try to email bully me into raising their grade, many believe they can talk or persuade themselves into an A, and it has probably worked in the past because teachers are increasingly under the thumb of the student. Lest a teacher receive a terrible review, be harassed by parents and potentially not be brought back the next semester we are forced to inflate grades. Students do not respect teachers because their parents have taught them that if you complain loudly enough, or find reasons and ways to pick the teacher apart they will have to bend. I have seen creativity, openness, flexibility, self-analysis, exploration, and all of the things that college was once about, fly out the window in favor of a rigid pursuit of a narrow goal driven by parents.