The media has been widely reporting so based on an APA press-release for an upcoming journal article in Developmental Psychology (pre-print & press release link below). The authors coded video of how often mothers were “too strict or demanding considering the child’s behavior” during play when the child was 2. Mothers who were over-controlling had children who performed lower on emotional regulation laboratory tasks at 5 years old, and lower on self-/teacher-reports of socio-emotional skills at 10 years old.
Is this really “helicopter parenting,” which I usually think of as a term for parent’s excessive intervention to solve children’s problems in school / college? I think of helicopter parenting as authoritative parenting coupled with anxieties about helping children be as successful as possible in an ever-increasingly competitive world. But the coding in this study looks to me like parents focused on high behavioral expectations of their children without a lot of warmth and responsiveness to their child’s perspective (i.e., authoritarian parenting). Indeed, the authors never use the term “helicopter parenting.”
I feel it’s a pretty interesting study, but how should we interpret this study? What does “helicopter parenting” mean in the field of Developmental Psychology?
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/06/helicopter-parenting.aspx
Perry, N. B., Dollar, J. M., Calkins, S. D., Keane, S. P., & Shanahan, L. (2018). Childhood self-regulation as a mechanism through which early overcontrolling parenting is associated with adjustment in preadolescence. Developmental Psychology, (advance online publication).
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