Author: Sarah Cottrell / Source: Mashable
Welcome to Small Humans, an ongoing series at Mashable that looks at how to take care of – and deal with – the kids in your life. Because Dr. Spock is nice and all, but it’s 2018 and we have the entire internet to contend with.
Helicopter Parents have reigned supreme in the media these last few years but they’re being replaced by a hyper-concentrated version of themselves with a new moniker: Lawnmower Parents.
If you’ve never heard of lawnmower parents, take a seat now because you’re about to have some strong feelings.Lawnmowers don’t just hover over their kids to make sure that they are safe, they obliterate any whiff of a struggle for their kids by curating every aspect of their childhoods. These parents tend to do extreme things, such as choose their child’s friends, practice “redshirting” to ensure their child’s early academic ease and success, and even jump into arguments on their child’s behalf to prevent their kid from having hurt feelings.
Thanks to a perfect storm of social and tech evolution, parenting, like so much else, has splintered into “tribes.” Where there was once a community understanding of “it takes a village” there are now strict codes of parenting philosophies. From the Free-Range parents to the Tiger Moms, the Hot Mess Moms, and the Perfect Parents with their sanctimonious status updates on Instagram, all of them feed the idea that kids these days are growing up woefully underprepared for adulthood.
In 2015, a Harris Poll for The JED Foundation, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and The Jordan Porco Foundation surveyed 1,502 first year college students and found that a staggering 60% of them reported feeling emotionally underprepared for the real world.
“When parents try to remove all obstacles for kids, they are doing them a great disservice,” Samantha Rodman, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, and author of How to Talk to Your Kids About Your Divorce tells Mashable. “Kids need to learn that they are competent and have agency in the world. If their parents pave the way for them to have an effortless life, then what will they do when an effort is required in adulthood?”
In some ways, I…
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