Mama Says

I’ve been hearing a lot about helicopter parents these days. Truth be told, most of what I’ve been hearing has been coming from the nagging little voice inside my own head that whispers all those nasty, self-critical remarks. It’s admonishing me for being one of these loathsome creatures you hear about in the newspaper commentaries.

All right, I admit it: I hover. Even worse: I love to hover.

The pejorative term “helicopter parent” seems to have originated among school teachers, who used it to identify parents who were overly involved in their children’s lives. These were the parents who fussed with their child’s costume for 30 minutes before the school play, then shouldered their way to the front row of the auditorium where they could get the best angle for their camcorder. Helicopter parents were an object of dread.

Now that the school play — along with recess — has been eliminated in favor of standardized testing, the term seems to have expanded somewhat in meaning. It now covers everyone from the dad that calls the kid’s college professor to demand his own copy of the syllabus to the mom who not only enrolls her children for music lessons, but even drives them there. Right now, I only fit this latter category, but I’m clearly on the slippery slope.

It’s shameful, I know, but I actually like taking my kids to music lessons. What other line of work allows you to sit reading Newsweek or doing the Sudoku while convincing yourself that you’re fulfilling your job description? Yeah, I dig this helicopter parent gig.

I also like parent-teacher conferences, and volunteering in their classes. Don’t let it get around, but I actually get a secret voyeuristic pleasure observing my kids at work. This is almost certainly a sign that I lack a life, I suspect.

Yes, I know that a really good parent knows when to let go. According to tradition, that’s supposed to happen on the first day of kindergarten, when you slow the car down, toss the kid and the backpack onto the curb, and speed off to work or at least to Starbucks.

Really good parents — the non-hovering kind, I mean — reflect on their own childhood exploits and misadventures and conclude that they lived to tell, and so will their kids.

I suspect this is the root of my own problem: I didn’t have enough childhood exploits. And now I’m passing on that shameful legacy to my offspring. It’s so humiliating. I never ran away from home, set the house on fire, or smoked in the girls’ john, and now my hovering is preventing my children from experiencing fully their own crazy youth.

It’s no excuse to point out that the broader culture actually demands a pretty intense degree of hovering. Kids must be accompanied by parents at all times, whether they are at the library, the corner store, or the buffet restaurant. Get caught violating that rule and someone will call 696-KIDS. Every story of juvenile delinquency is accompanied by the braying of “Where were the parents?” Every newspaper editorial about the negative economic impact of dumb school children jabs the bony finger of blame right into the xiphoid processes of lazy parents who couldn’t be bothered to read to their tots or even just flick through a few lousy flash cards.

Neither can I avoid blame by mentioning that we are surrounded by thousands of examples of children who actually do experience the sort of childhood that helicopter-haters seem to value. It’s not the least bit difficult to find children who have unsupervised adventures for hours every day and night; whose pushy parents aren’t forcing them to practice their violins — or even to brush their teeth; whose school life is so independent that their parents won’t even sign their field trip permission slips much less annoy the teachers with questions about the homework. I think we can all agree that those children are doing just fine without all this relentless hovering.

Nevertheless, I still need to answer for the harm my self-indulgent hovering is doing. The happiness our kids seem to get from knowing that they are safe at the center of their parents’ world is really just a mask for the horrible, nagging insecurity that’s the result of never having rafted down the river like Huck Finn. We owe them that raft! Not only that, we owe our nation the strong, superior citizens that result when kids are compelled to fight their own battles and find their own fun.

I’ve got to go cold turkey; it’s the only way. No more setting aside the bill-paying to play Monopoly with them. My parents never played no stinking Monopoly with me, and I turned out, well, sort of a poor sport. But still! Let these kids amuse themselves by watching endless reruns of Gilligan’s Island, like we did back in my day. No more signing them up for all these lessons, either. If they want to learn to swim, let them fall into Lake Erie; they’ll learn quick enough. And especially, no more interfering at school.

It’s been a guilty pleasure hovering. But now I understand that it’s wrong to cut the crusts off the whole-grain bread of their cage-free turkey breast sandwiches, especially if I then write “I Love You” on them in mustard. A really good parent would make them write their own damn mustard love notes, or go without.