Best Practice

Dealing with the helicopter parents

Helicopter parents are those that micro-manage their children’s lives and continually demand success. But research is showing the negative impact that this is having on young people. Karen Sullivan explains

David Hanson, the chief executive of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, claims that anxious parents are breeding a generation of “clueless” children, who never experience any physical risks. He suggests that they are damaging children by living “precariously through their achievements” and by adding unnecessary pressures in academic and extra-curricular activities. And he’s right.

While there is a great deal of under and even absent parenting going on across the socio-economic strata in every school, the group to which he refers, the “helicopter” parents, run a real risk of damaging their children’s development, self-esteem, ability to cope and to develop resilience in the “real world” that exists around and after the secondary years.

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