Is Helicopter Parenting Protective or Destructive?

Helicopter (otherwise known as intrusive) parenting can be described as a parent 'hovering' over their children, ready to intrude at the first sign of potential damage or failure. Is helicopter parenting simply protective, or is it a destructive parenting method?

Some may consider helicopter parenting to be an overbearing parenting style. It's easy to say "let the child burn themselves. They'll only do it once". It is easy to say that a good parent will stand a distance and allow a child to make their own mistakes. This is my own first instinct as a parent, but all opinions aside one must consider the facts.

While it is easy think that a child is better off learning from their own mistakes, it is impossible for any good parent to not care if their child is making decisions or taking actions that can be harmful. No good parent could easily stand back and allow their child to fail or cause damage to their selves. In an age old example, no good parent could allow their child to burn themselves on a hot stove to learn that it is hot. It is a parent's job to prevent that child from burning curious fingers on a hot stove.

So why is helicopter parenting an issue? Clearly, there is a difference between preventing a child from burning their fingers on a stove and listening to phone conversations between a teenager and her boyfriend to see how intimate they may be getting. While a good parent may be curious about this issue, and want to protect their daughter from making any mistakes, a helicopter parent may be going far enough as to create a distance between their children and their selves.

Children need a certain amount of space to grow and become their own person. This is difficult for any parent to accept and allow, but it is necessary. Children will not always be children. It all boils down to two important questions. How involved should you be, and how much space should you allow? This is a decision every parent must make.

Take this real life example that once happened. At the age of 15, I was having a phone conversation with a friend, and it was included in this conversation that we had experimented with marijuana. Little did I know that my father had been listening in on a seperate phone. Two days later, a neighbor and family friend (who happened to be a state trooper) was sitting at our kitchen table lecturing me about the legality of marijuana and the severity of my actions.

Can you imagine the reaction this caused? Did this 'protective act' prevent me from ever experimenting with marijuana again, or was I more driven to distance myself further. You better believe that the violation of privacy that had occurred did not have the results my father had intended. So why would anybody ever 'risk everything' in such an overbearing parenting style?

Helicopter parenting may come from a more personal reason than the parental instinct. A parent may be personally affected by their own shortcomings, and therefore go to desperate lengths to prevent the same failure in their child's lives. In this situation, it would be very important that the parent accept the underlying cause as something they must learn to work through on their own, but who is to say that in this situation the parent would be able to see a problem with their actions?

The bottom line is that the tighter the leash, the harder the instinct to pull. It is natural to want to protect children, but it is not normal to control every aspect of a child's life or decision making. This, in fact, can be more damaging than anything else a child could do to their selves.