Helicopter Parenting: Definition, Examples, & Effects​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
Helicopter parenting is when parents do for their children what the children can and should do for themselves. What are the consequences for these children?​
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A couple years ago, I taught a concurrent enrollment class at a charter school—a college-level course that enterprising students could take to get started early on their college education. One of the school counselors took me aside before the class began to encourage me to keep parents out of the equation as much as possible. Because this was a college course, she told me, I was to communicate about any issues in class as directly with the students as possible; 
they were responsible for their performance in class, not their parents.

I felt a wave of relief being told this, because I had heard many tales from other graduate students and faculty members about “those” parents—the ones who seemed more invested in their children’s grades than the children did themselves. I had been working with children as therapy clients for a couple years and was already aware of how overly involved parents could be in sensitive matters. And I had dated a private school teacher for several years, hearing plenty of stories about how many parents felt entitled to interfere in their children’s education. But I intend to keep teaching, and I know it’s only a matter of time before I encounter a true helicopter parent, so let’s look together at what the science has to say about helicopter parenting. Maybe I’ll even figure out how to draw healthy boundaries with this kind of parent.
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What Is Helicopter Parenting? (A Definition)​

Helicopter parenting is the act of being too involved in a child’s daily life or too protective against any potentially unpleasant or negative experiences they may have (Reed et al., 2016). The term originated with the image of this kind of parent “hovering” over their child like a helicopter, giving them few opportunities to operate independently.

What aspects of parenting make it helicopter parenting? Helicopter parents are usually distinguished by three key traits in their parenting: They are highly involved, they are highly controlling, and they do little to encourage their children to behave autonomously (Padilla-Walker & Nelson, 2012). Rather than letting their children find their own way, these parents swoop in to solve problems, make decisions, and guide many aspects of their children’s daily lives (Reed et al., 2016).
 
A key characteristic of these parenting behaviors is that they are focused on activities or behaviors that the child should be developmentally prepared to do (Segrin et al., 2015). For example, it is appropriate for a parent to intervene when two three-year-olds are fighting in the sandbox, but jumping in when the children are nine-year-olds might deprive the children of a chance to exercise the problem-solving and conflict resolution skills they have developed by this age. Rather than supporting the child in utilizing these skills, this kind of helicopter parenting sends the message that the child may not, or should not, be able to handle the situation themselves.
 
Some of the key behaviors involved in helicopter parenting are information-seeking, direct intervention, and autonomy limiting (Luebbe et al., 2018). It may be easiest to see how these behaviors would manifest by thinking about an academic setting. For example, a parent might, after learning that their child received a grade they consider unsatisfactory, contact the student’s teacher directly. This could take the form of simply asking for information about why the child received that grade, forbidding the child to discuss it with the teacher, or asking the teacher directly to reconsider the grade given.
 
To return to an idea stated earlier, these behaviors could be appropriate in certain settings. If they occur when the child in question is a college student, however, they are likely not appropriate. A college student should be able to, or be learning to, advocate for their own academic performance; a parent should only be involved if there is a gross violation of rights or boundaries.
 
The impacts of helicopter parenting are felt at several levels (Odenweller et al., 2014). Children of helicopter parents struggle to develop a healthy sense of themselves as independent thinkers and doers, families experience strain and conflict, and high schools and colleges have to figure out policies for handling the involvement of parents where they should not be involved.

Opposite of Helicopter Parenting​

Would it surprise you if I said that psychologists have a term for the opposite of helicopter parenting? (We can think of a name for almost anything.) The opposite of helicopter parenting is called autonomy supportive parenting (Soenens et al., 2007). Instead of trying to control a child’s life, a parent engaged in autonomy support focuses on giving their child the tools to handle things independently and make their own decisions.
 
There are two components to this opposite of helicopter parenting: promotion of independence and promotion of volitional functioning (Soenens et al., 2007). This means giving children control of their own decisions and encouraging them to take those opportunities to exercise their skills. Children who get the opposite of helicopter parenting learn that it is good and safe and appropriate for them to independently problem-solve and pursue what matters to them. To take the example of the bad grade that we looked at just now, autonomy support might take the form of a parent saying, “If you aren’t satisfied with the grade you got, what would you like to do about it? Do you want help coming up with ideas, or do you want to figure it out on your own?”

Benefits of Helicopter Parenting

There are few clear benefits to helicopter parenting, as you might have guessed by now (Reed et al., 2016). We will dive into that research in just a moment. Could helicopter parenting ever be helpful? One study suggests that if students are really struggling, such as with heavy drinking, then enlisting helicopter parents to provide intensive support may be helpful (Earle & Labrie, 2016).

Negative Effects of Helicopter Parenting

The vast majority of research on helicopter parenting has focused on its negative outcomes, so I will try not to overwhelm you with the bad news. First off, we know that helicopter parenting is associated with less prosocial and empathic behavior from the children who receive it (McGinley, 2018). What does this mean? The researchers think that helicopter parenting sends the message to children that their own needs must be far and away the most important factor in any situation, which would make them less likely to show care for others.
 
