The Importance Of Helicopter Parenting

“By trying so hard to protect our kids, we’re making them too safe to succeed...Prepare your child for the path, not the path for your child. We’re doing the opposite,” declared Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt. A helicopter parent is defined as someone who is overly involved and controlling in their child’s life. To the contrary, neglect is defined as the failure to care for a child properly such as abandon or desert. All good parents have found a happy medium between those two. Helicopter parenting can be just as dangerous for the well being of a child as total neglect. Despite the fact that a strong, supportive relationship with parents is healthy, the constant overprotectiveness of helicopter parents will result in the child being incapable

Most people are afraid of failure, rejection, and not being good enough, but this fear is taken to a new extreme. Children these days are told that they are the best at everything, that nobody could ever be better than them in a certain area. This is wrong. If children don’t experience failure and learn that they are the best at everything early in life, then they will never survive life in the real world. Peter Grey stated that "We have raised a generation of young people who have not been given the opportunity to...experience failure and realize they can survive it." It doesn’t matter if a child is on the winning team or the losing team, everybody gets the exact same participation trophy because everybody’s kid is perfect. If children don’t learn what failure feels like before they are on their own, then it will be ten times harder to bounce back from, and they will literally think it is the end of the world; they won’t know how to handle

A normal, healthy relationship with parents is good for every child, but sometimes that relationship is taken to far. The never ending over cautiousness and regulation of helicopter parents causes children to be unequipped for adult life in areas such as problem solving, dealing with failure, and normal social etiquette. In order for children to develop these necessary life skills, parents need to let their children out of that safety zone to experience life. Don’t let them run down the middle of main street at midnight, but give them a little bit of freedom, and trust that they have been taught