Helicopter Parenting

(I know, I know. I don't know why it always happens that I threaten not to blog for awhile and suddenly find inspiration for a few more posts. Weak willed I s'pose --like half my countrymen, I am tempted to say. But that would be succumbing to post-election blues, which would be wrong.)

This morning's WaTi brings us the tale of hovering parents who accompany their kids to job fairs & interviews, doing all the leg-work for them.

It's the next phase in helicopter parenting, a term coined for those who have hovered over their children's lives from kindergarten to college. Now they are inserting themselves into their children's job searches -- and school officials and employers say it's a problem that may be hampering some young people's careers.

"It has now reached epidemic proportions," says Michael Ellis, director of career and life education at Delaware Valley College, a small private school in Doylestown, Pa.

That reminded me of a column in this month's Women's Day (Yes, I broke down and bought it. I admit it. Happy? I am very weak this time of year when it comes to resisting holiday magazine cover food porn; they make me not want to think about politics or culture -- just want to roast things and bake bread.) It's not online (here's the author's website), but the theme is how unpleasant hovering moms make the playground these days. I thought I was the only one harboring this kind of thought for instance.

I recently watched a mom stride over and inject herself into a perfectly normal bicker over who would go down the slide first. "I just like a stress-free playground," she said afterwards to the grownups watching her. Funny, it was stress-free, until she'd started haranguing the kids.

Here's the kicker:

Isn't it ironic that we all want our children to be fit, imaginative, independent, strong, brave and socially adroit, and then we discourage them from doing activities that build those very traits?

Play is practice. Inhibit the play, they don't get the practice, and then you wind up with an adult equivalent of my son's version of Bach's Minuet 3. (Needs work.)

In some strange way, this helicopter parenting phenomenon seems related to this Mark Steyn piece on Canada. As part of a broader point he tells the tale of two groups of Canadian soldiers:

In the spring of 2002, four soldiers with the Patricias were killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire—i.e., the Yanks—and the nation went into a week of deeply unbecoming Dianysian grief-mongering. “If Canadian troops cannot be certain that they’re not going to be fired on by Americans, we have no business being there,” huffed Svend Robinson, every jihadist’s favourite gay infidel. … Alexa McDonough, meanwhile, declared she felt a “sense of rage” that Canadians were being “taken for granted” by Washington.
Actually, they weren’t. In that very week, there was another story (all but unreported, except by the National Post) about a quintet of PPCLI snipers to whom the United States government wished to award Bronze Stars because they were so impressively lethal at, er, killing the enemy. Horrified at what might happen if it got out that our boys still, you know, shot at people, the Canadian government put the proposal on hold until they could figure out a way to fob the Pentagon off with an offer to get the deputy lieutenant-governor of Nunavut to present the medals at a quiet ceremony on an ice floe in Queen Maud Gulf circa 2012.

It's like helicopter governing (although PM Harper seems to have some "Momfidence" as the columnist puts it). Curtsy: ninme.