What Really Scares Helicopter Parents

Volumes have been written about the rise of helicopter parenting. We know the symptoms: obsessive hovering, with the aim of making sure that Junior grows up in a well-padded Nerf world where nothing more distressing than a hangnail ever befalls them. The results have also been extensively elaborated: a generation growing up anxious, risk-averse, and generally unable to cope with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Less has been written to explain why the squadrons of Sikorskys have appeared at this particular date and time. Vague noises are made about how the world is more dangerous for kids than it used to be (it isn’t), how parents are more anxious than they used to be (really? More anxious than they were during the pioneer days or the Great Depression?), or how liability makes institutions more attuned to parental worries than they once were (OK, but the parents of 1970 didn’t ask institutions to keep their kids from climbing trees). I grew up in a New York City where kids had a lot more freedom -- and a lot more crime to contend with, a lot more pollution, and a lot less safety gear. What changed?