Helicopter Parents Quotes

Helicopter parents. Before I started at Pirriwee Public, I thought it was an exaggeration, this thing about parents being overly involved with their kids. I mean, my mum and dad loved me, they were, like, interested in me when I was growing up in the nineties, but they weren't, like, obsessed with me.

He could tell Big Tag was going to be a helicopter parent. An Apache attack helicopter parent.

Checking in on what our kids are doing online isn't helicoptering, it's parenting.

Children are not born for the benefit of their parents, neither are they the property of their family. Children belong to the future.

The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.

In particular, our culture focuses almost entirely on one aspect of the parent-child relationship. That’s control—how much control the parent exerts over the child, and how much control the child tries to exert over the parent. The most common parenting “styles” all revolve around control. Helicopter parents exert maximal control. Free-range parents exert minimal. Our culture thinks either the adult is in control or the child is in control.

Some kids tell me their parents are never at home. How I wish. I never have a minute to myself, except in my room. Our back yard is no escape. Every time I sit by the pool, Mom is at the kitchen window doing this and that. Always watching.

10 ways to raise a wild child. Not everyone wants to raise wild, free thinking children. But for those of you who do, here's my tips: 1. Create safe space for them to be outside for a least an hour a day. Preferable barefoot & muddy. 2. Provide them with toys made of natural materials. Silks, wood, wool, etc...Toys that encourage them to use their imagination. If you're looking for ideas, Google: 'Waldorf Toys'. Avoid noisy plastic toys. Yea, maybe they'll learn their alphabet from the talking toys, but at the expense of their own unique thoughts. Plastic toys that talk and iPads in cribs should be illegal. Seriously! 3. Limit screen time. If you think you can manage video game time and your kids will be the rare ones that don't get addicted, then go for it. I'm not that good so we just avoid them completely. There's no cable in our house and no video games. The result is that my kids like being outside cause it's boring inside...hah! Best plan ever! No kid is going to remember that great day of video games or TV. Send them outside! 4. Feed them foods that support life. Fluoride free water, GMO free organic foods, snacks free of harsh preservatives and refined sugars. Good oils that support healthy brain development. Eat to live! 5. Don't helicopter parent. Stay connected and tuned into their needs and safety, but don't hover. Kids like adults need space to roam and explore without the constant voice of an adult telling them what to do. Give them freedom! 6. Read to them. Kids don't do what they are told, they do what they see. If you're on your phone all the time, they will likely be doing the same thing some day. If you're reading, writing and creating your art (painting, cooking...whatever your art is) they will likely want to join you. It's like Emilie Buchwald said, "Children become readers in the laps of their parents (or guardians)." - it's so true! 7. Let them speak their truth. Don't assume that because they are young that you know more than them. They were born into a different time than you. Give them room to respectfully speak their mind and not feel like you're going to attack them. You'll be surprised what you might learn. 8. Freedom to learn. I realize that not everyone can homeschool, but damn, if you can, do it! Our current schools system is far from the best ever. Our kids deserve better. We simply can't expect our children to all learn the same things in the same way. Not every kid is the same. The current system does not support the unique gifts of our children. How can they with so many kids in one classroom. It's no fault of the teachers, they are doing the best they can. Too many kids and not enough parent involvement. If you send your kids to school and expect they are getting all they need, you are sadly mistaken. Don't let the public school system raise your kids, it's not their job, it's yours! 9. Skip the fear based parenting tactics. It may work short term. But the long term results will be devastating to the child's ability to be open and truthful with you. Children need guidance, but scaring them into listening is just lazy. Find new ways to get through to your kids. Be creative! 10. There's no perfect way to be a parent, but there's a million ways to be a good one. Just because every other parent is doing it, doesn't mean it's right for you and your child. Don't let other people's opinions and judgments influence how you're going to treat your kid. Be brave enough to question everything until you find what works for you. Don't be lazy! Fight your urge to be passive about the things that matter. Don't give up on your kid. This is the most important work you'll ever do. Give it everything you have.

