Ditch the helicopters: try curling

The metaphor has always bothered me, helicopter parenting, not because it isn’t true that today’s parents hover, make loud noises, distract everyone and blow crap around while teachers, coaches, and even employers try to work with their kids.

What the metaphor fails to express is the impact of that helicoptering on the child; the ways in which the hovering is not just about watching but about impacting their children’s lives. These parents seek to remove any barrier that would negatively impact their child’s chances of success, as conceived, most often, by the child herself: which book she prefers to read (as opposed to the one the teacher assigned), which friend she needs to sit next to to feel most comfortable in class (though she and the friend can never stop talking), which sport team she must be on (though the family’s own schedule conflicts with half the practices and games). What do you mean my kid can’t be in the marching band, on the cheerleading squad and play football at the same time? She’s amazing, and deserves to have it all!

I prefer to describe this parenting phenomena with a sports metaphor: curling. You know, that sport we only know about because it is part of the winter Olympics, the one in which a curler slides a stone across a sheet of ice and sweepers use brooms to clear the ice and smooth it to improve the path of the stone as it heads toward a target?

Parents, so desperate for their little stones to glide on to fame and fortune, smooth the path for them, removing troublesome classmates, a less-than-ideal teacher, a hard class (“He can’t afford a B on his transcript!”), any rock that might cause friction, any divot that might impede that smooth slide into Yale.

Of course we now know how all this smoothing of the ice turns out. College students’ inability to cope with common stresses is well documented. Students are showing increased signs of depression, unable to manage the regular challenges of adult life. Parents who have the time, money, and energy to push the broom for their kids have inadvertently swept away all of opportunities for kids to fail in low-risk environments. Now, instead of having toddlers who fall a short foot to the ground and pop back up before anyone even notices, we have 6-foot seniors who, though their transcripts don’t have a smudge on them, aren’t psychologically or emotionally ready for college — hell, for life — at all.

Or perhaps we find ourselves faced, as we are this week, with Brock Turner, the Stanford freshman who couldn’t behave with dignity when faced with a woman’s vulnerability, whose parents perpetuate the problem by writing letters to judges arguing for leniency against their convicted felon. This goes well beyond smoothing the ice; this is like replacing the ice with the petals of a thousand roses.

These recent events only highlight the need to closet the brooms. Stop trying to play the game ourselves; start coaching our kids from the sidelines. No bending the rules, no paying off the refs. We’ll need a new metaphor, one that accepts the struggles of life rather than attempts to eliminate them. Steeplechase, anyone?