Drawing the Line Between Helping and Helicoptering

In the wake of the college bribery scandal, critiques of parents who meddle too much can leave us questioning our everyday instincts to help our children.

CreditCreditLorenzo Gritti

By Lisa Damour

March 28, 2019

The recent college admissions scandal has, not surprisingly, reignited concerns about overinvolved parents. Though few parents will intervene to felonious extremes, the widespread critiques of parents who meddle too much can leave us questioning our everyday instincts to help our children.

Sometimes parents with the best intentions fall into the traps that are known as helicopter parenting, named for those who hover, or snowplow parenting, which refers to parents who remove obstacles so their kids don’t have to deal with frustrations. Bribing your child’s way into college seems like an outgrowth of these patterns of overstepping. But where’s the line between healthy and unhealthy help?

On a recent Friday before the scandal broke, a colleague of mine mentioned in an email that her eighth-grade daughter was sick and she had stopped at her school to pick up her daughter’s books. My colleague knew that her daughter would want to catch up on her work if she started to feel better over the weekend. The message ended with a question: “That doesn’t count as helicoptering, right?”

Similarly, one of my friends recently shared in a confessional tone that she doesn’t always require her high school junior to walk to school. When his studies have kept him up unusually late, she lets him sleep in and gives him a ride. “Do you think it’s O.K.,” she wondered, “that I don’t always make him walk?”

While I understood the worries behind their questions, I didn’t hesitate to let these parents know that I firmly agreed with their choices. As a psychologist, I believe there’s a lot to be said for going out of our way for our children. For starters, it is one of the perks of parenting. Like all loving parents, I find that making my daughters happy makes me happy, too — and that these moments help balance the often-tedious work of being a conscientious parent.

What’s a joy for us can also be healthy for our children. An entire body of psychological theory maintains that our earliest relationships lay down patterns that are often replicated throughout life. In essence, we teach our children how they should expect to be treated. When we warmly extend ourselves at home, we point them toward friends and romantic partners who also enjoy serving as a source of support.

Finally, having a supportive relationship with our children can also help guide their behavior. Wanting to protect the good time they are having with their parents can help young people decide not to cross behavioral lines. Decades ago, one of my supervisors, the psychologist Neil Kalter, taught me that, “having a positive parent-child relationship is money in the bank — and disciplinary checks are written against that account.”

So, there’s plenty of upside to helping our children. But how do we keep it from going too far and turning into harmful helicopter parenting? When we’re unsure, here are some questions we can ask ourselves.

Are we abetting dependency?

Sometimes parents will enable their children’s continuing dependency, perhaps by running over to school to drop off a forgotten lunch one day and a trombone the next rather than letting the child deal with the consequences of her forgetfulness. Providing this kind of help might ask little of us and solve the problem in the short term. All the same, we should be wary of falling into a pattern of rescuing our children from their own bad choices.

When a child stays home sick, it makes sense to pick up homework.

But, as Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former Stanford dean and the author of “How to Raise an Adult,” explains, “if you are always the one who is going and getting homework left behind, then you are preventing a kid from learning the hard way how to remember their stuff.”

Can we allow our child to be uneasy?

We can also reflect on whether we are trying to prevent or undo emotional pain instead of helping our children develop the capacity to endure and learn from difficult feelings. Psychologists have long recognized that distress often promotes maturation. We grow from feeling the sting of a mistake. And weathering setbacks, often with support from the people who love us, helps us learn to take disappointment in stride.

“When something goes wrong, empathy is important,” notes Ms. Lythcott-Haims, “we don’t say, ‘I told you so,’ but we do signal to our children that the problem is theirs to handle. We can help them think it through but, ultimately, the solution has to come from them.”

For instance, when we comfort a child who didn’t get the part she wanted in the school play and perhaps help her consider what she might do differently at her next audition, we’re being appropriately helpful. If we contact the director to guide or question casting decisions, we’re going too far.

Is our child moving toward independence?

The psychoanalyst Erna Furman wrote that toddlers gain autonomy as their parents move from doing for them, to doing with them, to standing by to admire as they manage on their own. I have found that this model applies not only to toddlers, but to every stage of development. If a teenager usually makes his own breakfast, there are plenty of good reasons to graciously make it for him if he runs into an unusually busy morning — just as you might do something helpful for an adult you care about.

According to Dr. Ken Ginsburg, a professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-founder of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication, when we hover over our children, we communicate to them that we think they are incapable. Parents, he says, should ask themselves, “Are we teaching, or are we jumping in such a way that we take the action rather than letting the child do the learning?”

Dr. Ginsburg notes that “we should be deeply involved in our children’s lives to prepare them for the future” because helping our children is not an all-or-nothing decision.

Lisa Damour is a psychologist in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and the author of “Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood” and “Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls.” @LDamour • Facebook