If God were a helicopter parent, our sacred book would be full of clear, consistent, unambiguous information to take in. In other words, it wouldn’t look anything like it does. But if the Bible’s main purpose is to form us, to grow us to maturity, to teach us the sacred responsibility of communing with the Spirit by walking the path of wisdom, it would leave plenty of room for pondering, debating, thinking, and the freedom to fail. And that is what it does.

The one to whom nothing was refused, whose tears were always wiped away by an anxious mother, will not abide being offended. —De Ira 2.21.6

How well you do things should be incidental, not integral, to the way you regard yourself.

We have practically been conditioned to expect God to be our helicopter parent. And if for some reason we don’t run to God to solve every little problem, from finding our car keys to deciding on color schemes for the nursery, we are told there is something deeply wrong with us spiritually. Phooey.

Both kinds of parenting, finally, are forms of overidentification. The helicopter parent turns the child into an instrument of her will. The overindulgent parent projects his own need for limitless freedom and security. In either case, the child is made to function as an extension of somebody else.

The attempt to prevent our kids from struggling for fear it might scar their permanent records is, instead, scarring them for life.

Generation X women, who as children lacked cell phones and helicopter parents, came up relying on our own wits. To keep ourselves safe, we took control. We worked hard and made lists and tried to do everything all at once for a very long time without much help. We took responsibility for ourselves--and later we also took responsibility for our work or partners or children or parents. We should be proud of ourselves.

our society seems to have become ever more risk-averse, full of helicopter parents who try to shield their children from all risks—which is impossible—rather than purposefully exposing them to reasonable risks.

Modern-Day Parenting is no joke. For starters, no one takes you seriously unless you have a fancy parenting style. Tiger Mom, Helicopter Mom, Organic Mom and on and on. I've decided to go with L-Board Mom. I may look like I don't know what I'm doing but you want to keep safe distance 'cause you know I can hurt you and get away with it.

We’re told that parents push their children too hard to excel (by ghostwriting their homework and hiring tutors, and demanding that they triumph over their peers), but also that parents try to protect kids from competition (by giving trophies to everyone), that expectations have declined, that too much attention is paid to making children happy. Similarly, young adults are described as self-satisfied twits—more pleased with themselves than their accomplishments merit—but also as being so miserable that they’re in therapy. Or there’s an epidemic of helicopter parenting, even though parents are so focused on their gadgets that they ignore their children. The assumption seems to be that readers will just nod right along, failing to note any inconsistencies, as long as the tone is derogatory and the perspective is traditionalist.

I’m all about safety, but kids need some risk in their lives to stimulate their minds, hone their individuality, and encourage their creativity. The era of helicopter parenting has gone too far. I let mine take a few bumps and knocks, free-range, and learn a little bit about risk from a young age.

Gap years should be the norm, not the exception. An increasingly ugly secret of campus life is that a mix of helicopter parenting and social media has rendered many 18-year-olds unfit for college. Ninety percent of kids who defer and take a gap year return to college and are more likely to graduate, with better grades.

They're arguing for giving homework and tests to all young children, or separating them into winners and losers, because these tykes need to get used to such things -- as if exposure itself will inoculate them against the negative effects they would otherwise experience later. If we were interested in helping children to anticipate and deal with unpleasant experiences, it might make sense to discuss the details with them and perhaps guide them through role-playing exercises. But why would we subject kids to those experiences? After all, to teach children how to handle a fire emergency, we talk to them about the dangers of smoke inhalation and advise them where to go when the alarm sounds. We don't actually set them on fire. But the key point is this: From a developmental perspective, BGUTI [Better-Get-Used-To-It worldview] is flat-out wrong. People don't get better at coping with unhappiness because they were because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young On the contrary, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the real world is to experience success and joy, to feel supported and respected, to receive loving guidance and unconditional care and the chance to have some say about what happens to them.

Checking in on what our kids are doing online isn't 'helicoptering,' it's 'parenting.

The gift of faith given to your children will last longer than any monetary gift.

Our Heavenly Father has created a blessing just for you every day.

