Lessons from a Helicoptered Kid

Helicopter parents are all over the news. Every day brings headlines, studies, and one story more outrageous than the next: parents doing their kids’ essays, running interference in the classroom and on the playground, and even sitting in on job interviews with their new college graduates.

I grew up that way, more or less, and now I refuse to be that parent.

Perhaps I was a product of my environment. Even as a child of the sixties, I was reared in a ruthlessly aspirational milieu, the New York City suburbs, where Stepfordian mothers lived out their wasted dreams through their children.

Having the parents I had may also have had something to do with it. It was like this: on the rare occasions when I had to make my own bed, my efforts would be praised effusively and, minutes later, stripped and redone done with military precision. My parties were carefully orchestrated, and so was my hair.  

The control extended to school. When I was in sixth grade, I had my first big report. All I can recall is that it was a study of Scotland, and required a clever cover. I dutifully went to the library (in those days long before the Internet) and used the Dewey decimal system to look up facts, figures, and whatever else might be acceptable on a sixth grade report. I wrote a cohesive paper, traced a map of the country and pasted it on the cover with a carefully scripted title and set it on my bedroom desk. I woke up on the due date to find a new cover, one with a map of Scotland traced and cut with laser-like precision, the letters penned in my father’s calligraphic lettering, and my paper neatly typed.

I felt a nauseating wave of incompetence that took decades to leave me.  

“I’m giving you a D because this isn’t your work,” the teacher said. “This map has half of England in it.” I didn’t have to feign shock because I truly felt it. Crimson horror seeped up my face. “I must have messed up,” I recall mumbling.    

While I turned out to be a very diligent student, my younger brother was not. I was ordered to type (and sometimes heavily edit) his essays, even coming home from college on weekends to do it. There was only four years’ difference in our ages, but by then, teachers were already less confrontational. He got A’s he didn’t deserve. He didn’t bother to make his bed.

My brother and I had tutors whether we needed them or not. We took ballroom dancing, etiquette, music and anything else that would make us more socially acceptable. If I had a disagreement with another child, my mother was on the phone to wage war with the child’s mother.

While I excelled at school, I never learned to fight my own battles. And when I had my first apartment–at the ripe old age of 27–my parents ran up regularly with kitchen supplies, food, a mattress, and work clothes.

I never learned to do for myself, and I flailed when it came to anything that wasn’t job related. I married my husband because he was good at finances and I wasn’t. Needless to say, that doesn’t make a marriage. It turned out that beyond balancing a checkbook, he was not so good at finances after all.

When we divorced, I was faced with making my own bed, so to speak, and balancing my own checkbook, and I found I liked it.

We had a son, and I ended up raising him more or less alone. As he entered school, it became clear he had learning challenges: a laundry list of letters and acronyms that sent me into panic mode. But I was determined to appoint him captain of his own ship. He often needed help, and I am not saying that I didn’t guide and prompt, but after about fourth grade, he was mainly on his own.

There was one time I slipped. He was in fifth grade, with a big project due and he was procrastinating. Exasperated, I asked him if I could help him find magazine images for a collage. “No, mom,” he said firmly. “That would be cheating.”

The pride I felt at that moment displaced the remains of my own sense of incompetence for real and for good. I had finally succeeded at something on my own: creating a self-directed child. Most of the time, he lives up to the challenges. He has certainly failed at times, literally, but it is his own failure. His successes are all his own, too, and I leave him to savor them as he likes.

He may go to a competitive college, or he may not. He will never go to ballroom dancing school. He will most certainly get his heart broken and his feelings trampled, but the bed he makes will always be the same one comes home to.

His life is not about me. And I can proudly say he will never get a D because of me.  

Marie Hickman is a journalist, writer and blogger. She is a contributor to valpak.com and many other blogs including Mamalode, Money Saving Mom and Mind Body Green. She and her teenage son live in Palm Harbor, Florida.