by Alfie Kohn
There are two important qualifications to these results. The first is straightforward: Overinvolved parenting may be a reaction to children’s expressions of anxiety more than its cause. Most adults tend to offer help and reassurance to kids who seem less sure of themselves. As the lead author of that second study explained to an interviewer, other research has shown that when parents of confident kids were paired with children who were more anxious than their own, they gave those children more help. “There is potentially something in a child’s behaviour that brings out the protective instincts in parents.”19 While it’s been established that some forms of parenting do contribute to certain outcomes in children, cause and effect are hard to tease apart when we’re talking about intrusiveness and anxiety.20
The other qualification is particularly intriguing, and its implications extend far beyond the question of anxiety. In fact, they reach to the very heart of the idea of overparenting. When you look closely at the studies, it turns out that what’s classified as “overparenting” or “intrusive parenting” might better be understood as excessive control of children.21 That also appears to be true of the disturbing subset of overparenting that I described earlier, in which parents’ own psychological needs determine the way they act with their kids.
This offers a different lens through which to view all those warnings that parents do too much for their children and have become overly involved in their lives. Until now, I’ve been suggesting that we should question generalizations about how many parents act this way. Now I want to add that we should also question the assumption that parents who do act this way are mostly being indulgent and trying to make things too easy for their children. Perhaps what’s really going on is more about controlling than coddling. In that case, what we’re talking about might be described not as a variation of permissiveness but as virtually the opposite of that: a variation of the sort of traditional parenting for which many conservative critics of indulgence seem to be nostalgic, distinguished by a lack of respect for kids’ needs and preferences. Maybe that approach was never discarded after all; many parents just switched to a slightly different, more intrusive version.
One struggles to find convincing evidence that overparenting conceived as indulgence is harmful. But overparenting conceived as control is decidedly bad news. In chapter 2, I outlined the benefits of a “working with” approach to raising children. The flip side is that a “doing to” approach, which relies on control, has a number of disadvantages even when it doesn’t reach levels that could be described as abusive or authoritarian. In The Psychology of Parental Control, psychologist Wendy Grolnick reports that “controlling parenting has been associated with lower levels of intrinsic motivation, less internalization of values and morals, poorer self-regulation, and higher levels of negative self-related [emotions].”22 When parents are controlling about their children’s academic performance, the effects on the children’s achievement—and on their interest in learning—are usually detrimental.23
It’s worth keeping these findings in mind the next time you hear someone try to rationalize his or her need to control children:
“Hey, kids need limits.”
“You know, they secretly appreciate the security of being told what
to do.”
“They’ll thank me later for pushing them to do their best.”
While there is surely a role for structure and predictability in children’s lives, those concepts are often invoked to justify what is more accurately described as control, which isn’t appreciated by, or healthy for, children. Indeed, research has found that parental control appears to be destructive for kids of all ages, including young adults—and also across ethnic groups and cultures.24 One interesting example, though by no means the only one,25 is a study of Chinese-American families published in 2013, which found that children raised by “tiger” parents (characterized by extreme control and a relentless demand for high achievement) were more likely than those raised by more supportive parents to be depressed, to describe themselves as pressured, and to feel resentment toward their parents. They also ended up having lower grades.26
Control can take different forms, however. Some theorists distinguish between behavioral control, which means exactly what it sounds like, and psychological control, which is subtler but more intrusive and perhaps even more damaging.27 Psychologically controlling parents don’t just coerce children to make them act (or stop acting) in a particular way; they attempt to take over their children’s very selves. Kids are made to feel guilty when they do something contrary to the parent’s wishes. Love and acceptance are made contingent on pleasing the parent. Care, in effect, is turned into “positive reinforcement.” When the child is well behaved or impressive, there are plenty of hugs, smiles, high-fives, and “Good job!”s. But when the child doesn’t do what the parent wants, the love is withdrawn and the atmosphere turns chilly. This strategy can be diabolically effective because the child becomes, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of the parent. It’s harder to fight this than it is to rebel against the overt regulation of one’s behavior.28
An impressive collection of research has illuminated a long list of effects of such manipulation. In 1996, Brian Barber, the topic’s leading researcher, mentioned “dependency, alienation, social withdrawal, low ego strength, inability to make conscious choice, low self-esteem, passive, inhibited, and overcontrolled characteristics, and depressed affect.”29 Since then, the evidence to confirm those initial results has grown, and so has the list itself. Children raised with this sort of control may also develop “maladaptive perfectionism.”30 And they’re affected not only psychologically “but also [in] their functioning in school and social relationships.”31
It’s not that such parents don’t provide love; it’s that they use their love as a lever. Indeed, one study found that things were even worse when the parent was more affectionate because of the controlling context in which affection was given.32 This strategy amounts to a violation of psychological boundaries, so children come to feel “enmeshed” with the parent and sometimes develop a fear of abandonment. That fear, in turn, may lead them to become extremely dependent—or, paradoxically, it may drive them to become “pathologically independent” because they feel “an unhealthy need to prove themselves and to differentiate themselves from others.”33
And speaking of paradoxes, being on the receiving end of this kind of control can leave one with a sense of grandiosity but, at the same time, a lower feeling of self-efficacy, which means the child is less confident about his or her ability to accomplish things. The use of praise (“conditional positive regard”) to control a child—which means selectively reinforcing the behaviors and attitudes the parent desires—“creates a continual longing for the missing unconditional parental appreciation and affection,” which is to say, the kind of love that doesn’t have to be earned and isn’t used to control.34 “Probably all of us know what it is like to be accepted conditionally,” two other researchers commented, “but for low-self-esteem individuals, this may be a predominant state of mind.”35 In simple language: People who felt they had to earn their parents’ love are likely to feel lousy about themselves.
