How to end the scourge of helicopter parenting for good
Earlier this year, I answered a knock at my front door and found a strange visitor.
Standing on the porch was a little boy, one of my 5-year-old daughter’s friends who lives nearby and often walks over to play. That wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was the older man I’d never met before, standing beside the boy.
“This boy says he knows you?” the man asked, as the boy looked around in confusion. “I brought him here because he was just wandering down the street.”
I responded in the affirmative and quickly ushered the boy inside. I didn’t mention that the boy wasn’t “wandering,” but rather walking 150 yards to see a friend. I didn’t mention that the boy had made the journey many times before, and that it didn’t involve crossing any streets or other dangerous obstacles. And I didn’t mention that a stranger forcing a child who is not in any distress to remain in one’s company is arguably a greater transgression than letting the child wander in the first place.
I didn’t mention those things, but the encounter turned up the heat on a simmering anger I’ve experienced since becoming a parent. My kids are young — the 5-year-old is my oldest — but I want to give them as much independence as possible. Unfortunately, that’s proven difficult to do; despite its bad press, helicopter parenting is everywhere and it seems futile to resist. Many days, I simply find myself hovering out of reflex. But when I or someone in my sphere does cut the kids loose, a well-meaning interloper quickly appears to reconnect the metaphorical leash. Like it or not, we are a helicopter society now.
This has to stop. Overprotective parenting is obviously harder to do and stretches moms and dads thinner than ever. But the greater danger is what it’s doing to our kids; there’s a growing body of research showing that by hovering over kids night and day, we’re harming their mental health and failing to teach them basic risk management. Parents have never been more involved in their kids’ lives, and these kids have never been more depressed and anxious. If we want to reverse course, we need an all-out assault on helicopter parenting.
How did we end up in this mess?
The list of reasons helicopter parenting has become a cultural staple in the West is long and complicated. Often, as Deseret has previously reported, observers point to a cultural shift in the final decades of the 20th century that reframed childhood as a period defined by danger. Part of that shift had to do with media attention on kidnappings, which gave parents the impression that strangers lurked around every corner waiting to snatch their children.
For the most part, those fears were bogus. The federal government has spent decades publishing research that shows kidnappings by strangers are rare and not on the rise. One particularly eye-popping statistic comes from a 2002 study — a time when helicopter parenting was ascendant — showing that of all child abductions, only “0.0068% were true kidnappings by a stranger.”
Nonetheless, “stranger danger” is part of the culture and lexicon, and these fears coincided with a rise in safety culture generally, with a proliferation of laws related to seat belts, car seats, bike helmets and more.
In 1969 nearly half of school-age kids walked or biked to school, for example, but by 2014 that number had fallen to just 10%. That can’t all be explained by the distance of children’s homes to their schools.
In the long arc of history, helicopter parenting is also the latest and most extreme stage in a process that began centuries ago. Historically, many children were expected to grow up quickly and contribute to the family enterprise — think of a family farm — from an early age. But really kicking off during the Enlightenment and continuing through the Victorian period, people began to think of childhood as an increasingly distinct and innocent phase of life. Children were no longer little economic engines but distinct beings that came into the world with a blank slate. These changing attitudes led to things like much-needed child labor laws during the Industrial Revolution. But they also sowed the seeds for a world in which parents feel compelled to protect their kids from any and all obstacles.
The result is a race to the bottom as parents compete to do ever more for their kids. Just last month for example, The New York Times ran a piece about how overactive parents have ruined online school grading systems, while New York Magazine documented the trend of parents micromanaging their kids’ college life. Helicopter parenting is now extending into the adulthood of the next generation.
The costs of helicopter parenting
Back when helicoptering was going mainstream a few decades ago, it probably wasn’t obvious to a lot of parents what the outcome would be. I was raised in the 1980s and 1990s, and plenty of the moms and dads in my sphere celebrated their growing involvement in the lives of their kids. If engaged parents are good — and obviously they are — ever more engagement sounds like a pretty great thing, right?
Instead, recent decades have seen kids’ mental health plummet. For instance, a report earlier this year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 57% of teenage girls felt “persistently sad or hopeless” in 2021. That’s a staggering 60% increase compared to a decade earlier. Attempted suicide among teen girls also rose 60% over the second decade of this century, with 30% seriously considering taking their own lives, according to the report. Multiple health care professionals have described the situation as a crisis — and it bears noting that this predates the COVID-19 pandemic.
Teenage boys have not suffered as precipitous a drop in mental health, but they too are worse off today than they were a decade ago when it comes to mental health.
