We've all heard of "helicopter parents" or "tiger moms"--parents that consistently hover over their children, sniffing out possible dangers in their lives. Helicopter parenting is an approach to child rearing that typically involves crossing the line from behavioral control over children to psychological control. Many parents using this parenting style not only gear children towards positive and beneficial behaviors (doing homework, going to school), but instill high expectations, consistently evaluating their children's performance against these expectations and invoking certain emotional responses in children based on their performance.Some parents or specialists may argue in favor of helicopter parenting, but their views are undermined by our society's contemporary negative attitude towards the approach. Through the psychological control that helicopter parents extend over their children, parents can damage their children's individuality/identity, independence, psychological stability, and inhibit their sense of accomplishment.
But why, then, do some parents still willingly seize control of their child's motivations, ideas, assignments, grades, friends, and feelings? One possibility is fear. In overbearing parents, this seems to stem from insecurities that their children will not "make it" in the real world. TIME magazine writer Nancy Gibbs writes that it is this fear that manifests itself in obsessive behaviors, pushing parents to "demand homework in preschool, produce the snazzy bilingual campaign video for the third-grader's race for class rep, [and] continue to provide the morning wake-up call long after he's headed off to college." However, if the fear and its manifestation are ultimately detrimental to a child, what can already overbearing parents do to improve?
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| A crucial part of parenting out of faith is displaying confidence in children |
New York Times Op-Ed contributor Madeline Levine suggests that while it is impossible for parents to rid themselves of fear, they can take steps to limit its manifestation in their actions. "The child’s job is to grow, yours is to control your anxiety so it doesn’t get in the way of [your child's] reasonable moves toward autonomy." Ms. Levine's parenting model can be likened to parenting out of faith rather than fear. In parenting out of faith, parents relax their control over their children and demonstrate confidence in their children's capacity for working out their own problems. This confidence can be expressed verbally through encouragement or implicitly through actions. Parents also allow children to take risks--and potentially fail.
Failure, though feared and stigmatized, is important for development. Neil Sjoberg, a youth worker from London, expresses the importance of learning to fail. "Children need to be taught that failure is frequent and normal, it is not the end of the world and we should all help this by a cultural shift in admitting that we failed. Only by learning to lose can we achieve success." Learning from mistakes also allows children to have genuine experiences, and to understand themselves and the world around them more comprehensively.
Ultimately, parents should recognize that their parenting style is one of many factors that influence a child's development, among genetics and outside environment. This means that it is not realistic or advisable for parents to put it on themselves to ensure their child is successful, or the most successful. Instead, parents should acknowledge their children's individuality, and offer the most opportunities for their children to grow and develop so that they are as well-equipped as possible to enter the "real world."
Great points. Personally, I wonder to what extent a parent's approach is influence by his/her parents' approach. If my grandpa helicopter parented my dad, is he likely to be a hands-off parent, attempting to break away from his father's style (hypothetically here)? Or perhaps it depends on if that parenting style worked. Maybe my dad feels since he turned out successful, helicopter parenting is a better approach. Maybe our faith is so defined by our history that it becomes impossible to change.
ReplyDeleteI do think that how we were "nurtured" greatly affects our parenting style--but understanding how (in the context of our own families and upbringings), I think, is the first critical step we can take to change our parenting style.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of how our parenting style influenced by our parents, I think it's generally a matter of a our direct emotional response to our parents. This response is a result of weighing many factors (our satisfaction with our parents, their parenting style, and our own lives, etc.). It seems to be that children--if their emotional response is more positive--imitate their parents' style, but scrap their parents' style altogether if their response tends more negatively.