I'm not sure if citations needed has ever done an episode on articles like this, but as a parent and a leftist it's hard to not start noticing that nearly all parenting "experts" or "success" stories seem to basically boil down to people 'richsplaining' how to raise your kids into successful CEOs and career paths.
I find this incredibly frustrating because this bassically accepts as a framework that your kid becoming a CEO is an inarguably laudable goal, rarely if ever asks questions about how psychologically well adjusted they are as people, and perhaps most importantly never addresses the elephant in the room of the role class plays.
I feel like my entire life, in basically every form of media I've ever seen: helicopter parenting has been assumed as being wrong and harmful. These days it's hard for me not to ask if this isn't just an extension of the culture of "personal responsibility" and "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."
It would be better to say that “helicopter parenting” isn’t a particularly accurate or precise metric for measuring parenting quality.
There are things that are, on average, developmentally appropriate for a kid at a given age. Some kids will reach a milestone sooner, some later. Treating it like a checklist with deadlines will, frankly, make you significantly more ableist as a parent, among other things. But, once you’ve adjusted expectations to the context of a particular kid, if someone is not developmentally prepared for a given task, forcing them to do it, punishing them for not doing it, or simply leaving a bed unmet because you didn’t do some necessary thing for them, is very likely to result in some kind of trauma.
On the flip side of that, regularly performing tasks for a kid who is able to do them can have all kinds of effects, everywhere from making them to entitled, to disconnecting them from the machinations of their lives, to causing them to fail at higher level tasks which would be appropriate for them to be practicing, to making them resent you for taking away their autonomy.
I don’t know if it needs said, but my mom also worked 5 jobs and didn’t have time to double check my homework and I didn’t turn out to be Elon Musk (thank god). Maybe helicopter parenting isn’t a personal failing of poor people (or let’s be honest, the PMC and petit boug who this article is meant to shame). Maybe inheriting a bunch of money is a prerequisite to becoming an adult billionaire. I understand that most people who inherit their parents’ wealth lose it within a generation, but even those people still end up in some form of elite with a chance to rise again. It’s almost like the top 10% plays an intergenerational game on top of a safety net funded by imperialism while the rest of us struggle.