I don’t scare easily, but as a parent, these findings terrify me. I have two young daughters and five nieces. I’m not sure why everyone who has a young person in their life isn’t constantly sounding the alarm bells about this.
There are a lot of explanations for the ongoing youth mental health crisis, including compelling arguments that social media and technology are a big part of the problem.
But earlier this year, a trio of researchers published a paper that identified overprotective parenting as a major culprit. The authors observed that beginning in the 1960s and “accelerating in the 1980s,” people shifted away from thinking of kids as competent and resilient, and toward thinking of them as needing protection. The result is that kids now have far less independence, compared to previous generations, to walk around their neighborhoods, run errands or ride buses on their own. And that means they don’t build the resilience they need to deal with the stress of life.
“Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults,” the researchers wrote.
Others, such as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of “The Coddling of the American Mind,” have similarly documented this problem. Among other things, they note the rise in recent years of a “cult of safety” and the idea that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker” — an inversion of traditional ideas about adversity teaching strength. They argue that this has happened despite the fact that children are resilient and adaptable. Forgetting that fact is costing kids their mental health and reverberating in other unexpected ways — such as free speech restrictions at colleges that are trying to protect their students’ emotional well-being.
Curious about how overprotection plays out on the individual level, I reached out to Camilo Ortiz, an associate professor of psychology at Long Island University who specializes in child anxiety and who also runs a private psychology practice. Ortiz echoed other experts, saying there’s no question anxiety has increased over the past decade. Asked about parent-child relationships, he added that “there are very few animals that stay with their parents throughout their life spans. Humans are no different.”
He added, “That desire and normal development has been really frustrated by modern society and by what some psychologists call intensive mothering ideology.”
Ortiz went on to explain that when parents constantly intervene to “protect” their kids, those kids learn dangerous lessons. As an example, he mentioned kids who climb to the top of the monkey bars on a playground. The activity involves risk, and by the time the kids reach the top, their hearts are racing. In an ideal world, that physical response might be thrilling, or associated with a sense of accomplishment. But Ortiz said that kids with hovering parents sometimes have the opposite takeaway, coming eventually to think of normal physical responses, such as a beating heart, as something bad that they should avoid.
“Kids have become afraid of their own bodily sensations,” Ortiz explained.
In other words, parents aren’t teaching kids to negotiate risk and overcome challenges. They’re teaching kids to avoid those normal parts of life altogether. The kids are learning, to paraphrase Haidt and Lukianoff, that what doesn’t kill them makes them weaker.
How to fight a bad idea
Despite the spread of helicopter parenting and the many problems it creates, there is some good news: People are pushing back.
The most obvious way this is happening is via the spread of “childhood independence laws” — sometimes known as “free-range parenting” laws — that enshrine the rights of families to let kids roam free. Just this year, for instance, lawmakers approved such laws in Virginia, Montana, Connecticut and Illinois.
These laws are a great start. Though they don’t remove parents’ responsibility to ensure their kids are safe, they do mean that families are legally allowed to give kids the kind of independence that up until recently was normal. Kids in free-range states can do things like ride public transit, run errands or walk to their friends’ houses without their parents getting a call from Child Protective Services. These kinds of laws get a lot of the attention when it comes to unwinding the helicopter parenting nightmare, and I hope more and more states adopt them.
But there’s a catch. I live in Utah, which was the very first state in the U.S. to pass a free-range parenting law all the way back in 2018. The law was actually one of the things my wife and I considered when we opted to move back to the Beehive State from the West Coast a few years ago.
And yet, here we are nearly six years later and still helicoptering remains common. Even I, a believer in the value of giving kids more freedom, find myself hovering more than I’d like. And the minute that hovering stops, there’s immense social pressure to do it again, as I learned the day my daughter’s friend was involuntarily escorted to my front door.
What we need, then, isn’t just new laws affirming parents’ rights to let their kids range freely. Those laws are essential, but they’re also passive; you can free-range parent if you want under those laws, but they don’t push for change. Ergo, the solution — the all-out assault, if you will — can’t just include protections. It needs to be proactive as well.
Frankly I had no idea what that might look like, so I reached out to Lenore Skenazy. Back in 2008, Skenazy went viral after she wrote a column about letting her 9-year-old son take solo rides on the subway. The column was polarizing. It also eventually led to a book, “Free-Range Kids,” and helped turn Skenazy into one of the most prominent voices pushing back against helicopter parenting mania. Today, she’s the co-founder of Let Grow, a nonprofit that advocates for childhood independence.
