Helicopter Parenting: Causing the Harm You're Trying to Prevent
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If you're like many parents around the country, you're doing your best. Trying to make sure that your child or teen is keeping up with their school and making good choices seems like a good thing. However, in some situations, doing so can be detrimental to your goals. In other words, in trying to keep your teen in school and from doing drugs, you could be encouraging them to act out. To learn more about how
helicopter parenting can be bad for your teen, contact Stonewater Adolescent Recovery Center today.
What is Helicopter Parenting?
You're hovering over me! is an outrage most parents are familiar with. Watching a child transition through age is a complicated time for parents. Our watchful eyes have to be adjusted. We're no longer there to catch every fall, help with every assignment, and dry every tear. For some parents, this results in codependent behavior. Others fall into a new and particularly troubling identity: helicopter parents. Helicopters hover. It is what they are designed to do. Like a bird catching the right current of air, a helicopter can essentially stand still above its target. " Helicopter parenting" is a term that describes parents who hover over their children. These parents are probing, inquiring, investigating, and generally being controlling. The trouble is that helicopter parents lose their sense of appropriate and healthy boundaries when they become afraid of losing their children. Unknowingly, they begin to push their children away. Most problematically, they wear on their children's mental health, according to The Big Think .Why Helicopter Parenting is Not the Best Option
Developing life skills in an important factor in developing the autonomy and self-esteem each child needs to evolve into a healthy, happy, and independent adult. The article cites How To Raise An Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims, The data emerging about the mental health of our kids only confirms the harm done by asking so little of them when it comes to life skills, yet so much of them when it comes to adhering to the academic plans we've made for them. Helicopter parents tend to become obsessed with the surface details of their child's life, as though grades and building a resume is more important than their feelings and well being. These constricting forms of parenting come with serious psychological consequences, the article explains. Not only are they a severe life-skills retardant, but also extreme levels of parental control correlate to mental health problems for college-age kids. Many reports have pinpointed helicopter parenting as a major cause of mental illness and an inability to cope with responsibility, which is colloquially referred to as adulting. Children of helicopter parents turn into angst-filled adolescents who might display symptoms of poor mental health. In an effort to please their overbearing parents, children might self-harm or self-destruct in unobvious ways. Stifling under the pressure, when they reach college, many participate in extreme disorders. This behavior can lead to substance use, eating disorders, depression, or anxiety. Some areas of the US where there are high academic expectations have seen repeated clusters of adolescent suicide.Get Help For Your Teen at Stonewater Adolescent Recovery Center
Confronting responsibility for a child's mental illness is challenging for parents who wanted nothing but the best for their child. Healing substance use and family trauma is part of the recovery process at Stonewater Adolescent Recovery Center. We founded our center upon the healing experience of recovery as a family. We know it's possible for everyone to recover. Call us today for more information on our treatment programs for adolescent substance use and family therapy programming. Contact Stonewater Adolescent Recovery Center today to get more information about our residential treatment center.
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