Almost everyone is familiar with the term “helicopter parenting.” When parents take an overprotective and excessive interest in their children and what they do, the moniker fits.
But now there’s a new term entering the lexicon. It’s called “snowplow parenting.” A recent New York Times article summed it up as, “machines chugging ahead, clearing any obstacles in their child’s path to success, so they don’t have to encounter failure, frustration or lost opportunities.”
It fits the recent college bribery scandal and dovetails with parents who do whatever they can to get their offspring into top nursery schools before moving heaven and earth to get them into the best private schools.
It isn’t just wealthy parents who do this. Middle-class families spend absurd amounts of money to make sure their sons and daughters succeed at whatever they attempt. That means tutors, personal coaches, extra training, expensive equipment, yelling at coaches, umpires, and referees — whatever it takes to head off failure.
One of the more astonishing aspects of this phenomenon comes from Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean of freshman at Stanford University and author of the book How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success. She witnessed students relying on their parents to set up play dates with people in their dorm.
Play dates for adults who attend Stanford. It’s a prestigious school that’s produced billionaire tech giants and Supreme Court justices, and yet our society is now at a place where some parents have to help their adult children make friends.
At some point, parents have to let the next generation experience real life, and that includes disappointment, pain, frustration, and many challenges. People face them every day.
As a parent, it’s easy to understand the desire to protect children; parents find it hard not to regard their children as children. But society has raised a generation that reaches for the phone to call mom and dad instead of figuring things out independently.
It’s time for parents to stop snowplowing. Give the kids a shovel and tell them to get on with it. They’ll thank their progenitors in, and for, years ahead.