Some social critics have employed other terms to refer to psychological control and have warned about its implications. One writer talked about “love-oriented” (as opposed to “fear-oriented”) discipline as being “actually more totalitarian—the child no longer has a private sphere, but has his entire being involved with parental aspirations.” This raises the question of who, beyond the parents, is likely to benefit from inducing children to internalize those aspirations as well as favored rules, norms, and values. A pair of social scientists pondered the political and economic implications of socializing children to “internalize authority and . . . implement goals and objectives relatively alienated from their own personal needs.”36
This isn’t to suggest that most parents are driven primarily by a desire to turn their children into compliant worker
s who will do whatever they’re told without having to be monitored. I think it’s safe to say there’s no single, simple explanation for why some parents resort to a pattern of psychological or behavioral control.37 More broadly, the question of why we raise our children as we do has challenged theorists and researchers for many years. There does seem to be agreement that our parenting style is heavily influenced, but of course not completely determined, by how we were raised. For example, if we experienced our parents’ acceptance as conditional on how we acted, and consequently grew up with doubts about our own worth, then we may be inclined to offer our children the same kind of love with strings attached—which amounts to a form of psychological control.38 Indeed, two studies have found that parents whose feelings of self-worth varied with their kids’ successes were apt to be more controlling than other parents, particularly if they had reason to expect their children would be judged.39
Even if we can’t say for certain what predisposes parents to control their children, it’s clear that control takes place in different ways and for different reasons. Kids can be restricted and restrained, commanded and compelled. My central point is that excessive involvement or protection is just one more variation on that same basic theme. Doing too much for one’s kids, in other words, may really be just another way of doing things to one’s kids.
To be sure, there’s also an element of solicitousness in overparenting. But what defines a problematic concern for one’s children (and involvement in their lives) isn’t that it’s overdone so much as why it’s overdone. And that brings us back to the parent’s need for control. You can see this most starkly when the involvement is conditional, such that “warmth and love are only provided when the child remains within close parent-child boundaries.” Such parents may “anticipate their child’s increasing independence with feelings of resentment and anxiety.”40 And even when that doesn’t seem to be the case, the intense involvement still has a stifling, coercive feel to it.
How we frame and make sense of parental behavior has enormous practical implications. If overparenting is defined simply as getting too close to children, spending too much time with them, or solving too many of their problems for them, the prescription that follows is simple: Back off. Do less. And if overparenting is also viewed as a kind of coddling in which parents are protecting kids from failure, then it might make sense to say, “Let them fail sometimes.”
But these responses are both simplistic and wrongheaded. In the first case, we need to remember that too little involvement in kids’ lives is even more problematic than too much. In the second case, the idea that letting kids fail will teach them to become more resilient so they can deal more successfully with future failure is driven more by ideology than by solid science.41
If, by contrast, overparenting is understood mostly as an exercise in control, then “Back off” or “Let them fail” misses the point entirely. Those responses are animated more by traditionalists’ antipathy to making things too easy for children than by an accurate assessment of what they need. The appropriate response is not to do less for kids but to actively support their desire for having some say over their own lives (and also to meet their needs for empathy, guidance, and unconditional love).
Consider again the controversy about permissiveness. What if—and this is purely a speculative exercise—the indictment of parents as being too easy on their kids led some to become even more controlling than they already were? (No one wants to be thought a pushover.) And what if that control sometimes took the form of overparenting? In that case, parents would likely be criticized again—not for controlling their children but for hovering too close and being too protective. And their reaction this time might be to play a smaller role in their children’s lives, to offer less help and guidance.
Both prescriptions (stricter discipline; less involvement) are misguided, I believe. And both criticisms (too permissive; too intrusive) lead us to provide our children with less of the “working with” approach that’s more likely to promote psychological health. All of this becomes easier to see once we’ve understood overparenting as an example of “doing to”—which is to say, a type of control.
HELICOPTER PARENTING—COLLEGE EDITION
Reporters and researchers have treated helicopter parenting (HP) of older adolescents and young adults as something separate from overparenting more generally. Before we examine some of the underlying beliefs here, let’s take a moment to investigate what we really know about parents who are closely connected with their children in, and out of, college.
