Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time would have a difficult time not clueing into the fact that I have negative feelings toward helicopter parents and their whacked-out Machiavellian ways. Is ‘Machiavellian’ too harsh? Then how about fu**ed-up, ruinously obsessive, and freakishly controlling?

It’s possible that I may have issues with parents who can’t seem to allow their children to (a) be themselves, and (b) have non-goal-oriented childhoods. The parents who die with the most Ivy-League-Degreed kid don’t win. That’s not even a category. Let it go. Kids should have only the job of growing into themselves; they are not here to make their parents look good.

Thankfully (as I’m this close to chucking the last vestige of professionalism right out the window) the end of the Helicopter-Parenting Era may be drawing to a close. Amy Benfer has written a gorgeously optimistic (and, yet, humorously sarcastic) article in Salon.com about the possible founder of the overly intense parenting trend, Lisa Belkin, and the new hands-off approach to raising whippersnappers:

Now Lisa Belkin certainly isn’t the only person responsible for the shameful way in which our discussion of parenting in the past decade has shifted to focus almost exclusively on the trials, tribulations, petty competitions and anxieties of a tiny group of very privileged families with children who seem to consider their individual child’s prospects of getting into the most exclusive schools more important than, say, ensuring an equitable access to education for this entire generation of children.

…Parenting trends do come and go. But it is genuinely shameful that over this past decade, women on both sides of the Mommy Wars — often self-identified feminist women — have allowed so many definitions of “good” parenting to become inextricably tied up with “affluence.” While all children need good food, healthcare, shelter and good schools, the helicopter parents, whoever the hell they were, allowed parenting to become a competition between children, in which your child’s well-being was directly proportionate to how much advantage he or she could score over the next kid. That, to me, is frankly immoral, and those are the kids I worry about. Hopefully they will grow up to be wiser — and kinder — than their own parents. More…

Now I can’t get that damn “Ding-dong the witch is dead” tune out of my day’s humming repertoire. I have Munchkin-fear, but it’s such a snappy little tune…

Previous Posts on High-Pressure Parenting (in Varying Degrees of Professionalism):

Acceptance
Awesome Parent
“Bursting the AP Bubble”
“College Panel Calls For Less Focus On SATs”
College Student Spy Cams
Find Your Happy Place
Media Frenzy Around High-Pressure College Admissions
Perpetual Perpetration
Play Doh-Smeared Credentials
Private College Counselors
Testing Season Begins

Posted by Alexa Harrington