If we give our children everything, we deprive them of aspirations.

What parents needed, I believed, wasn't another book about how they had to calm down and take a break. What they needed was an actual break from the deluge of parenting books.

Favorite Quote: The left single-quote

There is literally no way to prepare for parenthood. You can read all the books and make a schedule and love that little person more than you ever thought possible, but being a parent will still gut you. Your kid will say they hate you, they’ll projectile vomit in your face, they’ll have friends you don’t like or they won’t have enough friends and you’ll worry. You’ll never be sure if you should push them harder or whether you need to back off. You won’t know whether to follow your instincts or do what everyone else is doing. You will never be fully relaxed again.

I have no problem with being fabulous. My problem comes when you won't allow yourself to be an ordinary woman with a decent apartment and an okay job. When only the mom is allowed to be boring—because her life is so rich with meaning. When I carefully choreographed the story of how amazing I was, I was acting like one of those helicopter parents—you know, the ones who refuse to admit that their Jackson might suck at math or Stella might not be the world's greatest violinist. 'You are special! You are special!' they cry to their children, hoping this will boost their confidence. But the real message is one of panic: You must be special. Ordinary is not okay. When I walked into a party projecting the Shiny Girl—she of the lighthearted flings and glitzy job—I was essentially doing the same thing.

Another sister had worked at Tulane Hospital in downtown New Orleans. Tulane was also dark, hot, and surrounded by water, but officials at its parent corporation, HCA, had been proactive about arranging for private helicopters and buses to rescue patients, employees, and their families, betting correctly that government assets would prove insufficient. The process of an orderly if slow evacuation had kept panic at bay. She knew of no patients who had died at Tulane. This sister was able to laugh and joke about her experiences.

Helicopter parenting is a big problem today. We never want our children to fail, and we’ll do almost anything to prevent it from happening. In doing so, we are allowing them to take that elevator to top, only to have them find out later that, in the real world, there is no elevator to success. We don’t allow our children to take the stairs, neglecting the fact that we won’t be around forever to pick them up when they fall, or to keep them from falling altogether. When they have to climb the stairs themselves, their legs don’t have the strength.

The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom [helicopter parent]….They try to eliminate the trial and error from children's lives and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (parent-compatible) maps of reality. They are good students, but nerds--that is, they are like computers, except slower. Further, they are totally untrained to handle ambiguity….Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living.

Deferral of gratification may be an effect, not a cause. Just because some children were more effective than others at distracting themselves from [the marshmallow in the famous Marshmallow Test] doesn't mean this capacity was responsible for the impressive results found ten years later. Instead, both of these things may have been due to something about their home environment. If that's true, there's no reason to believe that enhancing children's ability to defer gratification would be beneficial: It was just a marker, not a cause. By way of analogy, teenagers who visit ski resorts over winter break probably have a superior record of being admitted to the Ivy League. Should we therefore hire consultants to teach low-income children how to ski in order to improve the odds that colleges will accept them?

Most people who refer to an epidemic of permissive parenting just assume that this is true, that everyone knows it, and therefore that there's no need to substantiate that claim. My efforts to track down data -- by combing both scholarly and popular databases as well as sending queries to leading experts in the field -- have yielded absolutely nothing. I'm forced to conclude that no one has any idea how many parents could be considered permissive, how many are punitive, and how many are responsive to their children's needs without being permissive or punitive. (The tendency to overlook that third possibility is a troubling and enduring trend in its own right.) In short, there is absolutely no evidence to support the claim that permissiveness is the dominant style of parenting in our culture, or even that it's particularly common.

Do we really want to condemn as excessive the use of safety helmets, car seats, playgrounds designed so kids will be less likely to crack their skulls, childproof medicine bottles, and baby gates at the top of stairs? One writer criticizes "the inappropriateness of excessive concern in low-risk environments," but of course reasonable people disagree about what constitutes both "excessive" and "low risk." Even if, as this writer asserts, "a young person growing up in a Western middle-class family is safer today than at any time in modern history," the relevance of that relative definition of safety isn't clear. Just because fewer people die of disease today than in medieval times doesn't mean it's silly to be immunized. And perhaps young people are safer today because of the precautions that some critics ridicule.

