Are Helicopter Parents Dangerous?
In case you missed this raucous debate, New York Times’s Judith Warner lit into moms who are more interested in being their child’s best friend than authoritative figures. She listed plenty of examples, but jumpstarted her piece, “Helicopter Parenting Turns Deadly,” with the recent tragedy of 13-year-old Megan Meier who committed suicide after a neighbor’s mom posed as an online 16-year-old love interest. The Meier case got massive play in the national media this past week, coming as it did on the heels of a major new survey showing that up to one in three children in the United States have been harassed or bullied online. But for me the tragedy highlighted another troubling issue that threatens our homes just as steadily as poisonous online communications. That is the disturbing degree to which today’s parents — and mothers in particular — frequently lose themselves when they get caught up in trying to smooth out, or steamroll over, the social challenges faced by their children. War
