Helicopter parent is the parents who are heavily involved in their children life in the way of over protecting and over controlling especially at educational. This parents are named as helicopter because they hover overhead their child overseeing every single details of their child’s life. The term of “Helicopter parent” was firstly heard from a 1969 book titled “Between Parent & Teenager.” The child who is from the book stated that his mother taking care of him like a hovering helicopter. While many people has used this term to refer to those parents who constantly watch their children from a distance after they enter to college and this term has now named after all overprotective parents.
A heightened consumer culture has created towering expectations. We feel pressure to give our children the best of everything and make them the best at everything by making them the perfect children and to give them a perfect childhood. More competition and uncertainty in the workplace has made us worried about equipping our kids for adult life. Many of us are more anxious because we were raised in small families and so have less experience of parenting. As smaller families, we have more time and money to lavish on each child. Many of us are having kids older and after many years in the workplace. Therefore, we rely on strategies we use in the office to improve our performance as parents. We have professionalized parenting. We call in the experts, spend money and put in long hours to solve problems, instead of trusting our instincts and common sense. We have lost our confidence, making us vulnerable to pressure from other parents and companies, wanting us to buy overpriced, unnecessary products and services.
When kids are so busy and under so much pressure it can affect their creativity, problem solving skills and therefore their resilience. It can also affect their developing sense of themselves, kids don’t work out who they are because they are so busy trying to be what we want them to be. Helicopter parents do not give their kids the space to explore their world on their own. Therefore, they do not learn to take risks, make mistakes, or think for themselves. They only just do what they are told. Doctors are reporting a growing trend in children suffering from stomach ulcers and frequent headaches due to exhaustion and stress and teachers are dealing with exhausted kids in the classroom. Helicopter Parenting can cause a child to resent his or her overbearing and overprotective parents. Some Parents can praise their children when they do well but withdraw affection, subtly or overtly, when they don't excel. This threat of criticism can contaminate children's relationships with others. The paper will show you the negative result from helicopter parenting and how it hurts out children.
One of the negative result from helicopter parenting is making the children lack of problem-solving skills. According to Carola Finch (2016), parents often involving themselves and interfere when their children have conflict with others, and try to resolve things themselves instead of allowing their children to solve their own problems. The result is that children would not know how to cope with failure or challenging situations on their own. Kids of all ages need problem-solving skills. Whether you have a 5 years old who needs to learn how to sound out words or a 25 years old who can’t find a job, kids need to know how to solve their own problems. When parents solve all of their child’s problems, kids don’t learn these valuable problem-solving skills. "Many parents mistakenly believe that they are simply modeling problem-solving skills and helping their child," explains Kim Painter, Ph.D (2014). "Instead, helicopter parenting robs children of the opportunity to experience conflict and to find a way to solve it on their own, which can be a deeply satisfying and self-esteem boosting experience." For instance, figuring out the best way to deal with a friend problem or discuss a failed test with a teacher without parent involvement will surely eases the children to resolve similar conflicts on their own down the road.
In other cases, helicopter parenting shields the children from natural consequences. Children need to face some natural consequences in life in order to grow up. In the situations where parents don’t intervene, children are forced to face natural consequences by themselves. Yet, most helicopter parents has micromanage their children's activities in an attempt to prevent them from receiving any negative consequences. This is also one of the negative impact of helicopter parenting. This type of involvement robs children of important lessons, argues Holly H. Schiffrin, an associate psychology professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia (2014). When parents drop off the forgotten lunch pack or undone homework assignments at school, she said, they are actually shielding their children from the consequences of forgetting these things — such as having to use their own pocket money to buy lunch, or making up for a zero on an assignment. “If children aren’t exposed to the natural consequences of their own actions when it’s relatively low stakes, then it’s hard for them to learn those lessons,” said Schiffrin. “They repeat the same mistakes when it’s a higher stake situation.”
Research on so-called “helicopter parents” is still in its infancy state, which is why estimates of such type parents fall all over the place. A 2009 survey of about 9,000 college students found out that 38 percent of freshmen and 29 percent of seniors are saying that their parents have intervened to solve a problem for them “very often” or “sometimes.” A 2010 study of 300 college students estimated that only about 10 percent of them had helicopter parents. While most assume the behavior is limited to middle- and upper-class parents, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin determine that all income levels, genders and ethnicities are represented in the phenomenon. This Shows that helicopter parents exist regardless above aspects.
We have mentioned earlier that helicopter parents are raising unemployable children. According to Marcia Sirota (2012), helicopter parents think that they are doing what is best for their kids but actually, they are hurting their children’s chances at success. In particular, they are ruining their children's chances of landing a job as well as keeping it. Helicopter parents don't want their kids to get hurt. They want to soften every blow and cushion every fall. The problem is that these over-protected kids will never learn how to deal with loss, failure or disappointment. Over-protection makes it nearly impossible for these young people to develop frustration tolerance. Without this important psychological attribute, young people will enter the workforce at a great disadvantage. Helicopter parents do too much for their kids, so the kids grow up lacking of healthy work ethic, as well as basic skills to withstand working stress. Without this work ethic and these necessary skills, the young person would not be able to accomplish many of the workplace tasks expected of them.
