Helicopter Parents Are Sputtering Out: A Summary

Julie Lythcott-Haims’ article from Slate.com, “Kids of Helicopter Parents Are Sputtering Out,” is a recent article published on July 5 2015. Lythcott-Haims discusses the issues of mental health involving college students. Specifically, she is discussing the possible correlation of strict parental guidance—Helicopter or hovering parents--possibly affecting student’s life skills once they are on their own. Lythcott-Haims uses statistics as well as different studies to back up her thesis of “helicopter parents” affecting their child’s mental health. One of the studies she uses is from Bill Deresiewicz and it discusses the idea of college students being “excellent sheep” which Lythcott-Haims disagrees and prefers the term “existentially

Of course it is hard to draw a line on what is going too far for a parent to control their children’s lives. Lythcott-Haims suggests figuring out “how to get kids to tune into their own motivation, and to get the parents to tune out their motivation to shield their kids from failure and disappointment.” It’s true that parents try to shield their kids from failure and disappointment, but that’s because they want them to learn from their own previous mistakes. With age, there is more experience with failure and disappointment, so parents want their own child to not make the same mistakes. It’s a natural instinct for parents to protect their child from any harm and it may seem extreme to others, it’s probably normal for them. Even with the protection from parents, as young adults, we’re still going to make the same mistakes no matter how much protection there

While her argument is strong in bringing valuable date of college students into place, there is no specific statistic on how many parents hover over their children; in fact, there might not be any way to measure how many parents are “helicopter parents.” There is a spectrum in Sociology that ranges from being permissive, authoritative, or authoritarian. A permissive parent is defined as being “nondemanding and noncontrolling” (University of New Hampshire). An authoritative is defined as being both “demanding and controlling, but they are also warm and receptive to their children’s needs.” while an authoritarian is considered to be “demanding and highly controlling, but detached and unreceptive to their children’s needs” (UNH). From Lythcott-Haims’ discussion about the girl having her father control her life including her major in economics, her father would probably be described as an authoritarian parent with him not letting her make her decisions. Even though this spectrum may bring a better idea on what kinds of parents are, it still doesn’t show numbers on how many parents fall into each category and that may because of how difficult it would be to fall into one parent style when it’s possible to fall in the middle of certain categories. Because of this, the number of helicopter parents might not be