Helicopter parents may be taking all kinds of risks in their long-term relationships with their children, but there’s one thing about which they can surely feel confident. At no point in the future can their sons and daughters turn around and claim, “You weren’t there for me!”
How could they, when the parent is always there?
Cheering at performances and games, volunteering in classrooms, intervening in squabbles, hovering over play dates, and generally being watchful and super-involved — for devoted helicopter parents, there is no corner of childhood that can’t be improved by having them in it.
Whether a parent deserves the sobriquet is a matter of taste and degree, of course. One man’s active fathering is another’s man’s idea of child suffocation. What one mother calls smotherly love, another thinks of simply as “hands-on parenting.” And children, especially small ones, tend to adore masses of attention and so probably don’t mind when they get it.
Certainly the little pigtailed girl at a recent kindergarten and pre-K “sports day” in the suburbs didn’t seem to mind being the cynosure of her mother’s hypervigilant eye.
“Mommy, watch! Mommy, watch!” the child cried, as she embarked on various tests of agility and speed. These, as you might imagine, were very sweet and low-level, as suitable for the 4-to-6-year-old demographic. There was a long jump, a tightrope walk (the rope was stretched out on the ground, not over it), an egg-and-spoon race (with hardboiled eggs), and an obstacle course made of orange cones and Hula-Hoops.
“Mommy, Mommy! Did you see me, Mommy? I did it!” the girl shouted with each fresh achievement.
“I saw you, honey! You did it!” the mother enthused each time.
As families milled about in the sunshine, and teachers herded little clusters of children from event to event, an observer might have noticed that there seemed to be an invisible harness connecting this particular mother and child. They moved in a way that looked almost synchronized, entirely because the mother, probably unconsciously, ebbed and flowed according to what her daughter was doing. As the girl jumped, the mother seemed to become lighter on her feet. As the girl landed, the mother bent her knees slightly. Now that was some spectacular helicopter parenting: with the inescapable physical presence of a Chinook and the gimlet eye of a weaponized drone!
“Did you see me?”
“I saw you!”
The girl was embarking on the orange-cone race, which was to be run as a relay, when a fellow parent appeared at the mother’s elbow and whispered something to her.
“Of course!” the woman said with a smile, clicking a button on her iPhone to stop recording video. She turned quickly to sign a card for one of the teachers. At that moment, as fate would have it, the darling child jumped through her last Hula-Hoop and looked up at her No. 1 fan.
“Mommy!” the child cried in half-accusing, half-bewildered tones. Her arms dropped to her sides, as if the life had gone out of them.
“You didn’t watch me,” she said.
“Honey, I was just –”
“You didn’t watch me go through the hoop.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
