#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.

[whinyvents]

I am once again unable to tell if my parents were ever really that bad or if I am actually just an ungrateful brat.

[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.

[splinter-cat]

Sometimes I feel like I was somehow complicit in my parents controlling and abusing(?) me because my neurodivergent brain heard them set rules and decided I Cannot Ever Break a Rule.

[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?

[hibiscuts]

I don't think they realize. I HAVE to leave. I don't care about the cost. I don't care if housing is atrocious. I'll pay it on my own if I have to. I just have to get out of here for my own safety.

[he13na]

I'm 29 and my boyfriend and I still live with our parents. Times are tough financially, please be kind.

My mom is my "bestie". She wants to always be with me and do things with me. But she's had me all to herself for 29 years and sometimes I just wanna get away from the family and be alone with my boyfriend (24). But he lives with his family too and there's ALWAYS. A L W A Y S someone home every time we go to each other's houses, and I'm starting to wonder if both sets of parents are doing this on purpose to clamjam. We've had to drive off to secluded areas in his car almost every time. And even when we don't have sex, I just want to be with him without everyone else around.

It's so hard to do that because both our families just LOVE each other and get along really well like it's one big family. Which is great! That's a really positive thing and a green flag! It's not always so fantastic when sometimes I don't want to feel like we're being chaperoned. And because of our chaotic work schedules, he and I only get to see each other 2 or 3 times a week, 3 IF we're lucky. I want to make the most of that and I've gotten all the family love I need for a while, I just want a romantic and personal night with him. And because I have a pretty shitty work life balance and my boss won't change or adjust my schedule to grant me more time, I'm having difficulty balancing and separating my time between my boyfriend and my family.

My mom wants to see a movie on one of "our" days. So I want him to come with us to ensure I get to be with him, and that means she's third wheeling our date. It's beginning to concern and bug me. Sometimes I just want to spend my time with him and not with EVERYBODY, but sometimes the opposite happens and I get bummed out that we can't have the special one on one time we deserve.

I know both our moms are Catholic and both want me to wait until marriage to lose my virginity (too late, lmao) and... wait, don't I get a say in what I do? Isn't that my choice? So there is some definite cockblocking going on. I feel a little suffocated and I love his family and MY family, but it's healthy to have a separate life where I'm not always in the presence of an elder and I can enjoy my time and make memories with my boyfriend and JUST him. I want more of that.

I don't know if they're strategically ever present because of that, or always wanting to "lowkey" supervise, but both families always want us to be with them (together) and I love that everyone loves each other but.... ugh, give us some space! Can anyone relate? How can I deal or get around this?

[booksand-glitter]

Worst part about living with any family is the half hour lecture you get each and every single time you go out to socialize, even though you've been 18 and socializing just fine and safely for almost 2 decades now.

Stop.

[errantindy]

Oh boy…and like…even if caution and worry for young children COULD be justified there’s a point where it should end, where young adults need to be trusted to become adults…not, ya know, still continually tracked and untrusted forever and ever. The more I see of tracking apps and functions I worry for kids more and more.

You see, in the beginning, my father had us tracked through our cell provider while we were on his plan. It took me a bit to understand what those cautionary texts I got like weekly from my provider MEANT and appreciated the lawyers and activists who got that set up. I had to demand my father stop tracking me that way. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to be tracked, but he stopped.

Then my father demanded the whole family use the Life 360 app so “he could make sure we were safe, in case something happened.” I went along with that until I gathered my courage and stopped, telling him that was unacceptable. Being that I’m trans, pan, and a few other pride flags short of my own parade, I didn’t want him tracking me to meetings of a local trans support group. He again did not understand, but there was nothing he really did when I deleted the app.

THEN, THEN, when I finally cottoned to the idea that my family was REALLY a mess an’ my parents were the problem, I cut off contact. Well. Perhaps…nine months later, I was changing a tire on my car, an’ ‘lo an’ behold, what do I find? A GPS tracker attached to my car. Wasn’t illegal in my state, the cops wouldn’t do more than give me a report, the company that monitored the device wouldn’t tell me nothin’, so as serendipity would have it, I was moving anyways, I was glad to be fleeing beyond my parents reach.

I feel like a lot of people don’t really fully grasp the idea that abusive parents exist and are both common and, to a degree, socially acceptable.

Like, they may be aware of the fact but have not yet actually integrated it into their worldview, personal beliefs, or policy proposals.

[longing-star]

Helicopter parents, vigilant but always distant

[impossiblewitchpersona-blog]

[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.

[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 👀👀👀

[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.