WJBC Forum: Helicopter parents need to land

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I’ve been listening to the discussion about “helicopter parents” on the station this week and decided to add my two cents.

Since I’ve been an educator for 34 years, I’ve seen the phenomenon of “helicopter parenting” evolve over the last twenty years since the term became popular around 1990.

It was coined by Foster Cline and Jim Fay, the authors of “Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility.” The term “helicopter parents” refers to a parenting style where the parents “hover” like a helicopter over their children, becoming too involved in their lives to the extent that they interfere with issues like college admission and job interviews.

I’m not talking about parents helping their children by taking them to college visits, or moving them onto campus, but rather actually doing the college search, filling out the applications, writing their essays, and accompanying them to their college interviews to “assist” them with answering the questions. For employment, the helicopter parent is the one who wants to be involved in every aspect of the job search including the interview to make sure they “answer” the questions correctly and “negotiate” the best possible salary and benefits. If this doesn’t sound odd to you then perhaps you failed the “Helicopter Parent Test” (Google it) and you’re in denial. However if the words: responsibility, independence, accountability, and resiliency are in your vocabulary then you might understand why helicopter parenting could be a negative. I am a parent of three grown children, and I’m also a grandparent. As our children were growing up, I was always concerned about helping them learn those four things, because I knew that to be a successful adult, you would have to be responsible, independent, accountable, and resilient.

Of course the tendency is always there to do too much (and I’m sure I did more for mine than my Mom did for me), but there is a line that should not be crossed. For example, one of the test questions asks: Do you encourage your child to: A. Try different activities to see what he likes most, B. take the classes you know he’ll be successful in or C. Do the activity you always wanted to try as a child.

The correct answer is A, because you’re allowing the child to make choices, have some independence, and experience a decision (good or bad) which consequently gives him/her the opportunity to learn something depending on how it turns out. Ultimately, isn’t that what we really want our children to learn?

I’m Camille Taylor for the WJBC Forum.

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Camille Taylor, Counselor at Normal Community High School, has been an educator in this community for 33 years. She is active in the community currently serving as a church elder and board member for both the Baby Fold and the YWCA. She has been recognized by the YWCA as a Woman of Distinction for education, a Martin Luther King Jr. award winner for the City of Bloomington, a Distinguished Alumni by the College of Education at Illinois State University, a Human and Civil Rights award winner for the Illinois Education Association, and the H.Councill Trenholm Award recipient from the National Education Association for her work with diversity. She lives in Bloomington with her husband, Arthur, and is a mother and grandmother.

The opinions expressed within WJBC’s Forum are solely those of the Forum’s author, and are not necessarily those of WJBC or Townsquare Media.