The Puzzling Hubris of Helicopter Parenting

Helicopter parenting is becoming epidemic. An entire generation will be incubated with astonishingly obsessive vigilance. What could go wrong?

It's often suggested that this style of parenting amounts to a Narcissist Creation Kit. But helicoptery parents have heard that line and are prepared with rebuttals about how nurturing children - even when larded out by the metric ton - is very different from spoiling them.

A keener issue, which few such parents have considered, is the sheer hubris of it all. To devote every waking second to forging smashingly great and successful children involves two presumptions (aside from the patently false one that children are like playdough, moldable via sheer parental will):

1. You, yourself, know how to be great and successful (i.e., you are those things)

2. You know how to make children turn out great and successful.

#1, alone, is a stretch. Great, successful people usually have their hand in too many projects and interests to become helicopter parents. If your supreme lifetime creative accomplishment amounts to the union of sperm and egg, one might reasonably question your fabulous greatness (also: if you're so wonderful, wouldn't it be appropriate to consider how you, yourself, were raised, and to repeat that proven formula?)

But let's say you really are utterly fantastic, and have chosen to forsake everything to spend 24/7 crawling around amid a litter of toys with your offspring, doting on their every passing need. Why assume you have the knowledge and experience to instill this fantasticness? For one thing, even if you're cranking out babies wholesale, it will take decades to view the results. All experimental parents are newbies when it comes to long run outcome.

So what makes ordinary people, with no track record in molding human character (as if it could be molded!) so confident they can bootstrap extraordinary children? The answer's obvious: a profoundly deluded sense of their own extraordinariness. And parents prone to delusions of grandeur are the very ones who ought to spend less, rather than more, time smothering their children.

As with all human trends, there's a historical chain. Today's 20-somethings were raised, by a generation of permissive buddy-parents, to have an unshakeable faith in their own extraordinariness - a conviction transcending any need for actual evidence. Their sparkling, ineffable, and thoroughly unearned self-confidence can't help but leave them convinced they'd be the supreme parents of supreme kids if they simply put their minds to the task.

So the question is: what sort of kids will this recent crop of smothered incubatees - all destined to be far, far above average! - eventually raise? My guess: the 1960's style parents I had, who push their kids out the door to socialize with their own kind, and who step in mostly to impose hard limits. The cycle completes!