It’s not very hard to find someone with a secondhand story concerning a dad who phoned the dean about a trivial problem or a mom who’s overly involved with junior’s love life (even if from a distance). But is there any reason to believe such incidents are common? A team of researchers representing five universities began their 2012 report on the topic as follows: “Popular media outlets are rampant with stories of helicopter parents who smother overly dependent grown children . . . yet studies examining such intense parental support are scant.”42 Indeed, even academic articles tend to offer generalizations about the scope of the problem based on popular media coverage, which, in turn, rests mostly on anecdotes.
It does appear that most parents are in touch with their college-age children on a regular basis.43 But we need to make a distinction that’s ignored by a lot of articles on the subject: Communicating isn’t the same thing as intervening on your kid’s behalf. In fact, those two activities aren’t necessarily even correlated.44 And the latter—frequent (or “excessive”) intervention—actually seems to be fairly rare. A national survey found that only 13 percent of college freshmen and 8 percent of seniors said a parent had frequently intervened to help them solve problems. (Another 25 percent of freshmen and 21 percent of seniors said a parent had sometimes intervened.45) “Helicopter parents? Truly, there aren’t that many of them,” one university administrator told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2008. “The popular image of modern parents as high-strung nuisances who torment college administrators . . . doesn’t match reality.”46
Such parents certainly don’t seem to be tormenting their children. An overwhelming majority of the ten-thousand-plus University of California students who were surveyed in 2009 said their parents weren’t involved in their choice of courses or their major. “While students view their parents as supportive of their academic endeavors, they generally do not view them as encroaching on their academic decision-making in college,” these researchers concluded. Moreover, surveys of students by psychologists who are looking for the effects of that type of parenting typically haven’t found evidence that it’s especially common. One study determined that only 10 percent of the students who filled out the questionnaire had helicopter parents; in another, average levels of HP were described as “relatively low” (registering about six on a fifteen-point scale).47
Alarming media reports have also suggested that parents hover when their young-adult children enter the workplace, but the available evidence casts doubt on that claim, too. Michigan State University researchers found that 77 percent of the 725 employers they surveyed “hardly ever witnessed a parent while hiring a college senior” but noted that it was the aberrant incidents of involvement that “yielded the most interesting anecdotes for media stories” and gave the impression that helicopter parents were lurking behind every water cooler.48 And what about “intense parental support of grown children” outside of college and the workplace? According to the only study on the topic I could find, just one in five or six parents seemed to be intensely involved in their children’s lives.49
If there’s a study showing that HP—of college students, young employees, or adult children in general—is anywhere near as common as we’re led to believe, I haven’t been able to locate it. But what about the effects of such parenting when it does occur? Does the evidence support the objections we so commonly hear?
Three studies have raised concerns about the more extreme ve
rsions of HP. In each of them, questionnaires were given to about three hundred students at a single college, with no attempt to find a representative sample. Conclusions were drawn based on whoever happened to sign up for the study. And each used a different measure of helicopter parenting, which means it’s tricky to compare the results of the three studies. One, whose results hadn’t been published as of this writing, found that the small percentage of students at a New Hampshire college who seemed to have helicopter parents described themselves as more anxious and less open to new ideas than did other students. (Whether that difference was statistically significant, particularly given that only about thirty students had such parents, wasn’t clear from a reporter’s description of the research.50) The second study, from Tennessee, reported that students who described having a lower sense of “well-being” were slightly more likely to describe their parents as having been intrusive or controlling when they were growing up.51 And the third, by Virginia researchers, found that helicopter parenting was related to higher levels of depression and lower levels of life satisfaction.52
Both of the qualifications I mentioned in connection with research on overparenting in general apply here, too. First, the items on these questionnaires primarily seem to be gauging how controlling the parents were. In fact, the Virginia researchers noted that their “measure of helicopter parenting behaviors appears to reliably capture the construct of behavioral control” and argued that a key reason HP seemed to have negative effects had to do with undermining the students’ sense of autonomy. Again, the problem is control, not indulgence.53
The second qualification is what leads me to say that HP seemed to have negative effects. It’s not at all clear that HP caused the problems with which it was associated. The Tennessee researchers acknowledged that “students with low levels of well-being, as well as high levels of anxiety or depression, may view their parents as more intrusive,” while the Virginia researchers admitted that “when parents perceive their child as depressed, they may be more likely to ‘hover.’”54 Either of these interpretations is entirely plausible: Pre-existing unhappiness may have drawn the parents in, or it may have led the students to interpret their parents’ actions as excessive. These are very real possibilities, yet invariably they’re mentioned in a single throw-away sentence buried in the articles’ discussion sections. If they’re true, then the study offers no evidence at all that HP has negative effects—and all the press coverage of such research, which claims that HP makes kids unhappy, would be completely without merit.
