Yo No Se

 There is growing evidence that power is actually bad for people’s health and performance. 
Mark van Vugt, Ph.D.
    
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This Week's Top Posts
Helicopter Parenting—Uh-Oh, It's the Law!!
Custody battles encourage parents to vie at overinvolvement.
Published on January 22, 2013 by Hara Estroff Marano in Nation of Wimps
Parental attention to children is a good thing, it has always been assumed. And indeed, studies show that parental involvement in children's schooling correlates with kids' achievement. Butresearchers are finally getting around to examining what other observers (myself included) have recognized for some time—that there can be too much of a good thing. Call it overparenting or call it helicopter parenting, it can have detrimental effects.
Researchers define overparenting as "the application of developmentally inappropriate levels of parental directiveness, tangible assistance,problem-solving, monitoring, and involvement in the lives of children." At every step of the way, parents are overly involved in their kids' lives and overmonitor them.
They push their kids to achieve and accept nothing less than As, calling teachers and even college administrators if they feel disappointed with a grade. They take over tasks for their kids, solving the minutest problems for them. Theymonitor their kids' movements, even from afar, and orchestrate their leisure. They go to great lengths to keep their kids out of harm's way, discouraging play in playgrounds or almost anywhere outdoors in favor of organized after-school activities.
They overreact to every little emotional blip in their child. They put pads on infants' knees when they're learning to walk, although such pads actuallyimpede mobility. They fill out job applications for the grown and graduated, accompany them to job interviews, even negotiate salaries for them! I could go on. Gatherings of college administrators these days often begin informally with the latest eyeball-rolling accounts of parental intrusiveness.
Studies are now documenting that such intensive parenting makes kids feel ineffective but overlyentitled, robs them of coping skills, and inclines them to narcissism as well as depression and anxiety, to say nothing of feelings of stress. After all, if you're short on coping skills, even a minuscule bump in life is going to stress you out. Kids become extremely risk-averse, terrified of failure, unable to make decisions for themselves. The parents don't come off so well either; overparentingis associated with negative traits such as anxiety in the adults.
Still, overparenting has taken on a force of its own and spread rapidly over the past decade. It is now the dominant standard of parenting in many communities in the U.S., aided and abetted by an extraordinary readiness of modern parents to negatively judge child-rearing practices or philosophies that differ from their own.
So it...