Is Helicopter Parenting to Blame for Our Kids’ Mental-Health Crisis?

Helicopter parenting – well-intentioned but deeply detrimental parenting – is leaving our young people incapable of functioning. 

There has been a glut of alarming articles coming out lately about the mental-health crisis facing young people today. The stats the authors are quoting show that these young people have little resilience and few abilities to cope with the ordinary stresses of life.

A Sept. 8, 2016, article by Simonia Chiose in the Globe and Mail lays out some of the shocking details.  The 44,000 students who completed a questionnaire called the National College Health Assessment in 2016, “eight percent fewer students than in 2013 felt their health was very good or excellent,” and “the number of students saying they seriously considered suicide in the prior year was 13 percent, up 3.5 percent from 2013.”

An Oct.18, 2016 article by Paul Attfield in the Globe and Mail quotes Tayyab Rashid, a psychologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough, who says that “trends I’ve seen is more severe cases, more chronic cases, and more crises.”

In an article for CBC News dated Sept. 26, 2017, author Amanda Pfeffer writes that a 2016 study by the Ontario University and College Health Association (OUCHA) shows terrifying results.

Pfeffer quotes Meg Houghton, the president of this association, who says, “I don’t want to be too hyperbolic, but the truth is, lives are at stake.”

This recent study demonstrates that “rates of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts, as well as suicide attempts, are up from [the] first survey in 2013.”

Houghton says, “we’ve got a major crisis on our hands,” and “many of us who oversee counseling services describe our day as using a finger to stop a flood and the demand for our services far outstrips our capacity to support students.”

In a May 2017 article for thestar.com, entitled “Demand for youth mental health services is exploding. How universities and business are scrambling to react,” the authors point out that not only colleges and universities are having to increase their mental health budgets, but “a growing number of major corporations that employ young people, including Starbucks and Manulife, have dramatically increased mental health benefits in response to growing demand.”

The article also cites a new study from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which “reported emergency department visits by children and youth from 5 to 24 seeking mental health or substance abuse treatment rose 63 percent and hospitalizations jumped 67 percent between 2006 and 2016.”

What’s not mentioned in any of the above articles or studies is the underlying reason for the alarming increase of mental health problems in today’s young people. I suggest that it’s the epidemic of helicopter parenting that’s to blame.

While childhood abuse and neglect have been strongly correlated with adult rates of mental health and substance-use disorders, it appears that middle- to upper-middle class children are experiencing more helicopter parenting. In an interview in the LA Times with Julie Lythcott-Haims, former dean of freshmen at Stanford University, she too observed this mental health crisis “in usually middle to upper-middle-class families and beyond, with disposable time and money. Working-class, blue-collar, poor families — parents there don’t have the wherewithal to be cultivating their kids’ childhood. They’re worried about fundamental things like food and shelter. [My colleagues] were not seeing this were at community colleges. Those students have a lot of self-reliance.”

Too many middles- to upper-middle-class parents these days are inadvertently undermining the mental health of their growing kids, and the results are reflected in the above statistics.

When parents mistake coddling and bubble-wrapping their children for giving them love, they cause their kid’s unintended harm.

Kids need to learn how to think for themselves, solve their own problems, cope with stress and bounce back from adversity. The skills, habits, and attitudes that they’re taught in childhood are meant to equip them for a healthy and successful adult life.

Unfortunately, when parents are so anxious that they do too much for their children, even well into their 20s, these young people never develop the strength to cope with normal life.

From everything I’ve observed, it seems clear to me that the underlying cause of the current mental-health crisis is the type of well-intentioned but deeply detrimental parenting that is leaving our young people incapable of functioning in their post-secondary education and in the workplace.

Helicopter parenting has become so frighteningly common that now schools at all levels have jumped on the bandwagon.

The solution to this mental-health crisis is not simply to increase the number of services offered to young people today. Society won’t be able to afford the costs of this crisis, both in the growing levels of care required for these young people and in the devastating degree of disability that will result from it.

Any type of Band-Aid solution misses the point. As with any health crisis, we must focus squarely on prevention….

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