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Helicopter Parenting

Helicopter parents think they are protecting their children from harm and are standing up for their child to make sure they get their well-deserved special treatment The truth is that helicopter parents are doing their children more harm than good, are potentially stifling the creativity and emotional development of the children and often embarrassing them.

What is helicopter parenting?

Helicopter parenting was originally described by famed author, child psychologist, psychotherapist and parent educator, Haim G. Ginott (1922-1973). He is known as author of the 1965 best-selling book “Between Parent and Child.” Ginott is credited with the first published reference to helicopter parenting in his 1969 best-seller, “Between Parent and Teenager.” In the book, Ginott mentions a teenager who complained to him, “Mother hovers over me like a helicopter.” Helicopter parenting is described very simply by Positive-Parenting-Ally as parents who “seem to ‘hover’ over their children in an effort of trying to control their lives in order to protect them from harm, disappointment, or mistakes.” They do their child’s daily homework and keep them safe by insisting that they be excused from activities where they could get hurt, in the opinion of the parent. So the child is often left on the sidelines when other kids in the physical education class are playing soccer or are taught gymnastics routines.

Helicopter parents demand to speak to the teacher “right now” even after school personnel tell the parent that the teacher is in class. The parent feels entitled to special treatment and should not have to wait for anything. Their child should also not have to wait. Their child should be first in line to receive rewards or to engage in an activity and their child should be seen first at medical or dental appointments, even if there are children who need more urgent care than theirs. Helicopter parents may think they are protecting their children, but they are actually hurting their children, possibly for a lifetime.

Who are the helicopter parents?

Mothers are overwhelmingly more likely to be guilty of helicopter parenting than dads and are also more likely to go to extremes to circumvent rules for their children. Moms more often refuse to let their children make mistakes, be given a bad grade or to perform in the ballet recital without the helicopter mom interfering and complaining. The helicopter parent feels the need to constantly come to their child’s rescue. They complain that their children are not treated fairly, that the child received a bad grade not because of poor effort or incorrect answers but because the teacher does not like their child. Other children are chosen for teams, school plays or recitals because the coach likes the other children better, not because the child of the helicopter mom does not have the necessary skills.

Helicopter parents, particularly mothers, are easily identifiable at an early age and typically interfere by the time a child starts school. There are differences between the types of behaviors exhibited by helicopter moms and helicopter dads. The fathers are so consumed by overall status and career path that they may skip going to the teacher or coach and go straight to the top with his complaints and even threats. Helicopter moms are busy working behind the scenes, manipulating and dominating to get the special treatment for their child that the mother thinks her child deserves, even though none of the other children in the class or on the team get that specific treatment or benefit demanded by helicopter mom. She is likely to threaten teachers and coaches directly, often telling them if they do not give her child what she wants, she will see to it that the teacher or coach gets fired.

Effects of helicopter parenting on the children

The results of helicopter parenting can leave a child with serious deficiency in some life skills and with poor emotional health. The U.K. Daily Mail reported on a study that found children of helicopter parents are “more likely to be depressed,” and to have difficulty getting along well with others. The children have less self-confidence than peers and are more likely to have anxiety issues, according to results of the study. This coincides with other findings on the effects of helicopter parenting. The Family Education Network quotes Ohio State University associate professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, Dr. Hiasako M. Koizumi, who explains that the helicopter mom “interferes with normal child development. She manages their environment to the extent that she prevents them from learning how to handle stress, inhibits healthy exploration, denies the growth of autonomy, limits self-confidence, and nurtures socially isolated and inadequate teenagers.”

Many other professionals stress the detrimental effects that helicopter parenting has on children and that the effects are long-term, potentially affecting the child throughout their entire life. Children of helicopter parents often exhibit a lack of confidence to accomplish anything independently. Some children may grow up unable to make crucial decisions on their own, while others recognize the helicopter parenting and are embarrassed by their parent’s behavior. Other children grow up with a sense of entitlement, stemming from the special treatment demanded by their parents throughout their childhood.

