Helicopter parenting and crumbling family-villages

It's easy to hover over your kid when no one you trust is telling you to stop

Credit: Stable Diffusion

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Earlier this month, I sat down for a meal with my wife, kids and mother-in-law, who was in town visiting. Soon, my 5-year-old asked for help cutting up her food. I wouldn’t have thought much of the request, except that in this case my mother-in-law expressed surprise to my daughter that she couldn’t cut her own food yet.

The comment was delivered lovingly and I genuinely appreciated it. This isn’t a post about in-law strife (I’m lucky to have the best in-laws, there really is no strife). But it also highlighted a recurring parenting problem my wife and I face: We’re not totally sure what our kids should be doing at what age because we have few examples right now against which to compare their progress. I have no idea when a kid should be able to cut up their own food. Another example: My kids are terrible swimmers. Is that normal at this age? Who knows. Or: I taught my 5 year old to ride a two-wheeler last summer; is 5 early, late, or typical for that kind of thing? I can only guess.

The result of all this guesswork is that we sometimes over infantilize our kids, cutting up their food or giving them pool floaties long after those things aren’t — or, shouldn’t be — necessary.

I was thinking about this recently as I wrote a Deseret News piece about my frustrations with helicopter parenting. The piece dives into the ways helicopter parenting hurts kids but is hard to resist, and what we can do to solve the problem.

But one thing I didn’t get into in the piece is how the breakdown of traditional family structures — specifically, the shrinking of the family from a village to isolated nuclear units — feeds into helicopter parenting. What I mean is that a village filled with families gives everyone reference points. If I see other young kids cutting their food or swimming in a pool, I know those activities are age appropriate for my own children. I can cut the leash because I know that’s what parents do for kids at any given age.

But with no other kids around and no parenting veterans like my mother-in-law — so, with no village — it’s never clear what kids can or should be doing.

Take for instance climbing on monkey bars at a playground. For my Deseret News piece, I talked to a psychologist who explained how kids will feel both fear and accomplishment from managing the risk of climbing around on a playground. His point was that having and managing those feelings is an important part of growing up — though helicopter parents often interfere in an effort to protect their kids from risk.

Perhaps part of the problem is that some parents are just temperamentally anxious and unable to let go.

But I suspect another part of the issue is that many of us parents simply don’t know what kids can do. They start out as babies and actually do need coddling. Eventually that changes, but when does that moment arrive? The playground our family visits most often rarely has anyone else present, so I’m literally not seeing what amount of risk kids can manage. I’ve forced myself on several occasions to take a step back and let my kids climb without me being nearby, but the first few times I was filled with self doubt. As my then 3-year-old daughter ascended ten feet in the air, I wondered just what my parental duties were.

Obviously we aren’t always alone on the playground, and we do sometimes see other kids. But it’s not quite a village, which in addition to being a group of people is also a set of values and standards that the group enforces. In the case of cutting up food, my mother-in-law provided an important lesson about the capabilities of a 5-year-old. But on a playground, in a public pool, on a bus, etc. there’s typically no one I love and trust telling me to give my kids more responsibility. (In fact, as I wrote in my Deseret News piece, when strangers do intervene it’s typically to tell parents to helicopter more rather than less.)

Sometimes the hovering period also gets comically long. Last month, New York Magazine ran a piece about parents helicoptering their kids all the way through college. It sounds insane.

But perhaps some of those crazy helicopter parents also lack a community to model more appropriate behaviors¹. Maybe, with no village and thus no points of comparison, it’s not obvious that hovering over your young adult child is unnecessary and harmful. After a lifetime of helicoptering in isolation, it’s just what you do. No one tells you to stop.

I think there’s also a temporal component to this, where a lot of us have spent so much time away from a village that includes kids we’ve forgotten what kids are actually like. In my case, I’m the oldest of 10 siblings (there were seven of us while I was at home) and I thus had quite a bit of babysitting experience. But as I wrote in my last post, after leaving home I spent the next 15 years focused on my education and career². I basically didn’t have a village-type community, and I had only the most fleeting of interactions with children. By the time I had my own kids, my lack of investment in a community left me somewhat isolated, and I had forgotten most of what I once new about kids as well.

On the other hand, I can imagine an alternate reality where I spent my young adulthood enmeshed in a community with people of all ages, babysitting and interacting with nieces and nephews — the way people traditionally would have in actual villages. In such a scenario, I’d probably have a better understanding of what kids can do and when I should be giving them more independence. I’d also have internalized the village values, rather than having to make them up for myself.

I didn’t do that, and I think failing to participate in a village when I didn’t need one not only left me in a lurch when I did, it also made me more likely to helicopter my kids. I didn’t have anyone teaching me what to do, so the default was (over)protection.

The idea that the lack of village-like communities is a contributing factor in the helicopter parenting trend is just a hypothesis. But it does seem to line up with the evidence. We know, for example, that loneliness has increased in recent decades, to the point that it’s now described as an “epidemic.” We know that Americans have seen their social circles shrink, with men being particularly hard hit. And we know that estrangements are increasing, with a quarter of Americans experiencing a separation from a family member³.

My point is that as a society we’ve become quite a bit more isolated over the last few decades — and that just happens to line up with the time during which helicopter parenting became the norm. My personal experience suggests that’s not a coincidence.

In my Deseret News piece, I quote some fantastic experts who have great ideas on how to address the helicopter parenting trend. Talking to them left me hopeful that people will eventually recognize how damaging it is to hover over kids, and that we’ll eventually stop doing it.

But I’d also point to the food-cutting moment with my mother-in-law as evidence that one way to stop infantilizing kids is to have more people around who can remind us parents of what we should be doing. A village of parenting veterans doesn’t just lighten loads, it also helps people understand how much of the load they need to be worried about in the first place. In other words, it takes a village to raise a child because it’s through the village that a parent knows when it’s time to stop cutting up vegetables, hovering on the playground or meddling in college classes.

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Headlines to check out this week

Do you know where your kids go every day?

“All the things that have traditionally made life worth living — love, community, country, faith, work, and family — have been “debunked.”

[…]

Everything that matters has been devalued for Zoomers, leaving behind a generation with gaping holes where the foundations of a meaningful life should be. They’re desperately grasping for alternative purpose-making systems, all of which fall short.

I’m not saying all Zoomers should become church-going office drones who churn out babies and never question their country. But our dismal mental health records and the scars on our wrists seem to indicate that becoming faithless digital vagabonds is just not working out for us.”

Religion and the Green Lumber Fallacy

“I agree with Tara Isabella Burton that in the absence of institutional religion, what we get is not less religion but more fragmented New Age cults, be it in the form of woke campus activism on the left or deadlifting Nietzschean vitalism on the right, or lifestyle and wellness consumerism amongst the haute bourgeois (e.g., Goop, SoulCycle). I believe these to be impoverished substitutes and so my argument is often practical. If New Atheism leads to New Age, maybe we should rethink our priors. Not that we should think God is real, but that perhaps the teaching of religion has less to do with theological first principles than with a way of life. Allow me, then, to make the case.”

1. It seems that at least some of the helicopter parents in the piece actually found an online community of fellow hoverers, which then reinforced their worst coddling impulses.

2. I eventually realized the error of my ways, moved closer to family and tried to build a village. I’ve had some moderate success with that strategy, but I think one way it falls short is age diversity.

3. The average age at which people are getting married and having kids has also ticked up, which would presumably exacerbate the temporal problem I mentioned in which people spend more time as unattached professionals and less time enmeshed in a village.