What beliefs drive parents to engage in intrusive parenting practices?

Parents play a critical role in fostering (or hindering) their children’s motivation to achieve. When parents intervene only when needed, children can thrive; when parents “helicopter,” or intervene excessively, children may persist less at difficult tasks and become overly dependent.

What drives parents to “helicopter”? For example, why might a parent take over and do a school project for their child instead of simply giving them hints or letting them work independently?

In this project, we explored whether parents’ agreement with “high-intervention,” helicoptering practices might stem from a belief that parents must intervene and do things on behalf of their children if they want their children to succeed.

In a pre-registered study, we probed these beliefs among parents. Specifically, we investigated their beliefs about how much parents need to intervene on behalf of young adult children, as this is an age by which many individuals operate largely on their own. While many parents might endorse doing tasks on behalf of younger children (who probably do require more parental assistance), we reasoned that parents who believe that they need to intervene even with adult children would be more of a unique group, and potentially especially prone to agreeing with helicoptering practices.

We found that the more parents endorsed the general belief that parents need to intervene to make decisions or solve problems for even adult children, the more they later agreed with specific high-intervention, helicoptering practices that have been shown in prior research to reduce motivation (e.g., doing a school project for one’s child).

In follow-up studies, we explored whether parents who believe that they need to intervene for their child to be successful would still endorse high-intervention, helicoptering practices in cases where a child was already excelling academically. Surprisingly, we found that those who most strongly believed that parents need to intervene thought that high-intervention practices were appropriate regardless of whether a child had consistently performed well or poorly in the past. This robust relationship towards these beliefs as a target for parental education programs and other efforts aimed at encouraging a more autonomy-supportive parenting approach.

For a full write-up of this project, click here!