Are you still helicopter parenting your children? Why you should stop

“If the child is able to do it and the parent swoops in and does it for them — now it’s helicopter parenting,” says Larry Nelson, a professor of human development at Brigham Young University

in Provo, Utah. “A young adult in college should be solving their roommate problems and interviewing for a job. That’s what a parent shouldn’t be doing at that age.” Helicopter parents

haven’t learned there’s a “regular process of letting your children go,” says Elizabeth Lombardo, a Chicago-based clinical psychologist. “I have friends who are college professors who have

received emails and phone calls from parents of their students,” she says. “I have heard from colleagues whose companies are hiring and received calls or emails from the parent of an

applicant.” ​ Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco Bay Area psychologist who has written books about family estrangement, says a helicopter parent may unintentionally cause harm. “It can look

like vote of no-confidence from the perspective of the adult child. They may take a parent’s well-meaning wisdom in thinking their child doesn’t have the judgment to make these decisions for

themselves, which can damage the relationship,” says Coleman, author of the 2021 book _Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict_. While he says it’s

not unusual for parents today to provide adult children with support, including financial help, the key is whether the adult child wants it. “Estrangement can be an attempt to establish a

boundary with a parent that’s overly anxious or involved,” he says. “Sometimes children do get too much of us and need more boundaries and separation.” ​ PANDEMIC PARENTING​ When the

pandemic hit two years ago, many adult children who were living independently moved back to their parents’ home during lockdown. In some cases, they brought partners and their own children.

Parents assumed the old mindset of wanting to take care of the child, and the adult child may have enjoyed being cared for by parents again, Lombardo says. “We don’t have a practice of

renegotiating those roles, and the pandemic stuck us back in those roles without any rituals or transitions to help us negotiate the fact that our kids are now fully functioning adults,”

says Brent Roberts, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Too much intrusive parenting can be harmful and contribute to depression, anxiety, self-harm and

eating disorders in an adult child. A study of more than 20,000 college students over 32 years, published in the journal _Psychological Bulletin,_ linked the students’ rising drive toward

perfectionism to parental expectations and criticism. The study, published in March, describes the “emergence of time-intensive, demanding and controlling parenting” as a recognition of just

how immersed parents have come in their children’s lives.