I THINK THE term ‘Helicopter Parent’ was coined by someone who had never met a child in real life. It’s just like the people who write books on how to get your newborn to sleep and tell you that simply rubbing your child’s nose is going to get it to sleep for 12 hours. Oh, look! It’s more unsolicited advice that makes me feel like I am doing everything wrong!
Characterised as an over-protective form of raising kids, Helicopter Parenting means being overattentive, or over-involved, and is apparently making kids less resilient. It pops up all the time across parenting sites, dragging new terminology with it; ‘What kind of parent are you? (spoiler alert; they’re all wrong!) Helicopter? Free-range? Concierge? Tiger?’ Anxious. I am a very anxious one, thank you for asking.
If you forced me to put a label on it, I guess I’d say I am ‘Black Hawk Helicopter Parenting’. But not by choice. My kids seem to have been born with very strong natural tendencies for self-termination, enjoying early-year hobbies such as jumping off very high things or refusing all kinds of vegetables for six months. Trust me, I would like very much to be a ‘hands-off’, ‘mess around and find out’, or ‘don’t call me unless there’s fire’, kind of parent, but I didn’t get those kinds of kids.
‘Let them figure it out for themselves’… thanks, but mine don’t do that. They don’t figure things out. They’ll just stand patiently, forever and wait for the thing to figure itself out. And I know this because I am usually the one delivering the thing that needs to be figured out. Like the dishwasher, or the hoover, or the half an onion that my younger daughter held for 25 minutes last night when she was clearing the counter and couldn’t work out what to do with it. I also refused to tell her, feeling quite strongly that covering it with foil and putting it back in the fridge was rather obvious, so she just held it for what felt like hours, before eventually putting it in the bin.
‘They’ll learn from their mistakes’. Again, not here. Mine also don’t do that. They will repeatedly choose frostbite because their coat doesn’t match the outfit. They forget to pack a lunch 85% of the time. Not only do they not learn from their mistakes, they will happily continue making them over and over again, so, I don’t know what else I can tell you.
The eldest clicked a link on Instagram last week, sent from someone she didn’t know, asking her to vote for them in a ‘Beauty Contest’. And she did! She went in hook, line and sinker. Did she pause when the external website asked for her Instagram password? She did not. And it will come as no surprise to any of you, that her Instagram page was immediately commandeered by an unknown party who has spent the last week boasting about their cryptocurrency success.
Lesson learned? I doubt it.
Once they become teenagers, you are supposed to give them even more independence, so that they can grow. I think I’m supposed to take my little helicopter and just fly away. But I don’t understand how, knowing what I do, I am supposed to just sit back and watch it unfold. Maybe I just pretend that I can’t see them making these mistakes? Or maybe I could get my memory wiped? That way, when my 13-year-old asks to stay home alone, I can just ‘forget’ the time six months ago when she put two dry Weetabix into the microwave and then went off upstairs to straighten her hair. Or when she convinced herself that something was very wrong with her arm and it turned out to be a bit of a squashed fruit winder.
Or when the older one asks to go to Longitude I am supposed to just pretend I don’t know that when she arrived at the Gaeltacht this summer and found a fly in her room, she lured it into the wardrobe, sellotaped it shut and kept her clothes on the floor for three weeks.
Believe me, nobody wants them to grow into competent adults more than me. But when these so-called experts suggest that if left to her own devices, that my daughter would make herself a quinoa salad and then head outside to find a tree to climb, it just really makes me doubt their knowledge of the situation. You know when you see a lone shoe at the side of the motorway, and you wonder what kind of person loses a shoe on the side of the road? That’s my youngest daughter. She’s a real free spirit, has never felt a minute’s stress in her life. Anything I don’t force her to do, doesn’t get done. How can I not helicopter?! I love her nature and want to protect it in this mad world.
Not only am I worried about what my kids will do, I am also terrified about what the world will do to them. I can’t check the news without seeing another violent attack on a woman. Or an increase in diet-related cancers caused by the foods they love. Since the pandemic, we seem to lurch from unprecedented crisis to unprecedented crisis, and my nerves are not the better for it.
The ice caps are melting, the Sahara is flooded, the climate is changing at a terrifying rate. Every time I open my phone, I see the most traumatic images of babies and children crying and grieving for lost parents while covered in rubble. They could be my babies. And I feel so utterly helpless, and useless, and worried that maybe ‘normal’ is never coming back.
I genuinely can’t imagine how it feels for young people as they to try to find solid footing in such turbulent times. Am I really blocking their development if I help them fix a problem? Life has plenty more for them, ones that I can’t do anything about. The world feels like a very frightening place right now, and my heart breaks for the parents who can’t keep their kids safe.
I don’t know if I’m getting any of this parenting gig right, but I always want to care too much rather than too little. I want to give them an abundance of kindness, empathy, understanding and safety, and maybe if they have too much of it in their lives, they can share it with others who need it too. Because although we can’t do much about the darkness in the world, we can always add light.
Margaret Lynch is a mother of two living in Kildare.
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