The Four Cultural Shifts That Led To The Rise Of The Helicopter Parent

Era of Millennials Helicopter parenting is a phenomenon that has taken the United States by storm! This style of parenting raises children to be dependent on their parents well into their mature years. Julia Lynthcott- Haims explains the four main factors that are responsible for this shift in parenting and childhood in the excerpt “The Four Cultural Shifts that Led to the Rise of the Helicopter Parent” in her book How to Raise an Adult. The “shifts” Haims proposes are juxtaposed with examples of how parenting has evolved to convey how the childrearing has transformed. The author attributes the helicopter phenomenon to four events that began in 1980s: child abductions becoming publicized, the idea that children were not doing enough schoolwork,

Haims explicitly states the four shifts, and the title of the excerpt openly introduces the topic of the helicopter parent. The shared information on child abductions led to a new fear for the parents: strangers. Until pictures of missing children began showing up on cereal boxes and milk cartons, parents were not as concerned with the strangers interacting with their kids, but the realization that their child could be taken next caused parents to me more cautious of the surrounding people. The second shift is the assertion people were making that children were not getting enough schoolwork. This caused an increase in schoolwork and stress on the children of the decade, which Haims claims to have resulted in kids and parents “doing whatever it takes to survive school” (Lynthcott- Haims). With the new workload and parents wanting their kids to be successful, parents began helping students with their work, and this eventually led to kids relying on their parents’ help to succeed. Another shift was a focus on the kids’ self- esteems. Children were

These assumptions about the audience contribute to the logic of her claims only for her intended audience by making them feel specifically acknowledged. The author is then able to use statistics and refer to other sources or events that occurred in the 1980s without the audience questioning its credibility. This assumption makes readers such as myself believe that she was raised before parenting evolved; therefore, she cannot speak on behalf of the generations raised by these so called helicopter parents. If the reader had not had such thorough descriptions of the four shifts and how they contributed to the change in parenting and childhood, this assumption about her audience would not contribute, or possibly even decrease, the logic of her argument. The most recent generations would not know how parenting styles were before these shifts occurred. This assumption also would result in some of the audience questioning some of Haims’s warrants, such as the Race to the Top, and the importance of these references would be lost. Haims also implies that children were only told by their parents to go play outside, be kids, and be back by dinner before the parenting styles changed (Haims- Lynthcott). This implication, however, can be disproved by my experience growing up