My huge generalities touched on millennials’ oversensitivity, their sense of entitlement, their insistence that they were always right despite sometimes overwhelming proof to the contrary, their failure to consider anything within its context, their joint tendencies of overreaction and passive-aggressive positivity—incidentally, all of these misdemeanors happening only sometimes, not always, and possibly exacerbated by the meds many this age had been fed since childhood by overprotective, helicopter moms and dads mapping their every move. These parents, whether tail-end baby boomers or Gen Xers, now seemed to be rebelling against their own rebelliousness because they felt they’d never really been loved by their own selfish narcissistic true-boomer parents, and who as a result were smothering their kids and not teaching them how to deal with life’s hardships about how things actually work: people might not like you, this person will not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it’s hard to be good at something, your days will be made up of failure and disappointment, you’re not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die. And the response from Generation Wuss was to collapse into sentimentality and create victim narratives, instead of grappling with the cold realities by struggling and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist.

In my conversations and reading I often find humility seems to be a source of generational conflict. One of the difficulties older generations encounter when dealing with younger generations is the latter’s apparent lack of humility. The young have come of age in an era where it was common for their parents to not allow them to make mistakes, self-inflicted or otherwise. Because this group has never been allowed to fail, they have seldom been humbled. Failure can be the most important catalyst of humility. The helicopter parent has sacrificed the invaluable lifelong lessons of humility at the altar of building unendurable self esteem. When real life hits such poor children the results are often a stubborn inability to recognize they have failed and stunning lack of means to deal with their failure.               The first time they are humbled can be traumatic. Sometimes this results in drama between the triad of parent, player and coach with the coach expecting player humility, while the player and parent expect automatic success. In these situations it is important to eliminate anger and frustration and try to resolve the conflict. Unfortunately, and ironically, a lack of humility by any or all of these parties can get in the way of such resolution.

When this job feels overwhelming, remind yourself that one day you will die!

So, what is the opposite of a "helicopter parent?" I wonder. A subway parent? A Sinking ship parent? A hibernating bear?

Good tennis players are those who beat other tennis players, and a good shot during play is one the opponent can't return. But that's not a truth about life or excellence -- it's a truth about tennis. We've created an artificial structure in which one person can't succeed without doing so at someone else's expense, and then we accuse anyone who prefers other kinds of activities of being naive because "there can be only one best -- you're it or you're not," as the teacher who delivered that much-admired you're-not-special commencement speech declared. You see the sleight of hand here? The question isn't whether everyone playing a competitive game can win or whether every student can be above average. Of course they can't. The question that we're discouraged from asking is why our games are competitive -- or our students are compulsively ranked against one another -- in the first place.

I’m hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. In hundreds of books and articles this problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued, and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and, my personal favorite, the kindergarchy.

Learning to love unconditionally sometimes means that we must let go to allow God to guide the situation and love through us, especially when we don't know what to do, even if we don't like the consequence.

There is hope in the challenge.

When we learn to loosen our grip and leave our own beaten path, accepting his perfect plan, we give God the opportunity to be our navigator as he reveals the beauty of his creation.

Historians have shown that "parents in the Middle Ages worried about their kids no less than we worry about ours today," and by the nineteenth century there is evidence of bars being placed on windows to protect toddlers from falling out as well as "leading strings so that young children wouldn't wander off during walks.

We have a Creator, a Father who is hands-on and loves us unconditionally!

Taking time to create memories will stamp moments that will forever be etched on your heart and on the hearts of your children.

Letting go is hard for me. I have spent too many anxious moments and sleepless nights in worry over what would happen if I let go. Much like being part of a search-and-rescue effort, I would find myself always searching for the unexpected spins in life while preparing to rescue the outcome.

