Baby Boomers Argumentative Essay

When it comes to healthy child-parent relationships, parents are their child’s primary support system. However, does too much parental support exist? The answer is yes, and it is conducive to many adverse outcomes in children. Ideally, a parent would provide their child with the necessary tools to understand how to take on self-efficacy, responsibility, social and problem-solving skills, and allow the child to think for themselves to prepare for the future. Due to the hindrance of constant parental supervision, parents do not introduce these valuable qualities to their children, and consequently, children often rely on their parents to rescue them when they face distress. “Helicopter parenting,” another term for “over-parenting,” is one such

Baby Boomers seem to be the underlying culprit. Though Boomers are the reason for the boom in over-parenting, it all started with the Boomers’ parents. According to Julie Lythcott-Haims, “Boomers took a more involved role in the lives of their children. Whereas Boomers’ parents had been emotionally distant, Boomers were emotionally present in their kids’ lives, often becoming one of the kids’ closest friends” (5). The fact that their parents were distant indicates that perhaps the Boomers did not want their children to live through the same treatment. They may have intentionally wanted to steer their children in what they thought was the right direction; to supplement their children with every ounce of support since they experienced the lack thereof. The overinvolvement points to the lack of an adequate amount of protection and emotional support from their parents, and because of that, it made them want to give more than ever to their children. While they may have assumed they were tremendously helping their children, Boomers may not have realized that they suffered from deprivation of parental guidance and that their style of parenting would negatively affect America’s future of

Parents feel the need to fill in the responsibilities their children should learn to acquire. When it comes to school and work, the parent is doing what the child should be learning to do. Examples include parents doing homework for the child and typing up their resumes for job applications. Knowingly or not, and even with the best of intentions, parents who do everything for their children are causing debilitating effects on the child’s mental health. As stated in Ambiguous Harmony, “The intensive parent continuously makes every effort to guide the child toward academic achievement rather than emphasizing the process of skill development, including the experience of trial and error” (Varenne et al.). In other words, parents concentrate on the end-goal and do not consider the stepping stones the child needs to cross on their own to reach that goal. A classic example of this would be if a child came home with questions about an assignment. Instead of the parent telling the child to ask the teacher about the assignment, the parent decides to directly contact the teacher to ask for clarification for the child. Doing so would only hold the child back from learning how and when to take the initiative and think critically—to get those answers. The best course of action would force the child to think for themselves, such as having