These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure out how to deal with it themselves.
Paul Bohn, paraphrased in How to Land Your Kid in Therapy by Lori Gottlieb.
He soon became a specialist, specializing in diseases of the rich. Tom Lehrer, in patter before "In Old Mexico."
Lori Gottlieb's anti-helicopter-parenting monologue in The Atlantic has garnered quite a bit of attention online. On the one hand, I generally agree that you don't protect children from every bump and scrape. On the other hand, there's something twisted about the pathology narrative captured above, assuming that every case of college-student anxiety and coping problem is derived from parent behaviors when the student was a toddler. It reminds me of the gelled stereotype of "the dropout" in the 1960s: a young man who is unable to control his impulses and does not understand the consequences of his actions until years later. In 1965, Lucius Cervantes argued that dropouts would be the origin of all social ills.
What is especially surprising is that Gottlieb writes this passage though she is very aware of the long history of humiliating parenting advice in U.S. history. It is also inconsistent with the evidence from a 2007 meta-analysis, Examining the Association between Parenting and Childhood Anxiety, which concludes that only a very small amount of variance in childhood anxiety is associated with parenting styles. While a few clinical cases may represent that small amount of variance, the clinical focus of Paul Bohn is a professional anchor for him, an availability bias that doesn't hold true when compared with existing research.
In addition, there is something deeply troubling about the narrow focus of a particular type of behavior among middle-class parents, as if youth from other backgrounds don't have anxiety disorders or adjustment problems in college. It is more appropriate for Tom Lehrer's mythical Samuel Gall ("the inventor of the gall bladder" and specialist in "disease of the rich") than someone trying to be reflective about parenting styles.
Bottom line: I don't recommend helicopter parenting, but I'm unpersuaded that there is research to suggest it's broadly pathology-inducing.
Today’s paper had a column about a summer camp that charged $300 to teach kids how to ride a city bus.