#Helicopter Parents

[ghostofdiamonds]

I can't believe my mom wonders why I don't have a social life when she's the one getting unreasonably upset that I told her about plans to hang out with someone and I didn't know all of the details yet.

[podracerbarrelroll]

Thinking of that post about parents who relentlessly track their kids' cell phone location and internet history and every move in the name of keeping them 'safe' without their knowledge or consent. Also about the article I read awhile back about the developing social expectation that parents not let children go anywhere alone (which I couldn't find, but this one is more recent and similar).

For one thing. In the United States, violent crime has decreased since the 1990s and drug use among teenagers has gone down overall since the 1970s (skip to the charts on page 161 if you want to click through them). The world is not actually more dangerous today than it was when Gen Xers or older Millennials were kids.

But I'm sure there are parents out there who think that any chance of bad things happening means they must keep as close an eye on their kids as possible or they're bad parents. Not using every tool at their disposal makes them irresponsible, and tracking phones is just what you do today because the technology is available.

To these people, I would like to say:

How would you have felt about your parents listening in on all your conversations on the house phone and routinely going through your room and reading any diary or journal you kept? My parents did that, and I can guarantee you that it did not feel good, and I am still (in my early 30s) extremely protective and possessive of my things and hate anyone touching my phone or computer without my permission for any reason.

Yes, your kid might do drugs, and they might be a victim of violent crime. Tracking their every move does not necessarily prevent that. However, it does make it more likely they will leave their phone at their friends' house when they're sneaking out to go to a party they didn't tell you about and then they don't have that phone to call you for help. It also makes it more likely that if something does happen, they will not go to you for help or tell you about it for fear of getting into trouble.

Parental monitoring works best when parents have good, open, and caring relationships with their teens. Teens are more willing to talk to their parents if they think their parents can be trusted, have useful advice to offer, and are open and available to listen and talk. Teens who are satisfied with their relationships with their parents tend to be more willing to follow the rules. Not by, y'know, subjecting them to your own personal surveillance state.

Children are not perpetual children. They are future adults and need to develop the very necessary skills of learning how to make their own decisions. Not allowing this is how you end up calling your adult children's college professors because they've fallen behind in classes, because you've created a risk-averse, conflict-averse adult with no idea how to manage their own schedule. (This is also how you get accidental conservatives obsessed with following the 'rules', but the other post describes that better.)

On that note, you cannot control your children their whole lives. They will eventually grow up and move out when they're eighteen or twenty or twenty-five if you insist on them living with you through college. If you've never let them go to a party or have a single alcoholic drink, how the fuck do you expect them to know moderation when they're older and the consequences for fucking up are worse?

Conversely, you may get a kid that grows up, leaves, and doesn't talk to you at all. My parents literally told me that I didn't have a right to privacy because I was their child and living with them. While I do still talk to my parents, I purposely put physical and emotional distance between them and myself when I left for college, and I do not and have never gone to them for life advice or for comfort when I'm having a hard time.

And finally. Consider finding out, ten or fifteen years from now, that your child is dating someone who tracks their cell phone location at all times, goes through their phone and computer at random, and restricts where they go and who they spend time with, perhaps because this person pays more of the bills. If you've shown your child that surveillance and isolation is love, how the fuck are they gonna recognize the hallmark signs of an abusive relationship?

Even my parents expected me to get to school and back by myself, either by walking or taking the bus, from the time I was in kindergarten. I spent a lot of non-school weekdays at the public library from the time I was in middle school. So, when I left for college and moved to a new town, I knew how to take the bus by myself and how to navigate an urban area without the advantage of a car and how to deal with being around other people in public. The idea of gen Z kids lacking even that experience is a fucking shame.

