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Landing the Helicopter of Hovering Moms Essay

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Parents usually have the best intentions – like protecting their children from life's hardships and preparing them for adulthood. However as with many other aspects of parenting, the results do not always match the intentions. Overprotective parents generally want to protect their children from harm, hurt, pain, failure, unhappiness, bad experiences, rejection, and disappointment (Lindsey 1). However, parents must realize that overprotective parenting has certain side effects. Parents believe that they are doing a favor for their children by keeping them safe without realizing that this parenting style can have severe effects on children such as robbing children of the essential life skills that they need in order to have a healthy …show more content…

As an adult, he might find it hard to take care of himself because he never developed coping skills to deal with life's challenges (Agadoni 3). This causes a child to be dependent on his or her parents; it creates the illusion that no matter what the situation, mommy or daddy will be there to fix it. This mind set is extremely crippling because eventually children leave the nest and venture out in life without the capability dealing with situations by themselves.
Helicopter parents often send the unintentional message to their child saying that they are incompetent of doing things on their own - like the things they attempt to accomplish independently are wrong. Instead of letting their children experience a sense of autonomy by allowing them to accomplish things on their own, an overprotective parent would step in and take control; again promoting dependency. A lot of times, such dependency carries on into adulthood (Sade 1). Instead of being a mature, responsible adult and taking things into their own hands; they call on their parents whenever things get strenuous in their lives. Likewise, adults who still depend on their parents for everything do not mature mentally and sometimes do not have the skills needed to become successful on their own.

For statistical understanding, the graph above shows the percentage of parents who admitted to helping their adolescent and

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