Helicopter Parents

Attentive, caring, and invested parents support their children as they develop socially, academically, and emotionally into young adults. Yet, there is a difference between parent involvement and over-parenting, between helpfulness and intrusion, between giving students the parameters and the space they need in making important decisions for them. Helicopter parents exert control over their students’ every move. They exert control over their extracurricular activities, free time, and college and career choices, while incessantly checking grades online and championing and advocating for their child. As parents micromanage homework completion or combat teachers and coaches, they, inevitably, prevent their children from understanding how the world truly works or what it feels like to advocate for themselves.

For some time now, the role of over-involved parents have been seeping into the culture of college campuses. As a result of micromanaging parents, some college bound students are ill prepared to take on the demands and the challenges inherent in growing up and thinking for themselves. Parents who hover too closely and do everything for their children may stifle their ability to learn how to advocate for themselves and to thrive on their own. Similarly, college students raised by helicopter parents struggle in believing they possess the capacity to set and achieve goals on their own. Often times, they are more dependent; they are more reliant on others; they have diminished coping mechanisms; they lack a sense of responsibility and conscientiousness compared to their peers.

For parents, it may be difficult to take a step back and to release some of the reigns. Yet, by interceding whenever they sense their children are struggling, it denies their children opportunities to learn how to navigate the world around them and how to persevere when facing obstacles.

When supportive parents boost their children’s confidence and teach them to rely on their own abilities, their children develop agency, ownership, and independence. It is very important for parents and children to have honest conversations with one another. This communication will be the tool that allows your child to find confidence in their successes and failures. Parents should ask their children for their opinions on how they can best support them, and how much they want for them to be involved. In having open dialogues, it encourages students to strengthen their sense of independence, while not feeling too constricted as they prepare to become college bound students.