[fawnl3t]

I hate this, I wanna lose my virginity already , I don’t wanna wait to college, so fucking tired of my mom babying me then getting mad me for not being able to do certain things on my own, can’t even be in a library alone or out of her sight, she’s always with me, can’t even lock my room without out her getting pissy or mad, hitting me or not letting me watch movies with sex even if they’re just pg13 or pg14 because I just wouldn’t understand, I’m a disabled teenager (17) not 3 years old! Then a doctors like oh any sexual intercourse? I’m like no, my mom’s laughs like him? He doesn’t even go out or socialize… which isn’t mostly her fault ? Always breathing down my fucking neck , looking over my shoulder , it’s uncomfortable !!!! Can’t be anywhere alone, not the park, not the library, the movies, shopping malls, nowhere ! Because oh there’s evil men even evil woman in this world who will take advantage of me, I don’t care! Lemme go out, fuck let them take advantage of me if it means some fucking freedom. Oh you need to learn to be independent once you 18 , or else it be hard … right but you don’t let me be independent! I have little to no privacy or freedom! I already gotta live in this fuckass bigoted small town in which I constantly deal with discrimination and abuse and hate crimes, AND i can’t even leave the confines of my room unless it���s a doctors appointment or some trip which she will get mad at me the whole duration for while breathing down my neck!!!!! I can’t even go to public bathrooms alone, she has to wait or follow and if she doesn’t then she’ll start yelling or freaking out when I’ve just started using it, it’s especially embarrassing if it’s a public bathroom where they might be other people…. All because oh I might be raped, I don’t care at this point ! Let them , fuckkk, then she’s like I need to worry less to enjoy my youth which is running out , BRUH she’s the one always stressing me out and not letting me enjoy my youth same with my dad and everyone else in this town!!!

[celestiachan]

eldest daughter syndrome isn't just being a third parent to your younger siblings. it's not being allowed to go outside unless it's for school or the doctor, it's not being allowed to move out until you get married, it's not being allowed to leave the house without makeup on

[ani-ponders]

"but they do it because they love you!"

you know you can still suffocate someone with an embrace, right?

[comfect]

An important follow-up though: also don't call the cops/CPS on parents who let their kids do this. Helicopter styles of parenting have co-evolved with an approach to seeing kids "in danger" that's extremely carceral, and punitive towards the parents. Look up reports of people calling the cops on kids walking home from school, for instance. We can't expect parents to let kids take risks (which to be clear, I fully agree with OP that they should/must) if their own risk is something like losing the kids.

On my hands and knees begging adults to allow children to engage in risk play.

And by risk play I don't mean handing them a gun and playing Russian Roulette.

I mean like climbing trees, getting so sick spinning on the swing they throw up, balancing on the curb, sitting in the mud, walking on slippery surfaces, building half ass ramps to ride their bike over, standing on rocks, or anything that involves a smidgen of confidence and out of the box thinking that could result in injury.

Obviously like watch your kids and such, but when we talk about the fun of being an 80s or 90s kid, it's not just talking about CDs and Walkmans or not having iPads. It's about how kids today were robbed of critical learning and experience skills we were allowed to have.

Playgrounds disappearing, helicopter parents, and sue culture really destroyed a child's development in the United States, and I think it's about time we as adults recognize that, because the kids sure have.

[longing-star]

Helicopter parents, vigilant but always distant

[impossiblewitchpersona-blog]

[kyri45]

Last panel is 100% in my top 5 favourite.

Shadowpeach Bio Parent AU (PREV / FIRST /NEXT )

Also yeah I had to find a reason why mr. Six eared doesn't actually uses his six ears to know the future-past-present in the show. Like- why my man? Is there a particular reason why you don't use them??? Perhaps one time you heard too much or not what you were supposed to learn? Thus this scene was born

[beepbeepdespair]

not me actually managing to overcome something caused by my helicopter parents 👀👀👀

[ladyylavenderrr]

Made myself laugh with this shit

[pineyw00dsshesquatch]

Goddamn, absolutely right. I love "the politics are way weirder and stupider and more complicated".

The stranger danger stuff has been simmering for a while. I'm an ancient millennial, but I had an extremely controlling psycho mom. We didn't need smart phones, my mom read my devart journals and dragged my ass home from my friend's houses. It's mortifying how many times she pulled invasive shit like that way past the age it was even remotely justifiable. I wasn't allowed to grow up. I can ABSOLUTELY confirm how bad that shit fucks you up and stunts you.

here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.

[noidretina]

One time, I had a pretty unstable couple of days. I had just gotten back from a late-night shift at work and had another shift in 12 hours. I was unfathomably sore getting off of that first shift and didn't sleep all too well either.

