The History of Helicopter Parents

[Wshington Post writer Petula Dvorak] argues that the world is actually getting safer, noting that murders are down 36 percent for children 14 and younger and 60 percent for children ages 14 to 17, compared to 1993 statistics. And the vast majority of crimes against children are perpetrated by people they know. . . . How do we know those declining crime statistics aren’t a result of so many parents hanging around the playground with their kids? Maybe our paranoid helicoptering has, in part, ushered in this “safer world.” Maybe.
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Parenting is a matter of the heart far more than the mind. We use charts and percentiles to measure their growth and their achievements. But we use our instincts for the life-and-death stuff. We make those calls based on the trials and triumphs of our own childhoods, the accumulated tragedies of our adulthoods and, most important, the readiness of our own singular children, whose spirits and needs and abilities are theirs and theirs alone.

 So my first thought was, is this every helicopter mom’s mindset?  Does every such mom fear that their children are less capable than others, more in need of protection?  I doubt it.  I suspect that in most cases, moms do what they see other moms doing, and, if they think about it at all, they fear that if they allow their children more freedom, they’ll have problems due to the way everyone around them feels, even if no harm befalls the child.

But then I thought about her rationale:  “helicopter parenting has made the world safe.”  She cites statistics that were cited to her to demonstrate that the world is a safe place for children, and tries to turn them around to support her helicoptering point of view, but that presupposes that mothers make decisions about the length of their children’s leash based on an an objective evaluation of the risks involved.

But helicopter parenting is not about objective risks that children face, but about how we adults perceive these risks.  And what happened in the 1970s?  Those risks, however small they are in fact, became much more visible, and much greater in public perception.

Adam Walsh got kidnapped.  OK, it turns out it was in 1981, based on a quick check on Wikipedia.  But this lead to a dramatic increase in awareness, even if not actual risk to children, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was founded as a result of the activism of his father and other supporters.  (But think about the “Have You Seen Me?” pictures on milk cartons and mailers and the like:  most of the time, these are teen runaways or children “last seen with” noncustodial  parents.   But this date fits in pretty neatly with a reader survey conducted by Slate.

But there’s something else that happened in the 80s.  The entry of (white, middle-class) women into the workforce meant that motherhood was not just a set of “defaults” but a set of choices:  working women felt the need to prove that their parenting was up to snuff, and stay-at-home moms felt the need to validate their choice by proving that their children have benefitted.  In both cases, that meant throwing themselves headlong into parenting with a determination that they themselves didn’t experience as children.

And what did we get?  Women who, themselves, were independent, are now helicoptering their children.

Now, look, I know the most common explanation for helicoptering is that “the stakes are higher for kids to do well in 2014 than in 1974” due to pressures from globalization, automation, etc.

But I’m skeptical of this.

What’s the most important skill that children need to do well as adults?  Not being the star player on the travel soccer team.  Not getting an “A” on a test or in a class.  Ultimately, being admitted into a top college might help with certain types of jobs, like working for prestigious Wall Street firms, but by and large helicopter moms can’t make that much of a difference in the future success of their “singular children” by steering their admission to the desired college.

No, the biggest skills children need, even now, and all the more so now, are the ones helicoptering can’t give them.  Independence.  Initiative.  Self-reliance.  Self-discipline.  Executive function skills.  Self-advocacy.  Decision-making skills.  An ability to dream big but make practical, real-world decisions.  The academic skills will fall into place if children possess these other qualities, but won’t make much difference in the real world if they don’t.

As a parent, I worry much more about whether my sons will learn these skills than whether a stranger will kidnap them at the playground, or whether a bad grade will go on their Permanent Records and affect future GPA and college admission.

So maybe helicoptering is a short-term phase, and a new generation of parents will share my worries.  Or maybe most parents already do, and it’s just the few who don’t that provide fodder for a newspaper article.

But in any event, if a whole generation of mothers needed to “prove” that their parenting approach was the right one, they couldn’t very well do that by stepping back and encouraging independence.  If they were to prove that they were good mothers, then it required being tangibly active in their mothering.

Does this mean, if my pet theory is true, that the next generation of mothers will be more relaxed?  To a certain degree, there’s some path-dependency.  Once every kid is overscheduled, parents feel it’s necessary to overschedule their own kid, because there’s no one left on the block to play with.  But maybe the horror stories of moms contesting their children’s grades will fade away.

UPDATE:

Sorry, one more thought, and this after my good intention to write this in a reasonably-polished way.  What else has happened in the past several decades? The cost of college tuition has spiraled out of control, and with it the message, from society at large and from the financial aid office, that it’s a parent’s moral, if not legal, obligation to pay these tuition bills.  In the case of divorced parents, depending on the nature of the divorce decree, this can even be a legal requirement.

Look, if a parent opts out of paying the tuition bills, the kid is in trouble because financial aid packages are based on the parents’ incomes.  There’s no way out.  Advice columnists like to say, “apply for scholarships” but the reality is that they’re woefully mistaken as to how much chance an average student has of getting any significant amount of money not based on “demonstrated financial need.”  And the “expected family contribution” calculations are very aggressive (see my post from a year ago on the formula), leading to very high number of “expected contribution” and low numbers for “financial need” at middle to upper-middle incomes.

And when a parent is looking at $50,000 per year, or, while their kid is in high school, looking a grades that might make a difference in how that number is in the future, it’s only natural that they see this as something they have a substantial vested interest in.  That’s a huge sum of money.  If you spent that money on a car, or, let’s face it, two new cars a year, you wouldn’t just passively accept the car breaking down, would you?

It becomes a bit foolish to complain about college students lacking independence, and college parents unwilling to allow them to be independent, when those colleges at the same time demand such sums of money from those parents.

Not that there’s an easy solution, of course.  But it’s foolish to blame this all on “bad parents.”