Dr. Tim Jordan takes a closer look at helicopter parents and explores the numerous factors that have driven parents to micromanage and overprotect their children for over 100 years. These include smaller family sizes, fears of abduction, the pressure to keep up with the Joneses in the race to nowhere, societal traumas (such as 9/11, wars, school shootings, COVID, and intruder drills), the overwhelming amount of conflicting parenting advice, and the influence of social media and technologies like the 360 app and Infinite Campus. Additionally, many parents today feel increasingly isolated from family and friends, further fueling their anxieties.
For more information on this topic:
- Jordan’s previous podcast: Why Teens Don’t Want to Grow Up
- Recommended books:
- Raising America by Ann Hulbert
- Anxious Parents by Peter Stearns
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
In Defense Of Helicopter Parents
Anxiety And Uncertainty In College Students
Welcome back to a new episode of the show. It’s a place where every week, I pick a topic about girls, about raising girls, and about what’s going on for girls. I try and get into the heads and the hearts of girls to give you some information, some awareness, and, hopefully, some tools that will help you navigate those years of grade school, middle school, high school, college, and beyond in raising a daughter.
I was triggered by the topic of a young woman I saw in my office. She’s a junior in college. I was working with her on a Zoom visit because of some anxiety. She’s approaching her last year in college. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and that triggered a lot of anxiety in her. One of the things that I discovered in my conversation with her was that her parents still have her on that 360 app so they can still follow her around her day. They know where she is every second of every day. That started back in sixth grade when she got her first phone. She’s 21 years of age and her parents are still following her around.
I also was triggered by a parent. I had a conversation with her and her daughter in my office. The parent, this mom, knew more about her daughter’s schedule and more up-to-date information on her daughter’s grades, her GPA, and each of her classes than her daughter did because of one of those systems. It’s called Infinite Campus at their school. This girl’s parents can follow her around. They know everything going on for her.
The problem with that, number one, is it causes parents to have a hard time not jumping in and micromanaging because they know every little detail, but also because it’s not giving the space for the girl to figure things out on her own. Those two situations plus many more caused me to start judging those parents, which I don’t like to do. I’m judging those parents as being too hovering, too protective, and being 1 of those typical helicopter parents, which we like to call them the last couple of years.
I thought I would go back in history. I’ve read a lot of books on the history of all kinds of things. I’ve read lots of books on the history of parenting and also the history of parental anxiety over the years to try and give me a better sense of why parents are becoming helicopter parents more often. Instead of judging them, let’s try and understand and take them off the hook.
After I give you this information on this episode, I hope that you will start looking at yourself and other parents that you see who are helicoptering their kids with more understanding. There are reasons why we’ve become so anxious in our parenting, especially over the last couple of years, but it started way before that.
Back in the 1880s, home became the mother’s domain. Dad started going off to work. People started moving to cities. They moved away from the farm. Mom stayed at home. Dad went to work. Part of the message the parents got was, “The world is becoming faster. It’s busier and louder. We’re living in cities.” There was some concern and some anxiety about that.
Back in the 19th century, kids were viewed as being sturdy. They were hardy and sturdy, and they were going to grow up fine unless some adults, their parents, or someone corrupted them. That hardiness, that look that we saw in kids back in the 1800s, started changing in the 1900s. We started changing our ideas about kids and our kids’ nature. We started seeing kids as more frail and more vulnerable. They’d be readily overburdened with things. They required very careful handling. Otherwise, they would go off the rails. Kids were going to develop character flaws unless we stepped in and helped take care of things for them. The outlook about kids was that they’re fragile and that childhood was a problem-filled, dangerous endeavor if you will.
In the early 1900s, we had several waves of immigrants. That caused a lot of parents to worry because these new people from other countries were coming into our kids’ lives. There were all these immigrant kids working in the streets and walking around the streets. There’s also a more dangerous urban world, if you will, which is city life. That caused parents to start worrying.
