Leonard, Welliver 1
Anna Leonard, Keir Welliver
Jolie Mitchell
AP Language and Composition
12 December 2017
How can Helicopter Parenting Affect the Lives of Youth?
From the beginning of a child’s life through adulthood, parents play a huge role in ensuring their overall wellbeing. Whether it is providing necessities or facilitating wants, a parent’s support is important for the growth and happiness of a child. Sometimes, however, their involvement becomes destructive to their child’s wellbeing. This is the issue with “helicopter parents”, or parents who excessively ensure they are prevalent in their child’s social and academic life. While some may say having parents who care is a good thing, this “excessive caring” has connections to children having issues at home, in school, and even at work later in life.
Excess involvement can damage a child’s healthy mindset. As stated by Julie Lythcott-Haimes, “We want so badly to help them by shepherding them from milestone to milestone and by shielding them from failure and pain. But overhelping causes harm,” (Brown). While it is okay for parents to care about their children, “holding their child’s hand through life” can lead to severe mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. In a recent study, children with and without social anxiety were assigned the task of completing as many tangram puzzles as they could in ten minutes while their mothers watched. The goal of these puzzles were to induce frustration in the children to mimic the frustrations commonly faced while doing homework. The results showed that the mothers of children with social anxiety were more likely to touch the tangram pieces and try to help without the child asking. This indicates a strong correlation between social anxiety in children and helicopter parents. These results have been repeated several times by others such as _____, proving the point that coddling children can severely damage them.
Another harmful aspect of helicopter parenting is the over involvement in a student’s homework and school life. The overall purpose of homework is to aid a student in comprehension and acquirement of various skills. Excessive aid from any guardian without true training would defeat the entire purpose, causing no help towards the student in any way as they merely turn the homework in. Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former Stanford dean, notices now that freshman over the years with virtually flawless academic records were incapable of taking care of themselves (Brown). In the light of a generation so obviously becoming more and more dependent on their parents, we cannot keep allowing for this absurdity. In Lythcott-Haims’ book titled How to Raise an Adult she states “It can leave young adults without the strengths of skill, will and character that are needed to know themselves and to craft a life.” This is worrisome because the issue of continuous dependency throughout generations is becoming increasingly prevalent.
Along with education, children and teenagers thrive on the idea of independency. According to Madeline Levine in her article “Raising Successful Children” it is prevalent that “the happiest, most successful children have parents who do not do for them what they are capable of doing, or almost capable of doing; and their parents do not do things for them that satisfy their own needs rather than the needs of the child.” This enforces the idea that helicopter parenting takes away from the education of the student. A parent who enforces what their child should accomplish merely to improve their resume is absurd and prevents them from growing as an individual. Levine also highlights the stress levels of students and how over-praising the children causes their stress levels to increase as they worry about keeping their status held high. School life also becomes more difficult as students elevate their education, causing them to rely heavily on their parents because they have no prior knowledge about management of stress and time. According to a survey from Junior Achievement USA and Allstate, Kimberly Palmer noticed that “one in four teens say they will be in their mid-20s before they will be able to support themselves without parental assistance, an increase from 12 percent two years ago,” (
Issues stemming from childhood may lead to complications in the workforce as the adult can not work effectively. The employees that are formed by the intense coddling of their parents tend to discourage potential employers with their limited amount of basic skills and entitled attitude (Sirota). Through deterring potential employers, students who were unable to learn properly and take responsibility now have consequences of unemployment. Those same children would have a highly difficult time keeping a job what with how they built up no tolerance for frustration and anger, giving up easily when something does not go their way. Looking from the functionalist view of sociology, the functions of acting as a well rounded are diminishing and producing more and more adults who may not know how to clean up after themselves, even, leaving coworkers and spouses frustrated.
Not only are issues in the workplace common, but overindulging also becomes a problem. The most common form of this is substance abuse. By leaving a home run by helicopter parents, the sudden independency makes the child more likely to try activities that their parents would not approve of, such as underage drinking (Bendikas, 5). This substance abuse also has other effects such as depression or
Although helicopter parenting has shown negative impacts on today’s youth, there are studies indicating that it may not have said effects. Valerie Strauss introduces support to prove helicopter parents are not as common as some may think. shows in an argument about helicopter parents showing that they are not as prevalent as some may think. She talks on about the misinterpretation of communication as intervening, showing that only 13% of college freshman have parents that impede on their work out of 9000 college students (Strauss). One issue with this information though is that they never did specify how many of those 9000 were freshman and how many were seniors, stating that another nine percent of college seniors have interfering parents. Through doing this, Strauss creates a bias for helicopter parenting as she generates potentially inaccurate statistics from a sample size too small to represent all college students. A medium sized college will contain from 5000 to 15000 students per year while large colleges will hold over 15000 to 30000 or over, proving that only surveying 9000 college students is not a large enough sample size considering 16 million students are enrolled merely in The United States during 2017 (“College”).
The term ‘helicopter parenting’ was coined in the 1990’s due to the booming economy and the lust for generational success. Since then, overprotective parenting has had in popularity as well as in negative effects.increasingly negative effects. This method is creating unobtainable social norms, harming education, and dampening the professionalism of the workplace. In order to restore social balance and educational integrity the parent’s mindset should be oriented around aiding rather than doing.
Works Cited
Brown, Emma. “Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation of
children.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 16 Oct. 2015. Web. 11 Dec. 2017
“College Size: Small, Medium or Large?” COLLEGEdata, NACAC, 2017. Web. 13 Dec. 2017
Levine, Madeline. “Raising Successful Children.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 4
Aug. 2012. Web. 11 Dec. 2017
Lythcott-Haims, Julie. How to raise an adult: break free of the overparenting trap and
prepare your kid for success. St. Martins Griffin, 2016. Print.
Strauss, Valerie. “Why those annoying ‘helicopter parents’ aren’t so bad after all.” The
Washington Post, WP Company, 21 Oct. 2015. Web. 11 Dec. 2017
Sirota, Marcia. “Helicopter Parents Are Raising Unemployable Children.” HuffPost Canada,
HuffPost, 23 June 2017. 13 Dec. 2017