I found a list of 135 people who created and revised the Common Core Standards. In all, only seven of the 135 members were actual classroom teachers and no one was a K-3 classroom teacher or had any training in early childhood education.[23]

Millions have been spent on Chromebooks for the mere purpose of taking the PARCC test, a test that 15 states have recently dropped. Meanwhile, we are told that there is a budget crisis and, once again, teachers are warned of frozen salaries and higher rates for health insurance. Due to budget cuts, there are already much larger class sizes and fewer guidance counselors, social workers, teachers’ assistants, librarians, psychologists, social workers, special education teachers, reading specialists, and security guards.

Many parents have gone from helicopter parents to lawnmower parents. Instead of preparing the child for the path, we prepared the path for the child.

In an era when the mothers and fathers of privileged children are cast as helicopter parents, chastised for protecting their offspring from even the most mundane slights and injuries, children who end up in the juvenile detention system are essentially handed over to the wolves. Adolescent risk taking is both normative and developmentally vital. But in these children we punish it, and we do so with particular ruthlessness in children of color.

Please note that the Gallup-documented changes in trust did not flow from the verifiable truth or falsity of the content. In the bubble, facts are no match for belief. There is no Democrat Party child-sex ring being operated out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, and never was. There is no fleet of UN black helicopters poised to invade the capitals of the world and steal their sovereignty, and never was. There was no U.S. military operation under the Obama administration to overthrow Texas and jail patriots in a vacant Walmart (I’m pretty sure we already have Texas, don’t we?). There was no George W. Bush administration plot to blow up the Twin Towers on 9/11 as a false-flag operation. There was no fake moon landing. Baby Barack Obama was born in a Honolulu, Hawaii, hospital, just as the birth certificate and contemporaneous newspaper announcements said. And at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, having already shot his own mother to death, Adam Lanza murdered twenty children and six adults. It was not a hoax. No matter what that asshole Alex Jones or his addled followers believe, the victims’ grieving parents were not “crisis actors” in a plot to undermine the Second Amendment. It was a fucking massacre conducted with a fucking assault rifle such as the fucking NRA has fought for decades to be readily available.

In an age of helicopter parenting, Christian parents should know better than to constantly hover over their children in an attempt to mitigate potential risks and mistakes. Living life involves inevitable risks, and Christian parents must teach their children to take self-sacrificial, calculated risks for the glory of Christ and the good of others.

The first people who come for us will likely be the kidnappers. It’d be safer to get to a phone and call our parents.” Everyone looked around. The mainland was a dark blob on the eastern horizon. To the west was Vancouver Island. About a kilometer of water separated the two. “Umm…” Corey began. “Not to question your judgment, buddy, but that’s a bit of a swim. The water’s damned cold. I bashed my knee good in the crash, and I’m not the only one who’s hurting. I get what you’re saying, but the pilot’s radio seemed to be out, so they won’t know where we are. If we light a fire, someone out boating might see us.” “That’s a good idea,” Sam said. “Or it would be. If we had matches to light a fire. Or if anyone was actually out boating.” “Why don’t we just find a place to hide?” Hayley said. “That way, when someone does come, we can see if it’s a real rescue or not.” “How the hell are you going to tell the difference?” Sam said. “Ask them? And no one’s going to find the crash site. You know why? There is no crash site.” She pointed out over the empty water. When the helicopter had dropped over the ledge, it had disappeared. Only a few small pieces of debris floated, already being dispersed by the tide.

So, Maya, do you want to know the big secret? What you really are?” “Of course she does,” Daniel said. “Good.” Moreno flashed a smile. “Then this is where we begin negotiations. You two lead me back to that cabin and let me call my associates. We’ll take you someplace safe and tell you everything you need to know.” “Um, right,” I said. “We’ve escaped a helicopter crash, trekked through the forest all night, and captured you. But that was just for fun. Time to stop goofing off and turn ourselves in.” “Do your parents let you get away with talking to adults like that?” “Only when those adults treat me like an idiot.