Societal Changes And Parental Concerns
I have a quote from Dr. Holt from 1910. It said, “In this speeded-up world that has arrived, it’s no longer possible to rely on their parents as guides to new challenges. Their kids were growing up in settings so different from the ones in which they had passed their childhoods.” Things had changed, and how we looked at kids had changed. A lot of parents started to worry. They’re like, “I’m not sure if I understand what I’m supposed to be doing here. My kids are so different.”
There is another quote from 1930 by Father Flanagan from Boys Town. It is, “His deepest worry of those days was the temper of the times, the crass materialism, the breakdown of religious training in the home, the soaring divorce rate, leaving a trail of broken families and children shunted from one indifferent parent to another.” That was from 1930. There was a lot of concern back then about things breaking down in the family. Things are different. There was more materialism. Things are starting to speed up.
The 1950s and 1960s brought this elusive quest for happiness. We had to start keeping up with the Joneses next door. If they got a new car and a new appliance, we had to keep up. There was some anxiety about that. There were new technologies, new appliances, and new homes. People were moving to the suburbs and away from their grandparents.
It used to be, prior to that time, that a lot of parents lived in the same townhouse as their grandparents and their parents or in the same apartment building. There were 2 or 3 floors. There was a different generation on each floor. In the 1950s with the people moving out to the suburbs a lot, and not everybody but a lot of people, we started losing contact with families. Families became a little bit more spread out, if you will.
Here’s a quote from Margaret Meade from 1950. She said, “American children are growing up within the most rapidly changing culture of which we have any record in the world, within a culture where for several generations, every generation’s experience has sharply differed from the last one so that these expectations of change and anxiety about change have been built into our character as a people.” Things are changing. People are experiencing that. Parents are experiencing that. It causes more anxiety among parents. They’re like, “How do I prepare my kids for their future? I don’t even know what their future’s going to look like because things are shifting so quickly.”
We put a lot of pressure on parents to do it right. There were more child-rearing experts. Dr. Spock was one of the ones that came to mind in the 1950s, but he wasn’t the only one. In the 1960s and 1970s, we lost our sense of solidarity and reciprocal obligation. We started knowing our neighbors less. Vietnam hit. The civil rights movement hit. Our kids were out of control. We had hippies. We had kids with long hair and people dropping out. There were a lot of drugs and sexuality. That was a huge change. That brought on a lot of concern, angst, anger, and unrest in the whole culture, which transcended down into our homes as well.
In the 1970s, people started talking about the breakdown of the family. That picked up in the ‘80s. The birth rate started going down. People were using birth control more. Moms were working more starting in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and that increased in the ‘80s. We started talking about latchkey kids, kids who were home without their parents after school and before school. The divorce rate was climbing. There was a war on teenagers at that time. Teens were out of control. There were a lot of stories in the news about these teenagers who were doing delinquent things.
The ‘70s was also still part of that sexual revolution. The highest rate of drugs and sexuality in our teenagers was back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The Women’s Liberation Movement hit, so there was pressure on women to go to work, to have a career, and to have it all, if you will. Parents started becoming more anxious that their kids were going to get behind. Especially as they were rushing off to work, they felt like, “Are my kids going to suffer because I’m working and because dad’s working as well?”
There was concern about early sophistication and sexualization, especially after the ‘60s and the ‘70s. It was also because there were more images being shown on TV and in the movies. It was interesting at that time in the ‘80s that kids were represented in the movies as being demons a lot. Those were the years when we saw The Exorcist. We watched Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and Carrie. It reflected in a sense our worry about what all these changes are doing to our kids and how they are affecting them.
Parents are both working more. Parents started sharing their child-rearing with non-family members. Preschool teacher. Kids spent more time with their sports and their coaches, enrichment teachers in classes, and TV shows. Parents felt more at risk than their kids in a sense, because of all those changes and because of all the information and all the images their kids were being bombarded with. That was before the internet. That was before social media.
Parents worrying about their kids was even more so for people who were living in poverty or two-parent working families. There was more stress on them than there was on parents who had some higher income and also where only maybe one parent was working. Parents started to get a sense of, “Am I being a good enough parent? I’m only having maybe 2.5 kids now. I’m not having 4 kids, 6 kids, or 8 kids,” like in my family growing up. There’s a sense of, “Since I’ll have fewer kids, I need to put more energy into them. Perhaps I have more time and energy to put into them.”
