Parenting

By Meena Vathyam

Hovering or Holding Back: Helicopter and Hands-off Parents

If you happened to read Kaavya Vishwanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life—before allegations of plagiarism led to the novel’s not-so-quiet disappearance from bookshelves—title character Opal’s parents, Amal and Meena Mehta, are portrayed as typical South Asian helicopter parents. These involved parents develop a fully detailed plan to gain their daughter’s acceptance to Harvard. When the plan goes awry, Amal and Meena must reevaluate their plans. Do such parents really exist? The answer is an unsurprising yes.

The term “helicopter parent” describes parents who hover around their children, maintaining strict control of decision-making. These parents manage their children’s lives to the extent that it’s difficult for the children to become independent or learn how to make good choices. The opposite of helicopter parenting is the hands-off parent. Parents using a hands-off approach let children learn consequences from their actions without providing their children with basic guidelines for living. Both helicopter and hands-off parenting are extremes, but which is a more effective parenting style?

Sonal Gandhi, mother of two boys, ages 6 and 8, finds a hands-off approach preferable because it allows children to be independent. She sees helicopter parenting as problematic because children aren’t allowed to learn how to handle situations independently. Consequently, these children won’t be able to handle stress or potential failure. Helicopter parents, too, run the risk of disappointment in the future when their children don’t measure up, or if their children rebel against their parents’ control.

Snehal Naik, a first-time parent, hopes to find a delicate balance between the two approaches. She believes that specific situations might call for extreme parent involvement, while others do not. The trick, she thinks, is knowing which version of parenting a particular situation calls for. Naik also imagines that as her son Arnav, 4, grows older, her parenting style will change.

Naik sees patterns of excessive hovering as potentially detrimental to children. For her, helicopter parenting can affect a child’s self-confidence and self-esteem. Children in the United States tend to be more self-confident as they grow up, precisely because independence and individualism are emphasized from a very young age.

“I remember when my son, Arnav, was only ten months [old] and we started him in daycare,” Naik says. “Within a week, he was holding his own spoon, which was the start of an eye-opening experience.”

Some of the attitudes towards helicopter parenting might be cultural, Naik suggests. In other parts of the world, helicopter parenting might not be perceived as negative due to cultural norms that privilege enmeshed family relationships.

Haresh Assumal, father of assertive daughter Malvika, 5, suggests that just as constant correcting and hovering is bad, the reverse is probably worse. He believes that children need guidance because they will make mistakes that need correcting. Children should be taught what is right and wrong. For Assumal, helicopter parenting is detrimental only if done constantly. Potential problems may result from parents who set goals that reflect what they want, not what’s best for their children. This could result in big disappointments for parents and children alike.

All of these parents see balance as critical to successful parenting; that is, neither helicopter parenting nor hands-off parenting is the right method.

Gandhi suggests that the primary job of a parent is to help children become self-sufficient. By the time children leave for college, they should be self-sufficient and capable adults. Helicopter parenting can prevent children from reaching this developmental milestone because if parents are overly controlling, children will have difficulty dealing with important parts of life, such as failure.

But the hands-off approach isn’t good enough for Gandhi either. Parents must be attentive to their children and guide them—without doing things for them—so they can eventually learn how to guide themselves. Children need to learn that it’s okay not to be perfect at everything, but that trying their best is the most important thing that any of us can do.

Assumal also favors balance with a little more helicopter parenting than hands-off parenting. “Probably 60/40,” he says.

But not all of these parents think that helicopter parenting is innately part of South Asian culture. After all, helicopter parenting is very much a trend of American culture these days too.

Gandhi says that her parents’ generation incorporated a hands-off approach because as immigrants, they were prone to be unfamiliar with the system, culture or language—or all three. She suggests that parents these days tend towards being helicopter parents because they want their children to be very successful.

Assumal suggests that South Asian parents tend to be more “hovering” because it’s the way they were raised.

For Naik, current attitudes towards parenting simply reflect how parents themselves were brought up. “We are just trying to do what we think is best for our children and the way we were raised is perhaps a good place to start. South Asian parents tend to have the bar very high for their children, for good reason, and unfortunately, if a child doesn’t achieve what we think needs to be achieved, then we take it very personally.”

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