People solve problems by giving trials, create mistakes, learning through experiences, and then retry after failing many attempts. This process builds confidence, competence and self-worth. Helicopter parents prevent their children from developing all of these important attributes which are necessary for career success. In a functional workplace, there is only one winner of a competition, and only high-quality work is rewarded. If children grow up thinking that no matter what they do, they will win, they won't realize that they actually have to work hard in order to succeed. These spoiled young people will be devastated when they keep losing competitions, blowing interviews or getting fired from their jobs. They would not understand how much effort is actually required in order to be a winner in the work world. In a job interview, prospective employers might be put off by the overly entitled attitude of a young person, or be alarmed by their lack of basic skills.
The young person's general aura of ignorance and incompetence, combined with expectations of immediate and substantial rewards unrelated to performance are likely to be the kiss of death in any interview for a good position. According to an article by Brooke Donatone in the Washington Post (2013), intrusive parenting interferes with the development of autonomy and competence. Therefore, helicopter parenting leads to increased dependence and decreased ability to complete tasks without parental supervision.
As we can see, many articles show that helicopter parenting is contributing to a growing rate of negative impacts in inability to function optimally in the workplace. Parent who wants your children to have career success as adults, you need to be aware of any tendencies toward helicopter parenting in yourself and your co-parent. Loving your child means guiding them, protecting them and supporting them. It doesn't mean smothering them, over-protecting them or doing so much for them that they never learn to think on their feet, cope with challenges or deal with disappointment and failure. The most loving thing you can do as a parent is take a step back and let your child fall down, flail about and figure things out on her own. Sometimes the best way to "be there" for your kid is not to be there for them. This is how you enable them to develop confidence, competence, self-worth and emotional intelligence.
Other than that, one of the negative impact of helicopter parenting is a new study by Holly Schiffrin and colleagues from the University of Mary Washington in the United States. The study shows that college students with over controlling parents are more likely to be depressed and less satisfied with their lives. This so-called helicopter parenting style negatively affects students' well-being by violating their need to feel both autonomous and competent. Parental over involvement may lead to negative outcomes in children, including higher levels of depression and anxiety. Studies also suggest that children of overinvolved or overcontrolling parents may feel less competent and less able to manage life and its stressors. In contrast, evidence suggests that some parental involvement in children's lives facilitates healthy development, both emotionally and socially, Schiffrin HH et al (2013).
Children's need for autonomy increases over time as they strive to become independent young adults. Among college administrators, concern is shared that parents do not adjust their level of involvement and control as their child grows up and, instead, practice helicopter parenting. Schiffrin and her team examined how parenting behaviors affect the psychological well-being of children by looking at college students' self-determination. A total of 297 American undergraduate students, aged 18-23 years, answered an online survey. They were asked to describe their mothers' parenting behaviors, rate their own perceptions of their autonomy, competence, and relatedness (i.e., how well they get along with other people). The researchers also assessed the students' overall satisfaction with life, their level of anxiety, and whether or not they suffered depressive symptoms.
Overall, an inappropriate level of parental behavioral control was linked to negative well-being outcomes for students. Helicopter parenting behaviors were related to higher levels of depression and decreased satisfaction with life. In addition, helicopter parenting behaviors were associated with lower levels of perceived autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And those who perceived they had less autonomy and competence were also more likely to be depressed.
In conclusion, we believe that from the above points stated it is clear that helicopter parenting is negatively contributing to a growing rate of depression among young people as well as an inability to function optimally in the life and workplace. Loving the children means guiding them, protecting them and supporting them. It doesn't mean smothering them, over-protecting them or doing so much for them that they never learn to think on their feet, cope with challenges or deal with disappointment and failure. The most loving thing that can be done as a parent is take a step back and let the children fall down, flail about and figure things out on their own. Young people today need parents who support them in becoming functioning adults. This means less hovering and bubble-wrapping of kids and more empowering them to do things for themselves, figure things out for themselves and learn how to cope with difficulties, all by themselves.
Each child is different. Some kids will want to be more independent at an earlier age, while others may want to hang back as long as possible. Take their cues and let them go at their own pace, stepping in only when it's an issue of safety. Try not to compare your child to someone else. When his or her older sibling or cousins did things by themselves at an early age, it doesn't mean she needs to go at the same pace. Sometimes the best way to "be there" for the kids is not to be there for them. This is how parents enable their children to develop confidence, competence, self-worth and emotional intelligence.