They started to think about this ladder to success or the race to nowhere, if you will. Parents became more obsessed with their kids being the best, their kids being on the best teams, getting straight As, going to college, and being successful. It was like, “If I was a good enough parent, my kids would be on the best teams. They’d be getting straight As.” That became more of an issue for parents, which caused them to put more energy into it, and sometimes too much energy.
A 2001 study found that there had been a 25% increase in the amount of time that kids were spending with their parents from previous generations. Parents were having fewer kids. A lot more people were living in child-intensive suburban places. There were a lot of patterns there. You had soccer moms. There’s increased value placed on each kid. Kids are seen as more special and unique.
Also, kids are a choice. There are lots of ways with birth control and all to not have a kid. There’s more pressure to, “If I’m going to choose to have kids, by God, they’re going to be successful.” Anxious parents were turning more to child-rearing experts and advice books. This promoted more levels of concern about being a good enough parent, or even worse, by being a perfect parent. A lot of the advice was conflicting, which could put more pressure on parents. Who are they going to listen to? Grandparents became less likely to be living with or near their kids and their grandkids. That started back in the 1920s. Parents started to veer away from listening to their parents’ advice.
There’s a really nice quote I saw from an Angel Lansbury podcast. It goes like this, “People used to raise kids the way they made kugel and meatballs: in accordance with the traditions of their culture, picking and choosing from the slight variations they observed among their cousins, grandmothers, aunts, and uncles. What was once a matter of experience has become a matter of expertise.” The trend she argued had been exacerbated by Americans having kids later in life. They were like, “We have goals to achieve. We have to study up.” That has made it much harder. That’s true.
In the past, we listened to our grandma, our grandpa, or our parents because they were living right there or close by. It was easier to get our family’s advice because it tended to be the same. You then started looking outside of that because our family wasn’t right there. All of a sudden, you got all kinds of information piling in. That started coming through the media and television, especially even before the internet. Even before the internet, there was still a lot of information coming in.
Parents at that time, back in the early 2000s, started to feel more isolated because both parents were working. People were busier, and then they became more busy. There was less time to hang out in the neighborhood. People started not knowing their neighbors, being outside, or hanging out with the neighbors because people were at a soccer camp or people were at a club tournament of some kind. There was less sense of comradery and less sense of finding support from people who you live next door to or nearby. People did feel more isolated and alone. That’s continued and increased.
The Rise Of Child-Centered Parenting
We also started thinking of kids as being vulnerable. These are kids who’d be overwhelmed unless parents provided protection. Parents were advised to help their kids avoid any kind of anxious or fear-provoking situations. Instead of thinking of kids as having bravery, courage, and pluck, we started talking about kids who are vulnerable and in need of coddling, being protected, and being guided. They wouldn’t use the word micromanage but that became a word.
We’re less interested in courage and more interested in coping skills because our kids were so vulnerable. The world had become scarier. Parenting became more child-centered. Parents were feeling more responsible for their kids and their future. Parents became their kids’ entertainment directors. We started doing more because of the pressure we were feeling from those around us, from the culture, and from the experts. It made it harder for parents not to micromanage.
Also, I’ve made a list here of reasons why kids might be expected to be anxious starting in the 2000s through now. These are things that our kids are experiencing. First of all, 24/7 news. That started not long ago. It is that, the internet news, and the pandemic. There was more than one pandemic. We went through one a few years ago but there were other ones prior to that.
There are terrorist attacks like 9/11 and violence shown on TV. It’s not even just people hurting and killing each other but also violence against the police officers and riots in the streets. There was a war on crime and school shootings. Those are getting more coverage. There was the storming of the US Capitol a few years ago and intruder drills at school. We’ve got teachers who want to be armed. We have police officers in schools walking around who are armed.