Helicopter parents are always there…always

Helicopter parents bully other parents, teachers, coaches and anyone else who they feel is the cause of their child not having the best grades, not being first in line and not being recognized more than other children. They also display hovering behaviors when a child spends the night at a friend’s house, when their children go off to summer camp or on a school field trip. Even when not physically with their child, helicopter mom is still there…hovering. Some summer camps have actually started hiring staff whose job duties are to deal with all the telephone calls from helicopter parents who call to request special treatment for their child and who demand that staff supply their child with certain items that the other campers are not given.

Helicopter parents do not stop when the child enters adulthood

Just because a child graduates high school does not mean helicopter parenting stops. Some grown children feel the hovering even after going off to college or after getting married and living on their own as an adult. The extremes that helicopter parents go to so they can still hover over their adult children is demonstrated in the ABC-News report “Helicopter Parents Hover Over Kids’ Lives,” which states that up to 60% of college students have at least one helicopter parent. The extremes that some parents have gone to includes a confession by one college student who reported that his parents installed a nanny-cam on his computer. Jim Settle, co-author of the study on helicopter parenting of college students stated that the parents installed the nanny-cam “so the parents were able to watch their son 24 hours a day.” Other parents have logged on to their college-aged children’s social media pages to keep track of what they are doing and with whom and have make repeated calls to university administrators over minor disputes and even to complain over the food served to their child on campus.

College is not the only place that helicopter parents hover after their child reaches adulthood. They are right there to “help” their child get a job, which usually backfires when the human resources officer or hiring manager gets a call from mommy. When the adult who has been victim of a helicopter parent throughout childhood does get a job, there are likely to be issues with keeping the job, difficulty accepting criticism or a sense of entitlement, expecting more favorable treatment than co-workers.

Are you a helicopter parent?

Helicopter parents often refuse to admit to being a helicopter parent. They usually see nothing wrong with their actions, as in the case of the mother who called the college dining hall to complain about her daughter being served chicken that was too salty. The mother said making the call was the right thing to do. Other parents do not recognize that they are guilty of helicopter parenting. Baby Zone offers a quick, 10-question quiz so parents can determine if they are a helicopter parent. If you are, back off and let your child be a child and if grown, let the child be an adult. Let the child fall, fail the math test or not get chosen for the lead in the school play. Johnny will learn to dust himself off and go back to playing football and Suzy will learn to study harder for the next test. Children need to make mistakes and learn from them instead of having a hovering parent “protecting” them from living a normal life. Children who learn from mistakes and who learn to make decisions on their own are more likely to develop positive self-esteem and not grow up with a sense of entitlement or lack of confidence.

Source: http://nobullying.com/helicopter-parents/

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Grieving and the Nontraditional Family

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate it.

– Samuel Johnson

It has been said that the nontraditional family of yesterday is the traditional family of today! These means that the nontraditional family is fast becoming the norm in today’s society. But that also means that society is not prepared to help nontraditional parents and children cope with that reality. In particular, society has few, if any, means to help nontraditonal families cope with grief and loss, out of which they are born.

Nontraditional families include single, divorced, step or blended, adoptive, foster parents, and grandparents raising grandchildren. They are quickly becoming the majority in today’s society. Whether society/people consider them defective or less than “ideal” they are a reality and need special information and support. Most of the parenting programs available to nontraditional parents forget this reality. Consequently, the parenting programs apply only to traditional, two-parent, biologically based parents. Part of the problem is that nontraditional families have unique needs not usually experienced by traditional parents. One example of this is grief.

Grief is the state that individuals experience when a significant loss occurs in their life. The loss might occur as a result of death, divorce, and/or abandonement by a familiy member. It might be said that nontraditional families are born out of grief as they are formed as a result of a loss. This is not to say the traditional families do not experience grief but that nontraditional families have this experience, to one degree or another, in common.

