The Helicopter Parent

So the helicopter parent is a relatively recent cultural phenonemon describing the parents of out-of-the-house children (in college particularly) who continously play an active role in the day-to-day activities of their grown children.

A helicopter parent hovers continuously around their adult child (via the cell pphone) to offer guidance and advice on any number of routine decisions: should I get my haircut, what classes should I take, what should I do this weekend, etc.

I had someone once point to the helicopter parent as proof that the family wasn't in as bad a shape as some would have us to believe. But the truth is that helicopter parenting is simply another expression of the extreme brokenness in our culture when it comes to the familly.

If one of the primary goals of parenting is to prepare your children for healthy adulthood and independence (and I think I read that somewhere but I'm still new at this) then the way that I see some parent-child relationships play out is nothing like healthy.

Helicopter parenting can spring out of all types of soils. I've seen some home-schooling students whose parents were so focused on the family that they taught them nothing about preparing to leave the family.

And I've seen some that have sprung out of the "both parents working, kid has been in daycare since week 6" family culture. Some of these parents feel guilty and try to hang on to make up for lost time.

And of course I've seen healthy parent-college child relationships spring up out of both home-schooled and two-working parents type families.

My wife noted last night that our culture is more kid-centric than ever before. Everything from summer camps to Kinder-Music to more and more organized sports and activities at earlier and earlier ages.

But the results of all this sound and fury seem to signify the wrong things. Post-adolescence as a new label to describe twenty-eight year olds who still act fourteen. Helicopter parents who cannot allow their children to grow up and make normal, growing-up type mistakes.

I wonder if I or my kids will fare any better. Perhaps I'll look back on this post in fifteen years and think how little I knew.

But my hope and prayer for my kids and I is that we'll have healthy, adult relationships as they graduate high school and head off to the great beyond. That means lots of small, hard decisions along the way and allowing our relationship and my role to shift along the way.

I hope that I might not be a helicopter parent some day. If for no other reason than I'm not sure I can afford the cell phone bill.