Helicopter Parents Make Children Miss Milestones

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

 

Yet another account of educators describing wild instances of helicopter parenting is making the rounds, this time from Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that two-thirds of school psychologists, counselors, teachers and mental health workers who responded to a survey by the Queensland University of Technology reported seeing some instances of “overparenting” while more than a quarter said they’d seen many.
It’s all quite familiar. The necessary titillating anecdotes are there: the parent making a special plate of food for a picky teenager to take to a party, 10-year-olds at camp who don’t know how to dress themselves, parents requesting that their child be assigned to a “sports house” that matches their favorite color.
These anecdotes serve an unintended purpose: while they’re supposedly produced in support of the thesis (helicopter parents are ruining our youth), most readers get to give themselves a pat on the back. They would never do such crazy stuff! Therefore, they are not helicopter parents. Case closed — off to drive the kid to hockey practice as soon as I pack up his bag.

But amid all the things we have heard before about hovering parents was one line that gave me pause. The researcher who conducted the survey (which I have not seen) said that she’d drawn another conclusion from her results: many parents aren’t letting their child reach normal developmental milestones, such as traveling alone.

Milestones.
Milestones loom so large in the life of a young parent. When our children are infants, we’re constantly asking — when should they roll over? Sit up? Say their first word?
But as they grow up, those milestones begin to feel so much less clear. When should a child cross the street alone? Be able to enter a store and politely and successfully make a purchase? Advocate for herself with a teacher? Ride the subway? Take himself to the doctor or dentist, or for a haircut? Cook a meal, do a load of laundry?

Those are milestones, too. And those are the kind of milestones that it’s easy to forget your child isn’t hitting. Once we’ve set aside those books and charts— which provide remarkably little guidance on when a child should be capable of cooking a meal or doing a load of laundry — it’s too easy to forget to step aside and let those equally important moments happen. (The Motherlode contributor Kay Wyma‘s book “Cleaning House: A Mom’s 12-Month Experiment to Rid Her House of Youth Entitlement” has some thoughts to offer on the subject of when a child should be fending for himself in the kitchen and elsewhere, and other books I’m not familiar with may as well.)

All of which reminds me, again, of the wonderful checklist that the  blogger Christine Whitley shared back in 2011, from the 1979 child-rearing manual “Your 6-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant.” Your child, the writer proposed, was ready for full-day first grade if, among other things, she can “travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home.”
That’s a milestone that not many of today’s 6-year-olds have met.

What other milestones are we parents overlooking, putting off or unintentionally letting our children skip entirely? (The college-age babysitter who arrived at my house completely unable to follow the instructions on the back of a box of mac-and-cheese springs to mind.) Do we need new guidelines for when our children should be able to do what?