Grief has predictable stages of development. This is beneficial to the nontraditional parent as they attempt to make sense of their grief experience. Most importantly they know that it will not last forever, at least not in the same intensity as when it started. Perhaps the best know framework for grief and loss are the stages listed in the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross who wrote the book On Death and Dying (1969). Her stages of grief include:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

A useful metaphor for understanding grief are the waves of an ocean. When you are way out in the ocean, the waves are large and frightening. They pull you under and twist you about, creating a sense of hopelessness or fear of your future. This is similar to the stage of Denial or shock at the reality of the loss. When the waves pass and the ocean feels momentarily calm, this is called the stage of anger or bargaining. The shore represents the stage of acceptance. As nontraditional parents and children swim for the stage of acceptance, waves continue to crash over them, sometimes threatening to pull them under in denial and shock and at other times settling down and letting anger and bargaining propel them forward to the shore. The closer you come to the shore the less intense the waves. But even small waves, when standing on the edge of the ocean can unsettle and cause you to lose your balance.

Nontraditional parents can use this metaphor to help them balance love and limits with their children. Because they are in the ocean and not on the shore they cannot compare themselves to traditional parents. Rather than live up to society’s expectation of what an ideal family should look like, nontraditional parents need to concentrate their energy on swimming for the shore.

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Kids put in institutions have different brain compositions than kids in foster care

In new research published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, researchers looked at brain differences between Romanian children who were either abandoned and institutionalized, sent to institutions and then to foster families, or were raised in biological families.

Kids who were not raised in a family setting had noticeable alterations in the white matter of their brains later on, while the white matter in the brains of the children who were placed with a foster family looked pretty similar to the brains of the children who were raised with their biological families.

Researchers were interested in white matter, which is largely made up of nerves, because it plays an important role in connecting brain regions and maintaining networks critical for cognition. Prior research has shown that children raised in institutional environments have limited access to language and cognitive stimulation, which could hinder development.

These findings suggest that even if a child were at a risk for poor development due to their living circumstances at an early age, placing them in a new caregiving environment with more support could prevent white matter changes or perhaps even heal them.

More studies are needed, but the researchers believe their findings could help public health efforts aimed at children experiencing severe neglect, as well as efforts to build childhood resiliency.

Source: 

http://time.com/3683071/neglect-brain-development/

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It’s Almost Here! It was an honor to be able to contribute to this publication on helping grandparents raising grandchildren or aunts and uncles raising nieces and nephews or older siblings raising younger brothers and sisters or any kinship care situation. Reserve your copy today!

The Kinship Parenting Toolbox
A unique guidebook for the kinship care parenting journey

Edited by Kim Phagan Hansel
With 7.1 million grandchildren living with their grandparents and 4.7 million children living with “other relatives,” according to the 2010 census, almost 12 million children in America today are being raised in kinship care. Of course, this group of kinship providers comes with unique needs and challenges that they face. And the outcome for millions of children depend on the resources and support these families can access. This book helps build resources for these families, in the hopes that children’s lives will be profoundly, positively impacted.

Containing articles from more than 70 contributors touched in a variety of ways by kinship care – grandparents raising grandchildren, children raised by relatives, social workers, therapists, kinship support organizations and others, this book will be a much need resource for those working with and parenting relative’s children.

Chapters include:
The Unexpected Role
Getting Organized
Your Legal Toolbox
Your Financial Toolbox
Our Changing Family
Guilt, Shame, & Love
Perspective of the Child
Finding Support
Parenting Children from Tough Starts
Understanding Attachment
Behavior and Discipline
Working with Schools
The Teen Years
Tying Up Loose Ends
Resources

Get more info: http://www.emkpress.com/kinshiptoolbox.html

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Does My Child Have A Sensory Issue? How do you help your child regulate their emotions, improve coordination or increase their academic performance? Check out this helpful video for more information…

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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A New Organization and a New Focus: Enabling Children and Families to Succeed

by Adam Pertman

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-pertman/a-new-organization-and-a-new-focus_b_6543152.html

Finding safe, permanent homes for children in foster care – usually through adoption when they cannot return to their families of origin – has become a federal mandate and a national priority during the past few decades. That’s obviously a very good thing, but there’s a too-little-discussed downside to this positive trend: Far too little attention is being paid to serving children after placement to ensure that they can grow up successfully in their new families and so that their parents can successfully raise them to adulthood.

