Meaning
A parent who hovers over a child's everyday life with excessive supervision and intervention, managing schoolwork, conflicts, and even adult children's workplace or academic affairs for them. Informal and gently mocking; strongest in US English, especially in education and parenting commentary, and increasingly applied at younger ages. Informal and mildly mocking; almost always critical of the parenting style it describes. Regional use: US origin; now general English in education and parenting talk.
Origin
The image is older than the label. A teenager quoted in psychologist Haim Ginott's 1969 bestseller Between Parent and Teenager complains that Mother hovers over me like a helicopter. The full compound was circulating by the late 1980s and is often credited to Foster Cline and Jim Fay, whose 1990 book Parenting with Love and Logic made the helicopter parent one of its parenting types; that attribution is standard in the scholarly literature but is repeated second-hand rather than demonstrated as a documented first use. The word took off in the early 2000s when American college administrators used it for millennial students' parents who phoned them awake each morning and disputed grades with professors; Cambridge carried a dictionary entry by 2011, and later coinages such as snowplow and lawnmower parent extend the metaphor from hovering to clearing away obstacles.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cosseting parent
- helicopter dad
- helicopter mom
- helicopter parenting
Usage Examples
- The teacher finally asked one helicopter parent to stop rewriting her son's essays.
- Helicopter parenting gets mocked online, but it usually grows out of genuine anxiety.
- As a recovering helicopter parent, he regrets ever phoning his daughter's professors.