A 2011 study by Terri LeMoyne and Tom Buchanan at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga looking at more than three hundred students found that a student with “hovering” or “helicopter” parents is more likely to be medicated for anxiety and/or depression.7 They conducted the study because of what they were seeing in their classrooms. “We began to experience some really good students that were very capable, excellent at turning in their assignments … but when it came to independent decisions, if you didn’t give them concrete directions, it seemed they were uneasy at times.

I sensed his support for my little mission, even his hopeful conviction that I might be able to add the balanced weight of a mature and considered judgment to his pure observations. This is a parent’s task, after all. I put the glasses to my face and peered through the gathering dark. Beneath the cloud of vaporized chemicals, the scene was one of urgency and operatic chaos. Floodlights swept across the switching yard. Army helicopters hovered at various points, shining additional lights down on the scene. Colored lights from police cruisers crisscrossed these wider beams. The tank car sat solidly on tracks, fumes rising from what appeared to be a hole in one end.

I had no idea how creative ambition and life balance could coexist, because achieving balance seemed to imply being content, and didn't contentment mean you were no longer "hungry"? And if you lost your hunger, didn't you one day wake up in the suburbs helicopter parenting a couple of kids or working at a soul sucking corporate job? You stopped making art. You stopped being passionate. You stopped being you.

As for why you’d feel the need to raise such paragons, or believe that it is possible, or think that trying to do so is desirable, perhaps the answer is that the only lovable children are “perfect” ones. Both kinds of parenting, finally, are forms of overidentification. The helicopter parent turns the child into an instrument of her will. The overindulgent parent projects his own need for limitless freedom and security.

In fact, it isn’t usually our concern for our child that triggers our tendency to helicopter; it’s our own fears.

Helicopter parenting, the incessant micromanagement of a child’s activities, has created a generation of people who rarely experience conflict or traumatic situations, and as a result they are more prone to emotional overreactions.

Their dad had turned the whole office into the freaking day care center so he didn’t have to place jos precious babies out in the world. He could tell Big Tag was going to be a helicopter parent. AN Apache attack helicopter parent.

Myra was less a helicopter parent than a helicopter gunship parent.

Her parents were killed in their private helicopter. An elite death but at the moment of dying we are all penniless. She never spoke of it. It would be generous to understand her behavior, willful, remote, abstract, as her way of expressing grief.

The reason it never occurred to her is that, when she was starting out, few in her field were even considering wealthy families. This lack of attention amounted to “an interesting sort of reverse classism,” she says. Like Kenny, she took flak from colleagues when she switched from studying the problems of the poor to those of the privileged. “Why would you want to work with them?” people would ask. “Don’t they have everything going? Why are you wasting your time?” The notion seemed to be that the rich people’s problems were not as real, or that wealthy people were unworthy of empathy. “There is a lot of judgment,” Luthar says. “And now we have the whole thing where the parents are ‘helicopter’ and ‘snowplowing.’ It’s relatively rare that someone comes along and says, ‘Can we talk about this stuff with some kindness?’ 

Begin rant: I think the internet, social media, smartphones, a progressive education system that teaches socialist values and the false theory of evolution based on an atheistic worldview, moral relativism and post-modern thought mixed with a rejection of biblical truth, social justice over true justice, the teaching that everyone gets a trophy, and that everyone is uniquely special and should desire fame, add to that helicopter parents, absentee parents, confusing parental messages, confusing family structures, gender identity politics, and the idea that this generation is somehow the most brilliant generation ever because they can google every answer or ask some AI-based computer speaker box, mixed with all the confusing heretical, blasphemous, and unbiblical models of the Church, and it’s no wonder these young people are so bent on doing their own thing and not listening to what seems to be hypocritical,

You'll never have to worry about dying. You do realize that sound like the world's most insane helicopter parent right now?

Scientists at New York University identify 1990 as the beginning of helicopter parenting. The researchers say that’s when many parents stopped allowing their children to go outside unsupervised until they were as old as 16, due to unfounded, media-driven fears of kidnapping.

