The term “helicopter parenting” comes from the notion that parents, like helicopters, hover over their children, monitoring and controlling their lives. Helicopter parenting is a form of emotional injury to your child. Unless your child is a full blown drug addict or involved in illicit or illegal activities, the message you’re sending your child by helicoptering over him or her is “I don’t trust you.” This prevents your child from learning to gain their own independence.
When parents have a basic lack of trust in the world, they are more prone to helicopter parenting. One major stage of development we pass through in childhood is developing a sense of trust in the world. If that was not established by parents because of their own early childhood traumas, they may project this lack of trust in the world onto their children.
As a result of this particular wound, children will feel smothered and controlled. They may even feel that they have lost a sense of who they are as a result of the monitoring. A common complaint from children of these parents is that they have lost their voice, as helicopter parents take full control over various aspects of their life. Typically these children do not feel free to express their frustration. This repression of frustration can lead to depression.
Depression from a psychoanalytic perspective is anger turned inward. When we cannot express, we repress. This implosion can cause our emotions to turn on us.
Helicopter parents are poor at mirroring their children and offering them empathetic understanding. This form of human disconnect forces the child into a control/submit dynamic. There is no growth here because they never authentically learn to communicate. Their only choice is to obey or avoid and neither option is a healthy alternative.
As time goes by, repressed feelings necessitate defense mechanisms that will cause a future breakdown. Smoking, drinking, and overeating are all examples of defense mechanisms that people use to cope with distressing feelings. These defense mechanisms are ways for the individual to “control” the anger that they feel inside about being controlled. They dig their metaphorical pit deeper and they end up experiencing what I refer to as the “hole in the soul.” They attempt to fill this hole in the soul with temporary defenses that never build the person up and create low self-esteem. As a result the person also develops negative core beliefs about him or herself such as “I’m weak” or “I only matter when I’m pleasing another.”
From a Mind Map Perspective
Wounds of the past are multigenerational in nature. Although we are not the cause of Panel One of our life —we have no control in the way we were parented— we can always reboot the system and Be The Cause of better outcomes in the next chapter of our life.
If you are a helicopter parent, take inventory of your own childhood experiences so you can stop the multi-generational projection process. By working through the wounds of your childhood, you can stop contaminating your children’s experiences with yours.
