Home educators often hear something that goes like this:
“I get that your child didn’t love school, but aren’t you being a bit too protective? Aren’t you sheltering them? Don’t you think it’d be better to let them go through that?”
Which is...kinda hard to hear, right? You feel like you’re doing the right thing for your child, but there’s a fairly heavy cultural push-back suggesting that...maybe you’re not.
So today, in this email, I want to dig into that for the actual answer. Which side is right, here?
We need to start with where all these issues with overprotective parenting came from. Why are we, generally, so hyper sensitive to anything that looks like it? And to do that, we need to properly understand two cultural stories that collided about 35 years ago. One was the old belief that children need hardship (in whatever form, however arbitrary) to toughen them up. That one, of course, was rife through the industrial era. Just ask anyone who went to school in the 1950s 😬 That attitude has never fully gone away, which makes sense - the children who went through that experience are now parents, and grandparents. Many of them carried it with them out of childhood and into those new roles.
The other was the more modern fear that parents have become too anxious, too involved, too protective. And that story really started building in the late 1980s and 90s, when a few things happened at roughly the same time.
Fear around child safety spiked (even though, in most measurable ways, childhood was safer than it had ever been). Stranger danger programs ran in schools. Parents who'd grown up roaming freely started keeping their kids closer. Play became more arranged, more supervised, more scheduled. Parents started managing more of their children’s social lives, their activities, their time. Then academic pressure started intensifying, because a 1980s government report declared that ‘American education was in crisis’. That meant more testing and higher stakes which, naturally, had the ripple effect of putting more pressure on families to do more academic work outside of school. More homework, more tutoring, more time spent keeping up over summer. Busier schedules meant kids had less unstructured time. Computers and gadgets and more tv channels and gaming consoles and the internet meant they got outside less. Suburban sprawl, in a lot of areas, meant they walked to get to other places less.
At the same time, a wave of pop psychology (that took real research, and totally distorted it) was telling parents that protecting children from failure and disappointment was the path to healthy self-esteem. Let’s give a trophy to every child. Let’s give constant praise, regardless of how they did. Let’s make sure they never have to go through anything hard, in case it damages their confidence.
None of these things would have been enough on their own to flip our culture entirely. But combined, across two decades, that's exactly what happened. We went from one unhealthy extreme - where in many families children were left to work their way through life without much adult support, and where parents saw emotional closeness as weakness - to the other: anxious, hyper-involved parenting where every interaction is managed, every block of time is managed, and everything hard gets smoothed out before a child ever has to go through it. And, so, the 'helicopter parent' term was born.
It didn't take long for researchers to notice what was happening in all of this, and to start publishing work on the very real harm that highly anxious, highly controlling parenting can do to a child's development. Which was a good thing. A parent who manages every interaction, removes every obstacle, and steps in the moment anything hard crops up - that kind of parenting does get in the way of a child's growth. The research on that is solid (which I’ll get to shortly).
But somewhere between the research and the cultural vibe of the time, something got lost in translation. "Don't be an anxious, hyper-controlling parent" became "stop being so connected to your kids."
What developed was a general suspicion of parental instinct, one we're still stuck with today. And so parents who are simply present, responsive, and paying close attention often find themselves lumped in with the so-called ‘helicopters’. It is very easy now for parents to second-guess one of the most natural things about themselves. Especially in the face of questions like the one I opened this email with.
So that gives us the cultural setting that caused this phase of intensive, over-managed parenting, how that got all mixed up with natural, attuned, involved parenting, and the backlash that rose up against all that. But what does the research actually say about these different styles, and their outcomes? Can we be objective about this so we can find some nice solid ground to stand on?
Well, yes. We can.
John Bowlby’s early work on attachment has been debated, refined, and sometimes rightly criticised, but the core thing we’ve learned - confirmed in the many years of attachment research that followed on from Bowlby - is still one of the most consistent findings in developmental psychology: children whose parents respond to their distress with warmth and sensitivity don't become dependent or fragile. They become more secure. More confident. More capable of handling difficulty when it arrives.
Not less.
Children with responsive, present parents develop stronger emotional regulation. Higher trust. Better outcomes across mental health, learning, and social competence.
An attuned parent gives a child a solid life base to grow from. Fact.
But we also know there is a harmful version, if it goes too far. Research clearly shows us the kind of parenting that can become a problem.
A parent driven by their own anxiety, not their child's actual needs. One who removes anything and everything difficult because they never want their child to experience anything hard, ever. Who manages every social interaction, pre-empts every frustration, and makes decisions on their child's behalf long past the point where the child could be making them on their own. That parent - over time - does get in the way of their child's development.
But that parent and the parent reading this email are almost certainly not the same person. Most of the parents I hear from didn't remove their child from school (or never sent them in the first place) because they couldn't handle watching them struggle. They did it because they were paying close enough attention to know that what their child was going through wasn't productive struggle. It was the wrong environment, causing the wrong kind of strain, with no developmental upside at the end of it.
That's not anxiety driving the decision. That's just good, positive discernment.
The sweet spot the research actually describes - the parenting that produces the best outcomes across every meaningful measure - is a parent who is warm, present, and responsive, and who also allows their child to hit real challenge within that safety.
Not the parent that says ‘just harden up, sucker’, and not the parent who says ‘don’t worry lovie, you don’t need to do anything hard, I’ll protect you from all that’.
So, now, with all that said, I will finally get to the point I really wanted to make today:
The instinct that probably brought you to this place in life is not something you need to apologise for, feel any guilt about, or be embarrassed by. In fact, it’s likely the very instinct that research says is the best way to build a positive, healthy relationship with your child, and for them to build an authentic sense of who they are.
Trust it.