Helicopter Parents Who Delayed Their Kids Development, Now May Be Paying Cruel Price

In the brownstone next door, an adult is yelling at a child. They are screaming, but nobody else in the house is concerned. This is because one adult is the mother, and the other adult is the 25 year old son. The parents then stay up all night before heading to work in the morning, crying, arguing; trying to make sense of the pure burning rage leveled at them. They were good parents. They did their best. How could a graduate of Stuyvesant High School and Duke come home and yell that they were the worst parents ever? They gave him everything.

Everything.

“I wish I had never been born!”

The parents who wrung their hands over co-sleeping, sharing a bed or room with their child in the 90s are now blindsided by the rage of the children they tended to like hothouse flowers. The adult children of helicopter parents are coming home and they are furious. These are the parents who “red shirted” their kids and held them back a year so they would be among the oldest in their kindergarten and pre-K grades, rather than going in with other kids in their birth year. The plan was to give a lifelong academic advantage. And dads were dreaming of sports scholarships since the kids would bigger and stronger than their younger peers. From Mandarin lessons to traveling lacrosse, baseball or soccer teams, they curated the lives of their children, hoping they would go to the best high school & then the best Ivy. Nothing wrong with that. They went to college and got jobs & got married & had dual careers. They were doing just fine, thank you. They wrote whimsical books about Wine Moms now that they were finished with extended breastfeeding. So, how could they, in their loving myopic vision, know that they were handicapping their children with years of constant micro management?

The low grade anxiety thrumming though the family to meet unexamined expectations was never questioned, and the hiccups of bulimia & insomnia were treated as unrelated events. So they added tutoring. Sad Kumon. They wrote their kids’ college essays & lied about Cancer. Just a little. They tried to make their future lawyer or artist stand out from the other Sophies, even if that meant costly college advisors, therapists, IEP lawsuits, fraud, lies, and before you knew it, Upper West Side parents were as bad as the RHOBH in trying to create a perfect child. In Los Angeles they do it with a nose job & botox at 18, here they just use different types of fillers. They were overriding their children’s sense of self by injecting them with an idealized version.

“I didn’t ask to be born!”, is shocking the 1st time you hear it. Then you learn your friend’s daughter said the same. There’s far worse. ( I’d have to ask my daughter’s permission to quote her.) These are the same kids you had in your mommy’s group, maybe even the ones you were jealous of because of their Sub Zeros or second homes or Pilates body. But now you are all in the same boat, and everyone is confused & nobody is steering. What is going on?

We are witnessing a delayed teenage rebellion. Because kids were always busy busy busy with after school activities, there was little room for spontaneous interactions in which a child would call upon their own resources to respond appropriately. They were always being watched. Adults told them to play nice, so they did. Such nice kids. Unsupervised play was unheard of, and never given the gravitas it has in healthy childhood development. These children would be given every advantage & would never be in danger. Kids weren’t allowed to go anywhere on their own, and in many places, there is nowhere to “explore.” Generation X kids walked to the neighbors and to the stores to buy cigarettes for our parents. We learned to navigate the world, avoid weirdos, observe nature, get dirty, ask questions, and socialize without parental interference.

My own children were stopped by a woman in the mall one time as I watched them walk across the floor to me. Cops were called another time. I wanted to give my children the luxury of freedom; but Gen X turned into the worst of the scolds as they plastered fake smiles on and said it was in the name of safety. After 9/11, “safety” was the reason given to allow cell phones in school. As a parent, I was incensed. This was a Trojan horse for steamroller parents to monitor their kids 24/7. Cell phone abuse has castrated this generation of young adults, who have internalized constant surveillance. Just stop texting. Every message is a reminder of the years of putting your needs above theirs by “just checking in.”

If you’re Gen X, you didn’t have to go home until the street lights went on, and nobody knew where you were. Yet my generation turned into parents who don’t let their kids walk 3 blocks home from school. Helicopter Parenting combined with the umbilical cord of cell phones destroyed any hope of a child going through the natural stages of growth. Lenore Skenazy, a peer and a hero, advocated for Free Range Children, and my 1998 business cards at Boing Boing said, “Let them climb trees. Let them fall. We cannot bubblewrap the world.” But we did. We ignored the freedom and joys of our own youth, and the whole merrily sloppily slipping world around us, and kept our children tightly swaddled until they left the house. Now they have broken out of their restraints, and are outraged and bewildered.

The overprotectiveness that allowed parents to “manage” their kids turned out to not be in their best interests. Ordinarily, adolescence is a time to rebel & reject the parents while seeking out independence. This used to be when teenagers yelled F U to their parents, and were then hugging the next day because stable loving parents allowed a child to lose control & still feel safe. Testing boundaries, listening to music their parents hate, and questioning authority are healthy teenage behaviors. However, these teenagers’ years were a combination of intense hyper parental involvement, ego meshing, and control. Only after they left the house could they start to question their parents without feeling guilty. We are witnessing a delayed teenage rebellion that should have happened 10 years earlier. Now, 25 year olds are roaring to life, and are ready to fight against whatever you’ve given them. Even if it’s a car. Even if you are still paying their rent, they hate you for it. My advice is do not take it personally. Let them rage at you, and see them as the hurt child they are. They were given everything. Except a sense of self.

(If your teen is listening to Norwegian Death Core rather than RHCP, you’re doing good.)