My dad tracks my every move on Life360 — but my parents used to walk home in blizzards and were ultimately free from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to live their lives in uninterrupted freedom till dinner time.
My parents like to remind me that life was harder for their generation.
Our parents’ childhood is a black and white movie that our generation might never understand. What did you do all day without a phone? Are you saying you didn’t have an Xbox? But how would you meet up with your friends without Snap Map?
Overparenting is an emerging parenting style where parents are extensively protective and involved in their children’s lives, according to pubmed.gov. On social media, this parenting style has been coined as “the helicopter parent.”
Technology has only made the inclination to be a helicopter parent easier. Parents can snoop on our lives with a click of a button. With technological advancement like tracking apps and screen time parental controls, problems of overcontrolling and overparenting styles have quickly risen.
Kids aren’t told to come home for dinner at sunset anymore. They’ll just get a ding on their smart watch. Every movement, failure, behavior — good or bad — is recorded and communicated immediately over apps like Life360 and Find My iPhone.
This leaves teens and children little space to breathe. When I miss a day of school, I know exactly what needs to be done to get back on track and have already started on my work. But before I get the chance, Canvas has my mom’s phone abuzz with 10 missing assignments. We’re almost adults — she doesn’t need the reminder too.
It’s a common conversation in my friend group: what new, overbearing habit do your parents use to control most aspects of your life?
The pandemic resulted in both of my parents working from home, transforming our family living room into their office — making my room the only quiet space. My friends explained how their parents got wide-eyed as they finished their second bag of Doritos, making harmful comments like “Are you sure you want to eat that?” or “Wow, do you really need another?”
But overparenting by Gen X isn’t only harmful to my generation, it’s even more obvious in the next.
As babysitters, lifeguards and food service workers, my friends and I also see the harm of overparenting at work. One day it’s a tantrum over the screen time clock running out. The next, it’s a five-year-old going rabid for the first piece of candy they’ve found in the cupboard all week.
But what I’ve realized is the parents who make sure you only eat 10 pieces of candy on Halloween raise adults who will overconsume what they couldn’t have as children. The kids who grow up with trust and freedom from their parents are less likely to be the ones cheating and sneaking around from their parents because they don’t need to.
With a more hands-off approach to parenting, kids will recognize natural consequences on their own and shape habits to avoid them. For example, if a teen is tired from scrolling on TikTok until 3 a.m., they’ll be less likely to repeat this behavior. They don’t need to be forced to hand over their phone at 10 p.m. and feel their access is being cut off — craving it more.
To be fair, some kids need an intensive parent to reach their full potential, and some may need help restraining themselves from certain foods of screentime for health reasons. But that doesn’t mean helicopter parenting should be the norm.
The coining of the helicopter parent on Gen X isn’t completely their fault. They had front row seats during the evolution of technology. So now, as parents, they are co-parenting with the internet.
Everyone knows whose mom is the strictest about food, whose dad spends their free time on Life 360 and whose household has every square inch covered with cameras. It’s time for our parents and the next generation of parents to loosen the leash that technology has wrapped around our childhood. Let us have space to grow, make mistakes, live and learn.