Does your house look like a daycare has exploded inside it?
That was the vivid assessment by one working mum in an article in The Wall Street Journal about the ongoing effect of COVID19 on her household. A daycare had gone off in it, scattering toys, half eaten sandwiches and discarded clothes around the rooms.
You get it don’t you? There’s a point where you give up trying. A point where you give up trying to try. But there is some light at the end of the tunnel. The article was about one perceived upside of the whole on again- off again- on again lockdown regime we’re under; the eclipse of helicopter parenting.
You know what helicopter parenting is too, don’t you? The way parents over the past ten or fifteen years have hovered over their children, curating their lives and lifestyles, and ensuring that no roadblock gets in the way in their journey of self-discovery. That they don’t fail. Ever. At anything.
Now, shock horror, parents are letting children cycle to the shops themselves with their own pocket money and buy stuff. Or even spend hours away at a time. It’s like an episode of Stranger Things. Whatever next: Spokey Dokes on the wheels of your chopper bicycle and flared brown corduroys?
Helicopter parenting is about making life like a Volvo, steady, dependable, and able to handle the corners without losing traction. Or more to the point, cutting the corners, and preparing a mini-adult who can step onto the moving sidewalk of full adulthood without falling over. I mean why send them out to explore now, when Dora can do that for them by proxy? Best to be on the safe side, which is inside.
The Loss of Control
And it was about control when the number of uncontrollable variables increased exponentially. We wanted to guarantee the outcomes despite the global churn and seismic events being screened into our living rooms. Yet we can’t guarantee the outcomes of the young progeny who we are looking after. To a certain extent, but not fully. We always manage to be blindsided don’t we?
And what happens when despite all that helicoptering, or perhaps because of it, things fall in a heap? My wife observes that in her psychology practice one of the most common client types is the young woman who has been to a private school, undertaken all of the music, sport and ballet lessons, who had a physics tutor, and who took family holidays somewhere educational and exciting. Now at twenty she is at a loss as to what to do with her life and wants to drop out of medical school. Many a young person has stepped away from the moving elevator of adulthood, angry that they never had the childhood they had wanted.
We enter this life not in control of ourselves, epitomised by the lack of control of our bodily functions. And if we live to a ripe old age we end our lives with the loss of the control that we had somehow mastered in the middle bit.
That’s even true of our emotions. The saddest reality of a person with dementia is the loss of thought control; what they say, how they respond. All of the inhibitors go. The steering wheel has come off in their hands and in their in an uncontrollable skid.
The Screen Demon
The big demon in the whole helicopter mix, of course, is the dreaded “screen time” and how much or how little of it your child needs. Will they become a basement living, junk food eating, gaming addict with no social skills if you give them too much screen time? Perhaps. But they might become that anyway. There’s no way of fully knowing.
Besides, let’s not scold our children about screen time, or even worry about it, when the big ticket item in our adult world is screen time. Never mind Zoom, every adult reading this was addicted to their screens long before their children were. It’s monkey see, monkey do.
So when you finally get the kids off those screens and onto the soccer pitch what do you do? You spend your time on the sidelines within hand’s reach of your own screen, just in case there’s not enough excitement going on in the defensive half of the pitch where your nine year old is camped. You didn’t actually see the goal they scored with the naked eye, but you’ve uploaded it to Facebook to watch it later.
Of course when I was a child the big demon was screen time too. TV screen time. I didn’t get a lot of screen time as a child as my twin brother and I were about ten before our family got a TV. And then we made up for it. And now I have children of my own. And I worry about too much screen time. We didn’t pass on the same technology to our children, merely the same neuroses.
The Roller-coaster Ride
Of course we helicopter our children because we say we love them. But the fact is we do it so often because we love control. Not controlling them per se, but this world. This world feels like a roller-coaster ride.
Big Tech assured us of a smooth cable car ride to relational connectivity. Big Pharma promised a smooth cable car ride to physical capacity. Big Education guaranteed a smooth cable care ride to a career in something that was un-smelly and well paid. Not for all children of course. The ones who were not helicoptered would invariably end up in poorly paid, smelly jobs. Jobs like daycare for example. And now the chickens, and the kids, have come home to roost, and eat, and drink and poo and have too much screen time.
So here we are strapped into The Demon Drop II with no safety brake. It’s no wonder parents hate Fortnite, I mean, who can think that far ahead?
This lack of control, coupled with the desire to have it, pushes me back to the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible’s Old Testament. A king is writing, and as we know, ancient kings had a lot of control. But the king, Solomon, realises just how little control he really has over things.
Solomon makes a lot of memorable statements, many of which sum up his frustrations about the lack of control he has, with none more memorable than this:
I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 2:18)
No amount of helicopter parenting would help Solomon leave a firm legacy when he was gone. “Who knows?” That’s his angst. You can curate and helicopter your child’s life all you wish, but who knows?
By “vanity” Solomon didn’t mean “useless”, but as a wise friend of mine translates it, “misty”. Like mist these things don’t last. We can’t grasp at them. We can’t take control of the mist, it is here for a time, then gone. Just like us.
The flip side of course, is that Someone does have control. Someone is watching over us, not like an anxious helicopter parent, but as a loving heavenly Father. Jesus said of our desire to control:
…which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? (Luke 12:25-26)
Of course Jesus doesn’t leave it there. He’s not a fatalist. For those who give up their desire to control and hand it to God, he had this to say:
And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried. For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you. (Luke 12:29-31).
Sounds like the type of capital "P" Parent we could all do with in these out of control times.
Image Source: https://sg.theasianparent.com/signs-of-helicopter-parenting