The cherry on top? After I woke up, mother wanted me to help carry buckets of rocks to the backyard for their landscaping project. So I explained in crystal clear detail that I was tired, sore and energy depraved to the point where I didn't know if I was going to be able to make it through the shift I had. Nonetheless, my mother still insisted that I help her with the heavy lifting. I put my foot down and firmly said no until she finally rolled her eyes and ended the interaction. To this day, she still 'doesn't understand' why I didn't put what little energy I had into them.

Like, sorry lady, I value my physical and mental health more than your landscaping project.

[ghostbsuter]

"Mr. Fenton, please explain to me again, why are you here?"

Danny leans forward with keen eyes, downright murderous. "My godfather who owns VladCo. Hates Wayne enterprise and hopes to surpass them in this years competition, so I took it upon myself to make sure you're winning, Mr. Wayne."

Mr. Wayne massages his forehead with a sigh.

"What are your motivations?"

"To see that man realise I helped bring his doom, to know that I am the reason he's going down. Maybe some tears too?"

(This was, of course, only after the proper interview where Danny had revealed his connection to VladCo.)

(Bruce was going to hire the boy anyway, but now? Now he will make sure danny doesn't turn into a villain either.)

(If danny saw Mr. Wayne put his file into the 'suspect villain' folder from the reflection of the glass behind him. He simply shrugs and deals with it later. Really, he should have expected that.)

[hijinxinprogress]

Does the JL know that YJ has just casually been beefing with darkseid??

imagine there’s a all hands on deck battle against darkseid and everyone is there but darkseid points out the nearest yj member (it’s probably Bart) like ‘you!!! You managed to escape with your lives last time but this meeting will be our last’ and for a split second Clark’s so fucking confused bc we haven’t fought in years wtf are you talking about then he hears ‘oh shit, look it’s Doug’ and everyone turns to see Bart nudging Kon going ‘he’s talking to you…damn he must still be mad about the coal’ and kons shoving him back bc ‘you were the one fucking around with his coal, you fucking walnut’ while Cassie’s being scruffed by wonder woman bc they’re trying to avoid being around when the jl finds out and tims having a very intense silent conversation lecture about why tf there’s at least half a dozen yj mission reports that mention an assailant named ‘Doug’ 

then Constantine shows up with Greta and everyone (including darkseid) starts yelling and if you don’t know her Greta seems like the one with the ownership of the braincell in yj (she is not but I guess she looks like it from a distance if you squint) which goes one of two ways:

retired-civilian!greta is giggling and waving excitedly to each member of yj along with hal before she practically tackles each of them in a tight hug while the titans, jl, & jl: dark lose their collective shit bc Constantine brought a tiny civilian dressed in pastel floral prints from head to toe into an active battle with fucking darkseid, a civilian who doesn’t register as a threat in any capacity until she makes eye contact with darkseid and gives him the most disgusted look imaginable “Doug… you look…well.” and then like three jl members have to stop her from leaping at darkseid while Hal’s like ‘no! No no, bad Greta! We don’t fight supervillains with…what is that?? I really fucking hope that’s not a gun…Is-is that fucking silly string?! Greta no we don’t silly string supervillains! We’ve talked about this!’

or

never-retired!/recently-out-of-retirement!greta who does the same thing but when she notices darkseid she rocks his shit in eight seconds flat and starts muttering about ‘that fucking Doug, always ruining my goddamn day’ and Hal is the first one to recover from the shock/confusion but only to tell Greta she’s grounded which gets another irritated ‘fucking doug!’ while Wally and Barry are losing it at Mach 6 while Bart tries to explain himself also at Mach 6, Cassie manages to catch Wally’s exasperated ‘where the fuck did you get Doug from?!’ And responds with ‘Apokolips’ in a tone that means they’re questioning his intelligence which leads to more screaming bc ‘so you knew who he was?? Why didn’t you come to us??’ and they all back up Kon when he claims they told Lex bc that means they have at least 3 hours of freedom while Lex is getting yelled at by the jl (and honestly every cape over 24)

[summertimeroses]

i know 16 year olds who aren’t allowed to take a bus by themselves for 15 minutes to meet their friends in the town centre. our town is tiny, there’s a population of maybe 30,000 and most of that is retired people and young families. how are these children supposed to become functional adults if the idea of making autonomous decisions unsupervised is presented as dangerous and untenable? can you imagine having never been allowed to take a bus and suddenly having to live on your own?