Notice the use of the word “successfully” twice in the last paragraph. It’s the key. It’s also the founding principle of a new organization I’m proud to lead, the National Center on Adoption and Permanency (NCAP). Our mission is to move policy and practice in the U.S. beyond their current concentration on child placement to a model in which enabling families of all kinds to succeed – through education, training and support services – becomes the bottom-line objective.

Along with fellow NCAP team members, I’ll be writing more about our organization and its goals in subsequent commentaries. For now, please check out our website and know we are already at work around the country. Furthermore, I’m delighted to announce that we’re entering into an exciting new partnership designed to significantly enhance our efforts; it is with the American Institutes for Research, one of the world’s largest behavioral and social science research and evaluation organizations. In addition, we are partnering with the Chronicle for Social Change, which like NCAP is dedicated to improving the lives of children, youth and families. 

Because of the traumatic experiences most children in foster care have endured, a substantial proportion of them have ongoing adjustment issues, some of which can intensify as they age. And many if not most girls and boys being adopted from institutions in other countries today have had comparable experiences that pose risks for their healthy development. 

Preparing and supporting adoptive and guardianship families before and after placement not only helps to preserve and stabilize at-risk situations, but also offers children and families the best opportunity for success. Furthermore, such adoptions not only benefit children, but also result in reduced financial and social costs to child welfare systems, governments and communities. 

A continuum of Adoption Support and Preservation (ASAP) services is needed to address the informational, therapeutic and other needs of these children and their families. The overall body of adoption-related research is clear on this count: Those who receive such services show more positive results, and those with unmet service needs are linked with poorer outcomes.

(Next June, the first national conference in over a decade to focus on ASAP – which many in the child welfare community believe is the most important issue facing their field – will take place in Nashville, TN. NCAP is among the many sponsors; learn more about the event here.) 

Our nation has made a concerted effort to move children into adoption and other forms of permanency because, from research and experience, we understand their value for girls and boys who cannot remain in their original homes, a value rooted in the belief that all of them – of every age – need and deserve nurturing families to promote optimal development and emotional security throughout their lives. Indeed, while child welfare systems in many states are still experiencing a variety of problems, it’s also the case that a combination of federal funding and other resources has made a significant difference – that is, they have contributed to a huge increase in the number of children moving from insecurity into permanency over the last few decades, from about 211,000 in FY 1988-1997 (an average of 21,000 annually) to 524,496 in the 10-year period ending in FY2012 (over 52,000 annually).

Furthermore, an analysis conducted by the Donaldson Adoption Institute indicates that, as a nation, we have made some progress in developing ASAP services, particularly in 17 states rated as having “substantial” programs. At least 13 states, however, have almost no specialized ASAP programs, and even the most developed of them often serve only a segment of children with significant needs. For example, many of the specialized therapeutic services have limits in duration or frequency or serve only children with special needs adopted from foster care in their own states, and some serve only those at imminent risk of placement outside their homes. 

To enable families to succeed, ASAP services must become an integral, essential part of adoption. Just as the complex process of treating an ongoing health issue requires continuing care, as well as specialists who understand the complications that can arise and how to best address them, the adoption of a child with complex special needs requires specific services and trained professionals to address the challenges that arise over time. 

When families struggle to address the consequences of children’s early adversity, they should be able to receive – as a matter of course integral to the adoption process, and not as an “add-on” that can be subtracted – services that meet their needs and sustain them. Adoptive families, professionals, state and federal governments, and we as a society share an obligation to provide the necessary supports to truly achieve permanency, safety and well-being for the girls and boys whom we remove from their original homes. 

Given the profound changes that have taken place in the field today, especially the reality that most adoptions in the U.S. are of children from foster care with some level of special needs, permanency for them should focus on more than just sustaining their original families when possible or finding new ones when necessary. We must also provide the resources and supports that will allow them to – here’s that word again – succeed.

Get more information at http://www.nationalcenteronadoptionandpermanency.net