Say “helicopter parenting” and then picture the buzzing drone overhead flinging string cheese and geometry answers to the helpless below. Say “no-rescue parenting” and picture the lifeguard who is watching your child wrestle an octopus before looking away.
The former has been mocked for its anxious meddlesomeness, and I get that. Children need room to stretch and grow, to strive and fail. But there is something about the latter — the recent news media darling, as represented here, say, or here — which isn’t sitting right with me either. I mean, the basic premise sounds right: teach your children to take responsibility for themselves by letting them experience the natural consequences of their actions. If they forget their sweater, they’ll be cold; if they forget their snack, they’ll be hungry. And, as long as you don’t rush home to retrieve these things with the emergency mom siren blaring from your minivan, they’ll remember the cardigan or almonds next time.
O.K. That is not an unreasonable approach to shepherding your children into the pasture of responsibility, and we’ve certainly practiced various forms of it over the years with our own children. No, you can’t spend our money on Cheez-Its from the school vending machine because you left your peanut-butter rice cake at home.
But if you’re cold on the hike that I begged you to take with me, yes, I will give you my jacket. Not because I’m the depressed and obscene giving tree. But because you’re my darling. Because you’re so lovely to take this walk with me. Because your father, just yesterday, put his sweatshirt around my chilly shoulders at a bar.
I understand why so many of the smartest women I know are proudly carrying the no-rescue flag. Mothers have been the coddlers, historically speaking: the bringers of forgotten things, the tenders of the beleaguered. “I am sick of doing everything for everybody,” we may be saying. “And I don’t want my kids to be hapless dependents.” Fair enough. Except, not to sound like a bad capitalist, independence may not be such a great goal either. Everyone taking good care of themselves, efficiently separated from the needs of others — is that the best possible world we can live in?
What about something else altogether? Not dependence, not independence, but something more like interdependence, where we acknowledge our mutual reliance, count on cooperation, and nurture generosity, compassion and charity. Interdependence means saying, in a million ways, “How can I help?” — to your children, your partner, your friends, your community — and expecting them to do the same.
On a recent five-hour car trip, for example, I held up two different audiobooks for the children to pick and Ben, who is 15, looked uncharacteristically sheepish. “Either,” he said. “But actually? Would it be O.K. to not listen for a while? I kind of left all my humanities reading for the last minute, and I think I won’t be able to concentrate if there’s a book on.”
I confess that a Parenting Lecture started up, like a kind of no-rescue script I was obliged to read from. Just because you procrastinated doesn’t mean we’ve all got to sit quietly in the car so you can do the work you should have done already, etc. I was thinking of the research about letting children fail, letting them learn from their own mistakes, even though this kid? He is the person who would do anything for anybody, who has your back, your front, regardless of the boneheaded trouble you’ve gotten yourself into. He graciously helps his sister with her algebra; he cheerfully drops anything he is doing when you need a hand with dinner or yard work; he once stayed up into the wee hours to help us engineer a solution to our flooding basement.
Birdy, who is 11, interrupted. “I’d rather wait and listen later, so Ben can read. I’m not even going to enjoy it if I know he’s stressed.” This is, in truth, was exactly how I felt too. You make your bed and lie in it is one lesson. Let us help you make it, and then we can all pile in together is another. Two hours into our trip, Ben was done. “I’m so relieved,” he told us. “Thank you for waiting.” We popped Frank Cottrell Boyce’s “Framed” into the CD player, and I felt happy to be in it together.
Talking about this now, my husband, Michael, says, “We’re not really clean-up-your-own-mess people. Metaphorically or literally.” I’m thinking about the pound of flour I spilled on the floor recently, of Ben rushing in with a broom and his good nature. I picture him saying, instead, “Maybe next time you’ll be more careful” and cringe.
I know we’re always at risk of excessive sentimentality with our children. We always see the tiniest little matryoshka inside their big, capable bodies. I taught undergraduates at Santa Cruz for eight years and, believe me, you don’t want to create the entitled dude who calls his professor at home the night before a paper’s due and says: “Um, yeah. I’m going to need you to read the fem theory topics to me? Because, yeah. I don’t have them.” But I also don’t want the lesson to be “You flounder alone.”
So. Not helicopter. Not no-rescue. But interdependence. Maybe we can just call it parenting. Or, you know, being human.