Just Say No to Helicoptering

Dear Helicopter Parents,

Back the f*ck off. You're actually endangering your child's safety.

Thanks, Mommy Remix

An article on the New York Times blog The Well Column recently raised the issue of an increased safety hazard when parents go down playground slides with their toddlers in their laps. The velocity from the adult's significantly greater mass can exacerbate injuries to the child if a limb gets caught. (Read full post here.)

Or how about some broken teeth or a bloody nose when you both go flying and you land on top of your little one? Maybe if someone is recording the moment, you could win some money toward medical bills from "America's Funniest Videos." At least baby teeth are supposed to fall out.

In general, I'm not a fan of slides. In elementary school, we had one of those giant, metal monsters that were scorching hot in the sun and from which a classmate fell and earned himself a compound fracture. At Cedar Point, a flight down the multi-laned, bumpy blue hill on a burlap bag gave me a friction burn on my wrist. At Discovery Zone (otherwise known as Dante's third ring of hell) where I worked as a "kid's coach," I wish I had a nickle for every time I had to blow my whistle and remind a guest that "the roller slide is for going down, not going up."

Slides are a slippery enough slope toward the emergency room without parents adding themselves into the equation.

True, parents think their arms are the safest place their little ones could ever be. But not when momentum is involved.

You cannot protect your child from every little bump and bruise. You shouldn't, really, else how will he know how to pick himself up?

I am positive that each time my parents said, "Jump up," they were attending to more than my physical state. They were instilling emotional fortitude. They were teaching me self-control and strengthening my pain tolerance.

Remember, we are not raising "children." We don't want them to stay children, for heaven's sake. We are raising them into men and women. Adults will need to rely on a foundation of "jump up," not "let me kiss it and make it go away."

I'm as klutzy as the next person, but most of my "falls" now are screw-ups at work, injuries in my relationships, oversights in my finances. If I sat on the proverbial playground crying until someone came running and fixed my boo-boo for me, I'd be sitting there quite a while.

Helicopter parents (those who hover over their kids' every moment) may be well-intentioned, but they need to adjust their radar scopes to a longer range. They need to account for how this kind of parenting will play out in the long run.

Kids who can't fend for themselves turn into adults who can't problem-solve their way out of a paper bag. Nobody wants that.