There’s the 24/7 news cycle. STDs. We went through the AIDS crisis back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s. We hear so much about the degradation of the environment, the effects of global warming, and what that’s going to do for our future. There’s the polarity in our political scene or the polarity between people because of people being so divided in their thinking. They are so intense about it that people no longer have time to listen to each other. Kids pick up on that. They pick up on that sense of not just the polarity, but the intensity and the anger there are in adults, the culture, and the political scene. Watch what politicians are saying. It’s so angry and so disrespectful. That wasn’t the case many years ago.
I mentioned before about how lonely and isolated people are becoming. Parents have been frantically trying to get their kids on the top teams. They want their kids to be unique. They want their kids to be the best. They want their kids to have straight As. They want their kids to go to a top college, get a great job, and make a lot of money.
All that pressure about keeping up with the Joneses’ children is surpassing them. It has created a lot of angst in parents and angst in children. It’s harder for parents not to get involved. There is so much pressure for their kids to be perfect, for them to be perfect as parents, and for the kids to end up on these best teams or best colleges. It’s hard not to get our hands in there and micromanage because that’s what the standard is, supposedly.
We also talked back in the 1990s and 2000s about the crucial early years. Parents were told, “Your children’s future is at stake. If you’re not in that delivery room or you’re not bonded to your kid immediately, then your kid’s going to have a crummy outlook.” Especially since TV or TeleVision, we’ve worried about the effect of technology on our kids. That started a lot in the ‘50s.
Besides the TV, we had the internet, video games, and then social media. All those devices and things that came into our homes felt scary. They were new and scary. There are questions about, “Are these bad for our kids?” Our kids became overstimulated. The whole culture is overstimulated. That increased the whole emphasis on competition, achievement, consumerism, and sexualization of our kids.
A lot of people were worried about what that was doing to family values because our kids are getting so much information from so many places that we don’t seem to have control over. It’s not kids who are getting their values from watching their parents and listening to their parents. They’re listening to people from all over the world and every walk of life.
Parents used to rely on the wisdom of family, but with today's isolation, they're turning to external experts—often adding more stress. Share on XHere’s a quote from someone. It’s an unknown quote. It is, “Parents are confronted with an elusive quest to keep up with fellow Americans on an unknown chart called happiness. With progress dependent upon their children’s achievements from the way in which he shows up against other kids, guaranteeing insecurity all around.” That’s that race-to-nowhere concept. That’s keeping up with the Joneses’ children. It’s not about appliances, cars, or clothes. It’s about what team your kid is on, what soccer camp are they going to this summer, or what college are they going to attend.
Parents and all these concerns have caused parents to feel insecure about themselves and the job they’re doing as parents. There’s a lot of pressure on them for their kids to get a college scholarship, to get into a good college, etc. It’s so hard for parents to not get their hands in there, micromanage, and do too much. I get it. This pressure has been building for a long time and it’s gotten worse.
A lot of parents are in homes where both parents work. It’s not everybody, but a lot of parents. Parents are tired because their work follows them home. We’re never off from work. There’s less time off. I’ve talked to a lot of moms and dads who talk about how hard it is to switch off when they walk in the door at home. They talk about how hard it is to switch off that sense of, “I’m in charge of everything. I need to make sure everything’s in alignment like I do at work.” They talk about how hard it is to switch off into a different kind of pattern in the home.
I also think about a couple of other things. 9/11 happened and the whole culture was traumatized, including children and parents. It heightened our fears about our kids. Some kids were cut off from their parents that day because phones weren’t working and because of all the things that happened on that day. Kids were placed in shelters without phones because their parents may have been in one of those towers. A lot of parents, even if they weren’t directly involved, vowed that they would never let their kids be disconnected from them. The whole society was terrorized by all that.
The Overprotected Generation
Cell phones became a symbol of parental security and emotional safety. There’s this sense of having some comfort when you have a continuous connection with your kids. That has filtered down to our kids who have learned that they need a phone to feel safe and to have a constant connection with their parents. There’s a movement afoot, which I agree with, that we shouldn’t have kids having phones in school. A lot of parents’ arguments are, “What if something happened? What if there’s a school shooting?” There is fear.