Second, one interesting study found that the more helicopter parenting a young adult received, the longer they expected to delay getting married and the more advantages they saw to being single (Willoughby et al., 2015). This would suggest that, at a minimum, being the recipient of helicopter parenting changes the way young adults think about whether they want to be committed to a partner. I would speculate that the idea of having to give up more autonomy to a partner is not appealing if you feel that you are at the mercy of your parents’ interference in your life.
 
Third, it is clear that helicopter parents give their children reduced opportunities to develop decision-making skills (Segrin et al., 2015). At the same time, they are limited in their chances to develop skills that support decision-making, such as emotion regulation, using coping mechanisms, and seeing oneself as capable (Reed et al., 2016). Indeed, research suggests that it is the lack of self-control skills that explains the link between helicopter parenting and poorer school outcomes (Love et al., 2020). This seems to be particularly damaging for people in young adulthood, as they have reached a developmental stage when independence is particularly important and the stakes for not being independent have increased.
 
Perhaps the most reliable finding is that, although helicopter parents expect that their parenting will result in better school outcomes, the opposite is usually the case (Schiffrin & Liss, 2017). Children who receive helicopter parenting may become more avoidant of learning, be motivated less by internal factors, and show more perfectionism than children who don’t receive helicopter parenting; not surprisingly, their grades suffer at the same time.
 
If all this evidence wasn’t enough for you, you can watch this video on the long-term outcomes of helicopter parenting:

Video: Long-Term Risks of Helicopter Parenting

Types of Helicopter Parents​

Not all helicopter parenting is the same. When parents are more controlling and limit the autonomy of their children more, their children do worse (Luebbe et al., 2018), but when parents are highly involved in less controlling ways but maintain high levels of warmth toward their children, the effects of helicopter parenting are not as bad. In other words, high parental involvement is not always a bad thing, unless it involves controlling and autonomy-limiting behaviors.

Causes of Helicopter Parenting

Okay, helicopter parenting isn’t good, clearly, so why do parents do it? The simple answer is that some parents feel very compelled to prevent bad outcomes and to promote good ones (Rousseau & Scharf, 2018). For a variety of reasons, it may feel intolerable for them not to intervene to assure these outcomes. For example, pride may compel a father to ensure that his son is doing all he can to join the right college fraternity, or anxiety may motivate a mother to remind her daughter with ADHD to use and check her school planner each day.
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Parents may not trust that their children can develop these skills or use them reliably on their own. So instead of bearing the uncertainty of leaving their child in charge of the outcome, the parent intervenes.

Examples of Helicopter Parenting

Believe it or not, an important example of helicopter parenting comes from the workplace, where young adults are still influenced by their helicopter parents (Gomes & Deuling, 2019). The more involved parents are in trying to manage their adult children’s workplace performance, the less committed to and satisfied with their jobs those children are.
 
One of the most common ways parents engage in helicopter parenting is through contacting their children by cell phone (Kelly et al., 2017). The children of helicopter parents are more avoidant and report more family conflict as their parents contact them more often by phone.

Psychology of Helicopter Parenting

Although helicopter parenting can create poorer outcomes on several levels, it also may sometimes result in family members feeling closer to each other (Hesse et al., 2018). To the extent that parents are positive and affectionate when engaging in helicopter parenting, they may cause their children to feel supported and helped—which can perpetuate the patterns in the family.
 
There are also some cultural differences in helicopter parenting. For example, one study found that helicopter parenting looks somewhat different when parents in China are compared to parents in the United States (Hwang et al., 2022). Children of these parents may be differently affected by the same behaviors depending on what culture they live in too.

Does Helicopter Parenting Cause Anxiety?

It seems likely that helicopter parenting causes anxiety; at the very least, anxiety levels are higher among children who receive this kind of parenting (Cui et al., 2019). It remains unclear whether parents cause anxiety by engaging in helicopter parenting, however (Vigdal & Brønnick, 2022); it is possible that parents also respond to their children’s anxiety by becoming overly involved in parenting.

Articles Related to Helicopter Parenting​

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Helicopter Parenting​

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Helicopter Parenting​

Parents can learn to disengage from their helicopter parenting ways, and this is associated with better outcomes for their children (Hwang & Jung, 2022). It may be most helpful for both the child and the parent to learn together about how these dynamics are unhealthy. The instincts that motivate helicopter parenting can often be good, and they can be acted on safely in isolation; for example, parents who seek lots of information but allow their children to make their own decisions may not cause nearly as much damage (Luebbe et al., 2018).
 
I hope this article has helped you understand some of the nuances and background of helicopter parenting. It is perfectly natural for parents to want to be this involved, but the more they can restrain themselves, the better it will be for their children. Any parent who finds this especially challenging might want to seek help from a therapist who specializes in addressing parenting challenges.

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