It’s a bird…It’s a plane…no, it’s helicopter mom and she’s taking over your life! The definition of helicopter mothering varies on the circumstance. Whether it’s cutting their twelve year old’s steak, over-parenting, or even attempting to follow their high school graduate to college, it comes in all sorts of colors.
It’s been proven that helicopter parenting stunts a child’s emotional growth, doesn’t allow them to learn life lessons from natural mistakes, and limits their experience. Children everywhere are screaming out for help. If you’re one of these kids, you’re in good company. A high school student (who prefers to remain anonymous) speaks out on her micromanaging mother:
“Well, I can see where my mom is coming from,” the student says, “seeing that she’s my mother and all, but she takes it super far sometimes. She doesn’t like to realize that I am almost 17 years old and deserve more leeway and freedom. She freaks out so much every time I want to go out, it even stresses her out, which is ridiculous. I feel like since she gets freaked out she refuses to let me go out just so she doesn’t have to deal with that.”
It even seems like a mother’s good intentions have gone a little haywire. The student continues:
“It has gotten to the point where I have to sneak around to see my friends because she is getting so out of hand. She thinks she’s right all the time so I never want to tell her what’s going on because I know she’ll just judge and cut me off from the rest of the world even more.”
The question at hand is why do mothers do these things? Most of the time it’s usually in their over caring and worrying nature, simply wanting what’s best for their kids. It seems like things have escalated in the past years, particularly with the growing popularity of the Internet.
“Parenting information is available twenty-four-seven,” says Christie Barnes, author of “The Paranoid Parents Guide: Worry Less, Parent Better, and Raise a Resilient Child,” featured in an interview on CNN. “You can go online and find out every scary thing that could happen to your child. You can also investigate every illness. So there’s endless opportunity for fear.”
With this in mind, one can see why mothers have become increasingly paranoid, but is anything getting better? The hard truth is that kids need to fail. Make poor decisions. Learn from all the blunders that entail with being human. If everything is handed to them on a silver platter, they’re going to expect that until life knocks them off their feet.
Children may even start rebelling against their parents as they get older. Driving fast, breaking curfew, yelling back, maybe even shoplifting. Things can get well out of hand and very quickly. A strive for independence might cause something counterproductive, and instead of keeping their children safe, these helicopter moms might push them into something far worse.
No matter how many parenting books a woman may read, or what they hear on Dr. Phil, there will always be mothers who just want to protect their children from everything. Which might also mean doing their kid’s school projects. Complaining some bully cut them in the lunch line. Or accompanying their kid to prom.