Parents are like, “What if I’m going to be a little bit late picking my kid up? What if my kid wants to stay late?” There are all these arguments when the truth is it’s more safe than it was many years ago when it comes to things like abductions and kidnappings. That is a fact but we don’t act like it’s a fact because there is a kidnapping, an abduction, or something of that sort, and then it hits the news. It’s 24/7. It’s hard not to believe that everybody’s in danger everywhere at every moment, so then we hover. We’re even told by the news people, “Do not let your kids out of your sight.” How many times have parents been told that? It’s hard to let our kids be out of our sight.
Most of us growing up had a lot more freedom to be out and about than our kids have. I was down the street with my buddies. We would take our bikes miles away. We would be playing hockey in the street with kids from different neighborhoods. We were shooting BB guns and pellet guns out in the woods. We didn’t come home until dinner. We were gone all day, and we did fine.
Not only did we do fine, but we learned a lot of really important lessons out there in the world about taking care of ourselves, how to handle risk, and how to make mistakes and take responsibility for our mistakes and our actions. We learned to lead. We learned to solve our own problems. We learned to take care of ourselves, our friends, and our siblings. There’s so much good learning that happens out in the world that our kids are missing because we’re so afraid to let them out of our sight.
Being a good parent means you have to have that 360 thing and be in constant contact. It means that if I text my kid and they don’t call back within ten minutes, then I’m worried. I’m scared. I start calling all their friends. I might even call the police. It’s almost bad. That’s helicopter parenting. I get it because we’ve been inundated with fearful messages from the culture and the media.
College became the gold standard or at least college. It has become harder to get into college, especially in the last couple of years. College has become progressively more expensive. Kids have been getting the message, “You can’t just go to college. You need to go to a good college if you want to get a good job and you want to make a lot of money.” I talked about that kind of thinking in a past episode.
It’s hard for parents not to over-worry and overdo because that’s the model that they’re supposed to be following. That’s the script. It’s hard not to get in there and push your kids to get straight As or if your kid doesn’t get an A, to not call the teacher. That even includes parents who call college professors when their kids aren’t getting good grades. We have to be available. We have to be pushing and pressuring.
The Anxious Generation And The Loss Of Play
It has caused a lot of anxiety. I did an episode about how new parents seem more anxious than in previous times. Part of the argument was that not all, but many parents are having kids later. On average, it’s more like late 20s or early 30s to have their first kid. The same thing goes for marriage. It is because of that that a lot of parents, more than before, are having problems getting pregnant. It’s taking longer. Some of them have to go through in vitro fertilization. There may be a miscarriage or two there.
It ramps up the angst about children even. It’s like, “Am I going to be able to have a kid? Am I going to be able to get pregnant?” There are all kinds of worries about how if you have a child when you’re older, they’re more at risk for having issues and more at risk for having some difficulties. That’s another thing that is causing parents to hover.
Plus, we’ve got all the pressure again about, “You need to get your kid on the top club team by the time they’re 7 or 8 so that they can be in line for a college scholarship in sports, especially a college scholarship to a top college.” There’s so much pressure on kids to get straight As and for kids to be on the best teams. That pressure comes from not just parents, but it also comes from the culture. It comes from this very expensive and money-conscious youth sports industry that’s raking in billions of dollars every year by kids being involved in all those teams.
Parents have gotten a message from the culture that our kids should be happy, that they shouldn’t be anxious, and that they shouldn’t be sad. If there are any signs of any of those sorts of symptoms, we’re so quick to label, diagnose, and medicate because our kids should be happy. We haven’t taught our kids very well that those are normal emotions, things like anxiety and uncertainty. These young people I see who are going off to college are so anxious. There’s so much uncertainty about this new transition. They haven’t had the chance to cope with adversity because their parents did too much for them, because their parents were worried about their kids keeping up, and all those reasons.
