The return of helicopter parents

George Thompson george.thompson at NYU.EDU
Mon Mar 26 22:27:44 UTC 2012


I had only encountered this term fleetingly, and it seems that my notion of
the meaning has been mistaken.  I had supposed that "helicopter parents"
were so absorbed in their careers, their fitness classes and so forth that
they left the raising of their children to nannies and others and only
dropped in to the child's life for special events, zooming out again
afterwards.

GAT

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Well, they really never left...
>
> http://goo.gl/183Gf
>
>> Parenting observers cite the cancellation as a prime example of
>> "helicopter parents" — those who hover over their children and are
>> involved in every aspect of their children's lives — sports, school,
>> and increasingly work — to ensure that they don't fail, even at an
>> Easter egg hunt.
>> "They couldn't resist getting over the rope to help their kids," said
>> Ron Alsop, a former /Wall Street Journal/ reporter and author of /The
>> Trophy Kids Grow Up/, which examines the "millennial children"
>> generation.
>> "That's the perfect metaphor for millennial children. They (parents)
>> can't stay out of their children's lives. They don't give their
>> children enough chances to learn from hard knocks, mistakes."
>>
>
> VS-)
>
> ------------------------------**------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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