Experiencing trauma, abuse, or bullying may all be triggers that bring on both obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. Teenagers and young adults who were raised by anxious parents may learn obsessive compulsive behaviors. Teenagers and young adults who were raised by “helicopter” parents may find it difficult to cope in the world and may develop OCD to try and cope with the stress of adult life. Prolonged exposure to stress and the resultant anxiety seems to be quite a prominent OCD trigger. A sudden accident or trauma like a car accident or accidental death of a loved

Just do the right thing.” The simplicity is so removed from my own generation of helicopter parents.

We’ve now deteriorated from helicopter parenting to snowplow parenting. These parents violently force any and all obstacles out of their child’s path.

Alaina turned. “You dirty dog. You have been looking for an excuse to take that helicopter since I told you about it, haven’t you?” He shrugged, adopting a boyish innocence. “What, what? This helicopter, it is for us to use, no? The Prince wants the girls’ parents safe. We get them safe. It is good.” He swaggered off to finish shaving. Alaina called after him, “You just want to show off for Kayah and prove you can fly a helicopter.” He stopped and turned over his shoulder, his strong nose in profile, the bulge of his muscles on full display. “I am Mossad, is sexy, no?” He winked and then disappeared into the bathroom. Alaina let out an unsteady breath. Heat crept up her neck, and she fanned her face, murmuring, “Yes, you are, and that woman would kill me for even noticing.”—Reuben ben Judah and Alaina ben Thomas

But members of my generation think there is nothing we can’t fix. We can do a full lotus pose, or a century bike race, in our sixties. We can rise to the top of our professions, own real estate, and helicopter-parent our children. But we can’t protect our mothers and fathers from Joanne Lynn’s third trajectory.

A kid picked up a chair and threw it across the room. The mom’s response was, ‘Well, he did have an egg for breakfast the other day.’” “A

Several groups of male students were caught punching each other in the testicles with great force during lunch. They claimed they were playing a game called ‘sack tapping.

I would just like to add that it is perfectly okay for students to wear animal costumes in class, but hats are strictly forbidden.

If a parent is willing to call their adult child’s workplace to advocate for them, it is no surprise that they had harassed teachers and administration until they got what they felt their child deserved. It is a cycle of never-ending entitlement that leads to mediocrity. It starts with a parent pestering a teacher to get an undeserved grade for their child. Then they manipulate their kid’s way into college, or they get into college with grades they didn’t earn. Next, when the kid gets a job for skills and education that look good on paper but weren’t actually merited, they end up losing their job. And so far, parents cannot save a kid from being fired for poor work performance… at least not yet.

God is decidedly not a helicopter parent. God places the tree and the snake in the garden because they are necessary. If we are to live into the image of God, we cannot remain infants, or children, or even teenagers. We must become disciples, who fashion our lives of faith by making choices, day after day after day.

The mountain climber takes pride in planting his flag at the top because it took a lot to get there. If he took a helicopter it wouldn’t feel the same. In facilitating success parents are paradoxically guaranteeing that a kid can’t achieve it on his own.1 —David McCullough Jr., teacher, Wellesley High School, author of You Are Not Special: and Other Encouragements Compared

I’ve been doing this a long time and the best advice I can give you is to treat every student like a sack of shit, and then they will respect you.” At this point, I wasn’t going to argue with her.

It can be a lot of fun, and inspiring, and sometimes even downright rewarding. But the amount of bullshit far outweighs the good stuff.

The helicopter parent turns the child into an instrument of her will. The overindulgent parent projects his own need for limitless freedom and security. In either case, the child is made to function as an extension of somebody else.

We might be accustomed to thinking of our faith as a castle—where we go to be safe and protected. That’s a good place to be, and we all need that experience now and then. But what if God isn’t a helicopter parent? What if feeling safe and secure aren’t always signs of God’s presence but a pattern of fear that keeps God at a distance? And what if God wants to close that gap, for our sake, and doubt helps get us there? Doubt isn’t a sign of spiritual weakness but the first steps toward a deeper faith.

As the head of my son’s school said, “Many parents have gone from helicopter parents to lawnmower parents. Instead of preparing the child for the path, we prepared the path for the child.” That’s definitely not courage-building.