It’s OK for kids to be anxious or uncertain. These are normal emotions that help them grow—but parents must resist the urge to fix everything. Share on XThere’s a book that I read called The Anxious Generation. It’s a great book. I would suggest you read it. It is by Jonathan Haidt. He talks in the book about how we started shifting from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. It means that kids used to be out and about playing in the streets, but now they spend more time on their devices.
Our kids have lost out a lot on that. Our kids are less resilient. They’re less independent. They have a hard time coping with things because they haven’t been out in the world learning how to cope with things. They haven’t been out in the world learning how to overcome adversities. Parents see that. The parents feel like they need to intervene, which makes their kids, in many ways, less resilient and more dependent upon their parents. It becomes a cycle. I can’t tell you how many high school seniors I’ve seen who tell me they don’t want to grow up. I did an episode on that in 2023. Go back and check that out.
I’ve talked before about how much information parents are getting. That has worsened with social media and the internet. You can click on anything and then there are twenty articles, and a lot of them say opposite things. Also, technology has brought the Infinite Campus where parents can follow their kids all day. It has brought them things like that 360 app where they can follow their kids and their phones all day. Our kids are given cell phones when they’re too young because parents are so afraid. They’re like, “What am I going to do if something happens? It’s not safe out there. My kid needs a phone in order to be safe.”
Understanding And Taking Charge Of Parenting
There are a lot of reasons why parents have been pushed to become helicopter parents. There are a lot of reasons and a lot of blame to go around about why parents are so scared and anxious about their parenting job, about their children, and about their children’s futures. If they’ve been given information from experts and from the educational system, it is that they need to be more involved. There are fewer kids, so it’s easier to be more involved. I was the 3rd of 8 kids in my family growing up. My parents only had so many hands. They only had four hands, so they couldn’t bestow that much attention and all that on each of us. There are eight of us. We only have 1 kid or 2 kids.
Helicopter parenting isn't just about control. It's often driven by fear, cultural pressures, and anxiety about our children's futures. Share on XWhen you’re older, if you’re a 35 or a 38-year-old parent who is more educated and more settled in your career, you have more time, perhaps, and energy to invest. With all those prescriptions for success, club teams, national championships, college scholarships, top schools, elite colleges, and all that stuff, you can see what a quagmire it is for parents. It’s so hard for parents to walk on the path that they want to walk on.
That’s one suggestion I have. I’m going to do an episode in the near future about what you can do about all this. It’s so important for parents and if their kids are old enough for their kids to form their own end in mind. The end in mind does not have to be what the culture says, what the Joneses next door are saying, what the club sports coaches and organizations are saying, or what the colleges are saying. It can be what you think, what you value, and what your kids value.
If we take charge of our end in mind for our family life and our role as parents, then we won’t have to follow the prescription to lean in to make sure our kids are at the top of the heap, the best, the most unique, the most successful, at the top grades, are going on the best team, etc. Create your own end in mind and then use that to guide your decisions about parenting.
Make sure you remind yourselves that there are reasons why you’re being pushed to helicopter, overprotect, overdue, and overindulge children. You don’t need to follow that script. Remind yourself, too, of the cost when you do of kids who don’t want to grow up, kids who are less resilient, kids who are less independent, kids who don’t have a hard time taking initiative, kids who have more anxiety, and kids whose fears a lot of times hold them back and then who end up requiring more care. It becomes a cycle.
Letting kids take risks and face challenges builds resilience. Overprotecting them creates anxiety and dependence. Share on XTake charge of your parenting philosophy. Take charge of what your family values are and then follow that script so you don’t end up helicopter parenting. I get it. I understand why we’ve ended up in this place historically. I hope this episode has helped you have a better frame of reference, but it doesn’t mean you have to follow it. Make it your home and your parenting. Do it your way.
Come back next time. I’ll be here with a brand new episode. Pass these on to your friends. Please send me some suggestions for new episode ideas. Send those ideas to my wife at Anne@DrTimJordan.com. I appreciate you taking the time to tune in to these episodes. I appreciate your feedback. I really appreciate it when you pass these on to your friends. I will see you back here with a new episode. Thanks so much for stopping by.