Recovering Helicopter Mom
Is it me, or has the parenting world gone crazy? When did we lose sight of the fact that our kids are their own people and not just little hobbies for us or a second chance at our glory days? Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother are you serious? I’m in shock. I’m appalled. I’m disgusted, and it’s not a unique concept.
Somehow in our society we’ve turned parenting from being a mentoring, consulting, and life guarding gig to it being a dictating and a hovering helicopter gig. Somehow it’s now taboo to let anything inconvenient or uncomfortable happen to, around or because of our children. If they forget their homework, we’re bad parents. If they act out in the store, we’re bad parents. If they’re not potty trained or training by the time they’re 2, we’re bad parents. If they walk out the door looking like a hobo, you guessed it, we hear, “Why are they wearing that?”
Sometimes I just want to turn to people and say, ” What are you staring at me for? I”m not the one screaming in Target, and MY outfit matches.”
For some reason our society has now dictated to us that in order to be a good and effective parent we need to take over the role of being the child for the child, and do it perfectly so that our children never have to suffer from a mistake. Whose brilliant idea was that? OUR CHILDREN NEED THEIR MISTAKES! I know I needed mine, and robbing them of the luxury of learning seems pretty counter-productive to our “perfect parenting” fetish, in my mind. Must we consistently bring a coat, lunch, and homework to a child who consistently forgets it? Doesn’t that mean we’re raising a forgetter, because we’re the rememberer?
I know of a girl who was raised by her great grandmother because her own parents couldn’t pull themselves together, and her grandparents were busy raising and rescuing others of their children and grandchildren. She told her great grandmother about a project due at school the next morning which she hadn’t started and was, of course, the BIGGEST project of the year worth the biggest chunk of her grade…..Predictably, great grandmother flipped! She had just come home from work and was told the girl was going to flunk a project because she hadn’t started yet, and now she’d “have to blah, blah, blah, and this is not acceptable blah, blah, blah get in the car so we can go to the library, blah, blah, and I’ll have to call the neighbor to borrow their blah, blah because you didn’t have the sense to start on this earlier, blah, blah, blah, blah. ”
I witnessed this rant. I was the fortunate neighbor who was called and asked to borrow the required thing. I saw this 70 something year old woman DRIVE to my house ( kids can’t walk anymore??) and attempt to maneuver the large borrowed thing into her midsize sedan. All the while The girl stood quietly on the sidewalk listening to the rant with a look on her face I can only describe as smug.   And then it hit me. This girl was in no way abashed that she’d “forgotten” to do her project and was now in need of rescuing. No sir, that’s how she PLANNED it. This girl was programmed to believe the cost of leaving a project until the last second and having someone swoop in and take care of it was simply an angry tirade. That’s right, she’d figured out she never had to put effort or thought into things on her own, the people around her would make sure she got it done on time and in good form. All she had to do was listen to an angry lecture on their time and her lack of responsibility. By all accounts, a bargain.
We can all laugh now, but what about when that girl grows up to become the teen mother and great grandmother now adds another ‘great’ to her title, and a zillion more hours to her workload because she’s always viewed her children’s problems as her own? In my class recently I asked the participants to raise their hands if they knew someone addicted to something. EVERY person had a hand raised. Then I asked if that addicted person had someone rescuing and enabling them to continue their behavior with no risk of feeling their now very costly consequences. No hand went down. Are we doing our children a service with our interference? Are we so afraid of being judged by our peers and society as being a “lazy” parent that we’re all now a little too hands on? As a recovering helicopter/dictator myself I’d like to suggest that we all take a second look at some of our problems and ever so lovingly give back the ones that aren’t really ours, by memorizing these magical words. “Oh man, that must feel awful. What are you going to do about it?”
by Rachel K Larsen
Rachel Larsen is a Love and Logic Facilitator from Salt Lake City, Utah. She owns and operates a home preschool, and is also the mother of four children. You can read more of Rachel’s great parenting tips in this KSL News article that she was featured in or view the interview below.
Video Courtesy of KSL.com
