Helicopter Parenting Turns Deadly
Megan Meier, a 13-year-old from Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, killed herself last year after an online relationship she believed she was having with a cute 16-year-old boy named Josh went very sour. What she didn’t know--what her parents would learn six weeks after her death--was that “Josh” was the fictitious creation of Lori Drew, a then-47-year-old neighbor and the mother of one of Megan’s friends.
Or former friends. Megan had, essentially, dropped the other girl when she’d changed schools and tried to put an unhappy chapter of her junior high school life--fraught with weight problems and depression--behind her. Drew’s daughter, one assumes, would have eventually gotten over it. But Drew didn’t. Instead, she got revenge. She created a fake MySpace profile (she later told police she’d done so to “find out what Megan was saying online” about her daughter, according to a sheriff’s report). Working with her daughter, she led Megan to become infatuated with “Josh.” And then she delivered the blow. “I don’t like the way you treat your friends,” Drew wrote. According to Megan’s father, “Josh”’s last e-mail to his daughter read, “You are a bad person and everybody hates you...The world would be a better place without you.”
The Meier case got massive play in the national media this past week, coming as it did on the heels of a major new survey showing that up to one in three children in the United States have been harassed or bullied online. But for me the tragedy highlighted another troubling issue that threatens our homes just as steadily as poisonous online communications. That is the disturbing degree to which today’s parents--and mothers in particular--frequently lose themselves when they get caught up in trying to smooth out, or steamroll over, the social challenges faced by their children.
You only hear about the most freakish cases, like that of Lori Drew or of Wanda Webb Holloway, the Texas mother who in 1991 tried to pay someone to murder the mother of her daughter’s chief cheerleading rival. (“The motive here was love, a mother’s love for a daughter,” said a police investigator at the time.) Yet everyday examples abound of parents whose boundary issues are not so extreme, but still qualify as borderline wacko. “People now feel like having a good relationship with your child means you’re involved in every aspect of your child’s life,” says Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees & Wannabes and Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads, who travels the country speaking with and counseling parents, teachers and teens. “Nothing is off-limits” now between parents and their kids, she says. “There’s no privacy and there’s no critical thinking.” Wiseman has heard stories of parents who hope to pave their child’s way to popularity by luring the in-crowd to parties with promised “loot-bag” giveaways like iPods and North Face fleeces. She recently heard of a father who, happening on an instant-messaging war between his child and a bunch of children on a sleepover, went over to the other house, called the other father outside, and began a fistfight that ended only after someone called the police. And of a mother who, unwilling to join her fifth-grade daughter in accepting the apology of another fifth-grader who’d bullied her in the playground, hounded the school incessantly, pushing for the other child to be expelled. Parents, she says, routinely blow a gasket when they get it in their heads that they need to seek revenge on their child’s behalf. “It’s, ‘I’ve been wronged. My kid has been wronged, so I’ve been wronged; therefore I have to do whatever’s necessary, including being disgustingly immoral.’ ”
“Where are the brakes,” Wiseman asked, “on parental behavior?” Otherwise put: where does adult behavior end and childish behavior begin?
...Parents of teenagers are not supposed to act like teenagers. They’re not supposed to dress like teenagers or talk like teenagers or spend their days text-messaging teenagers--as one mom Wiseman encountered did, exchanging expressions of shock and dismay, after her 14-year-old daughter broke up with a popular and athletic boy. (“I was totally basking in the social status I was getting from the boy,” the very honest mother told Wiseman.)
Or, at least, parents weren’t supposed to act like this in the past. “There used to be this kind of parent-child gradient, where the parent was expected to--and did--function at a different level than the child,” says clinical psychologist Madeline Levine, author of the 2006 book The Price of Privilege, who lectures frequently on child and adolescent issues. Now, she says, “that whole notion of parents being in an entirely different space than their children is disappearing.” In part, Levine blames parenting experts for this turn of events. She blames the self-esteem movement, decades of parenting advice that prized “communication” over limit-setting and safety. She blames the narcissistic needs of parents who want their children to like them at all costs. And in part, when thinking over the fused mother-daughter dyads she so often encounters in therapy, she indicts this generation of mothers’ loneliness, dissatisfaction in work and marriage, stress, sense of failure, and emotional isolation. In the end, she asks, when you’re feeling alone and blue, “Who are you sure is going to hang around with you? It’s your children.”
It’s very easy to put up walls to separate the likes of Lori Drew and Wanda Webb Holloway from the rest of us. Most of us, after all, are not sick or profoundly vindictive, entirely lacking in self-awareness or devoid of all empathy. Still, we have all caught ourselves spending a little too much time worrying about (or gloating over) our children’s popularity. We spend a lot of time feeling our children’s pain and put a lot of thought into shaping their world to offer them the greatest possible degree of happiness. But our kids really need something much bigger from us than that. They desperately need us to grow up.
Irvine.
. I wish more kids felt they had people to turn to in times of crisis. Any adults who are part of any child's life should let them know, as often as they can, that they are always there for them if they need anything.
To the lady who pulled off the hoax, it was a horrible thing to do.
