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Anxious, hovering parents have come to occupy a special place in the collective imagination. We love to hate them, fear becoming them, and blame them for many of the things that worry us about late-modern life and the millennial generation. The headlines warn us: Helicopter parenting turns children into needy, emotionally fragile young adults. These assertions strike a chord, particularly among those of us who work in higher education. Even so, a brief look at history reveals that our condemnation of parents is largely misplaced. When it comes to over-parenting among the American middle class, the true culprits are several large-scale social and economic changes that have been underway for centuries.
For much of human history, we treated children like small adults. In fact, childhood as we think of it today—a period of innocence and vulnerability—did not emerge until the 17th century. Well into the 1800s, children worked right alongside adults, making invaluable contributions to household economies. We assumed that they were just as sturdy and capable as grownups, as long as they didn’t fall prey to disease.
Modernity changed everything. The rise of machine production meant that, instead of living as peasants, as most families had done for centuries, people began leaving their homes to earn a wage. We started to think of our work and family lives as belonging to separate spheres, and increasingly, our relationships to other people were governed not by religion or tradition but by cost-benefit analyses and the logic of capitalism.
In this context, sociologist Viviana Zelizer (1985) argues, children acquired a different kind of social worth. We began to see them as sacred and as existing beyond the reach of a ruthless marketplace where things are coldly bought and sold. New laws removed children from the labor force, and for middle-class and affluent whites, the mother-child relationship came to embody all of the things that modernization threatened to marginalize—virtue, innocence, warmth, love, joy, and personal connection. We also started to think of children as fragile—just as fragile, in fact, as the beliefs and traditions that modernity had stripped away. These new children needed our protection, which is why all 21st-century American parents hover, at least by pre-modern standards.
Isolation and inexperience have fueled our anxieties too, as social historian Peter Stearns’ (2003) work demonstrates. In previous eras, most people lived in big households where everyone engaged in childcare. Birth rates were high, so experience was easy to come by. With the help of grandmothers and older siblings—and servants, in the case of affluent families—parents were not children's only, or even primary, caretakers. These days, a lot of mothers and fathers go it alone, particularly when they are among the geographically-mobile middle-class. We live with our children in relative isolation, and it’s no wonder we hover; many of us had no experience with kids until we had our own.
Not coincidentally, the science of child rearing emerged in the 20th century. As Stearns (2003) explains, childhood experts have both responded and contributed to the sense that parents don’t know what they are doing. Today, the explosion of information related to children’s health and development is a core part of the helicopter parent phenomenon. Instead of reducing our anxieties, medical science draws our attention to risk but suggests that doing all of the “right” things will ensure children’s health and happiness. So we puzzle over children’s needs and try to meet them, just as the parenting manuals would have us do. We track standardized milestones and scrutinize our children’s development, all the while wondering, “Is my child normal?”
If helicopter parenting is a product of these large-scale social and economic changes, can anything be done to stop it? Most critiques imply that parents should simply change their approach, but this ignores how the urge to hover is a cultural phenomenon, not an individual one. To the extent that helicopter parenting is a problem at all, it is more useful to see it as a social one in need of social remedies. Easing middle-class parents’ anxieties requires stronger support for all families. We need experts who can help us put risk into perspective and who are trained to ease, rather than provoke, our fears. We need affordable, high-quality childcare and strong public school systems. We need workplaces that respect and accommodate the demands associated with caretaking, and we need ample job opportunities for young adults. In other words, we need communities that can lighten the load. Parents will stop hovering, I suspect, when our institutions are better designed to serve them and when raising children feels, once again, like a shared endeavor.
Themes drawn from Family Trouble: Middle-Class Parents, Children’s Problems, and the Disruption of Everyday Life (Rutgers University Press 2015).
References
- Stearns, Peter. Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
- Zelizer, Viviana A. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