Skenazy praised laws like the ones Utah and other states have rolled out, and diagnosed the underlying problem as an inability “to tolerate any uncertainty. We’re demanding a fantasy land where no child is never hurt or scared, where there are no skinned knees.”
“There’s so much that is prescribed as if regular life is too much for kids,” she said, adding a moment later that “we’ve sort of concierged our kids into a coma.”
Related
Let Grow pushes for laws like the one Utah pioneered, and is currently looking to pass more in states such as Michigan and Nebraska. But when I told Skenazy about my own experiences facing pressure to helicopter parent, she argued that there are indeed more things parents can do.
She recommends a curriculum for schools that Let Grow developed that’s designed to foster independence. The curriculum involves giving kids “homework” assignments that require them to do something new entirely on their own, without parental supervision. The tasks can vary, and kids themselves get to choose; some adventurous kids end up running an errand to the store, while others might do something around the house like make pancakes.
“It works and it doesn’t cost any money and it barely takes any time in the classroom,” Skenazy said. “And when the kid does actually succeed on their own, It’s a really big deal. For each individual kid and family, it’s a breakthrough.”
To deal with pressure from strangers, kids using the program carry cards that explain why they’re out and about alone, and which display their parents’ signatures. So far, it’s working; Skenazy told me about one suburb in the New York City area where kids participating in the program began showing up at a local grocery store. It threw people for a loop and when the first child showed up, someone intervened to ask about their parents.
But the child explained the assignment, and gradually other kids began showing up as well. Eventually, Skenazy said, kids visiting the store alone became a normal thing and no one batted an eye when they showed up. Everyone in the area understood the Let Grow assignments, and childhood independence gradually became renormalized in the community. Skenazy described this as a collective approach.
“Collective action is the only solution to a collective problem,” she told me, “and the collective problem is we have lost our minds with fear.”
Let Grow offers free materials for parents whose schools don’t take up the curriculum. Haidt and Lukianoff also offered advice in their book, and subsequent work, that includes letting kids engage in risky play that might result in bumps and bruises, sending them away to overnight summer camps, and exposing them to disagreement.
But sometimes, even greater measures are needed — and that’s where Ortiz comes in. Ortiz specializes in aversion therapy, which is the idea that people can overcome fear via exposure to the thing that frightens them.
Over the years, Ortiz noticed that kids who have Skenazy-style independence tended to be less anxious, and that gave him an idea. What if, he theorized, independence itself could serve as a kind of aversion therapy for clinically anxious kids who can’t function on their own. So about a year ago Ortiz began testing the theory, having kids he works with do simple things like chop carrots on their own or ride public transit. In other words, the treatment involves gradually exposing kids to the thing they fear: independence.
Ortiz’s new independence theory worked. In fact, it worked really, really well.
“When we looked at their levels of anxiety they came down reliably,” Ortiz said of the kids he worked with. “In terms of the magnitude, it’s equal to medication or cognitive behavioral therapy, but it happens faster than we saw with those other treatments.”
Ortiz is in the process of submitting a paper on his findings for publication. But already the work is exciting. If helicopter parenting has created a spiral of mental health disorders and overly fragile kids, the inverse is also apparently true. Giving kids greater independence might reverse the problems created by mom or dad hovering too much.
It’s worth noting that Ortiz, Skenazy and others who are fighting helicopter parenting typically frame their work around kids. But it’s implicitly for parents, too. I asked both of them about this and they confirmed that yes, some parents need training to overcome the natural impulse to protect. A young child climbing the monkey bars isn’t just scary for the child, I can say from personal experience.
“One thing that we do a lot in therapy is we notice urges and we practice not listening to those urges because we have what we call value-driven goals,” Ortiz explained to me, adding that parents and kids need to “practice feeling uncomfortable.”
That’s not easy for anyone, and it won’t be easy for well-meaning parents who are used to hovering, helicoptering, snowplowing and whatever other terms we use now to describe overprotection. But all of these things — laws, homework assignments, independence therapy and parents who are okay with some discomfort — are part of the multipronged attack on an idea that is objectively terrible for kids.
Oritz also made a critical point: By trying to eliminate risk and danger, we’ve created new dangers. You can’t, in other words, protect kids from everything. You can only teach them to protect themselves.
“We are really starting to push back, and push the idea that sometimes good parenting is less parenting,” Ortiz said. “Sometimes good parenting means you’re not even there in really challenging situations. Kids can figure things out even if it’s really challenging.”