Yahoo Finance How Helicopter Parenting Can Hurt Your Child's Finances
By now, everyone probably knows that helicopter parenting, in which you hover and swoop in to rescue your child, is a style of parenting that perhaps never should have lifted off. For instance, a Brigham Young University study published last month in the journal Emerging Adulthood, which examined data from 438 undergraduate students at four universities nationwide, suggests that helicopter parenting demoralizes kids.
According to the study, when you do things for your children that they should be doing on their own, it can lower their self-worth and encourage them to engage in risky behaviors like binge drinking.
Todd Deutsch, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles, agrees with the study's conclusions.
"The children [helicopter parents] are developing into this world are not equipped with the tools to manage life's problems and potentially acquire coping tools that are maladaptive such as drug use, living off parents, failure to hold a job and intimacy issues due to fears," says Deutsch, who offers a parental workshop called "Avoid the Helicopter Blades."
So if you're worried that you might be a helicopter parent, ask yourself the following questions. If you answer yes to most of them, you may be taking your kid on a ride that will be filled with future financial troubles.
Do you interfere a lot with your kid's college education? It's one thing to encourage your kid to study hard -- especially if you're paying for college -- but it's another to manage his or her schedule and try to solve all of your kid's problems. One prominent study in 2013, published in Springer's Journal of Child and Family Studies, used data from an online study of 297 U.S. undergraduate students and examined their independence levels and their mothers' parenting methods. Researchers concluded that the more parents micromanage their kid's life, the less happy their kid is likely to be.
Ritter Hoy, who works in university communications at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, says that from her perch, she sees several examples of helicopter parenting.
"I've had parents call me when their kid's name isn't in their local newspaper for making the dean's list, even though their kid asked me not to publish his name," she says. Hoy also hears a lot about parents calling professors to complain about grades.
"They're failing math tests because they're out partying; [their mom] calling to say, 'He's not adjusting to being away from home,' isn't going to get the student an 'A,'" Hoy says.
After college, are you making things too cushy for your kid? Your college graduate doesn't have a job and needs a place to stay. Of course, he's going to come to home base. That's perfectly understandable.
But you don't want things to revert to pre-college days, with your graduate practically living in the bedroom or on the sofa, playing video games all day.
That sort of thing happens a lot, according to Joanie Connell, a San Diego-based organizational consultant and leadership coach and author of "Flying without a Helicopter: How to Prepare Young People for Work and Life."
She says, "I talk with parents about helicoptering all the time and the biggest hindrance on finances I see is parents supporting their kids. Kids, including adult ones, know they don't have to make money of their own because their parents have their backs. The parents have to stop taking care of them and push them out of the nest."
Are you helping your kid buy a house? In February, survey research was completed for the lender loandepot.com. It included 1,000 interviews with parents of millennial-aged children and 1,000 interviews with millennials ages 18 to 38. Loandepot.com found that 17 percent of parents with adult children ages 18 to 35 expected to help their kids buy a house within the next five years, compared to 13 percent over the past five years, an increase of 31 percent.
That could be due to the tightening of credit standards just as much as the tightening of the parental leash, and every scenario is different. There's a big difference in lending or even gifting your responsible adult kid a portion of a down payment for a home than, say, cosigning for the loan and paying for the entire down payment, and pretty much doing everything but picking out the furnishings for the home.
Still, if you are giving your kid a housing assist, you want to make sure you're offering assistance and not helping get your kid a home he won't be able to afford to maintain -- or steering him into a home you want more than he does.
As Jackquelyn Mascher, a psychologist in Boston, observes, "Helicoptering trains lack of control in the child and overdependence in the child."
Often, she adds, "helicoptering is more about the parent ego than the child's needs."
Are you lending or giving your adult kid money regularly? This is where you may be dooming your adult kid -- and yourself.
Obviously, in the beginning of your child's adulthood, or even well into his or her adulthood, there will be occasions when your son or daughter might be struggling, and "it may make sense to give them a one-time gift to help them get back on their feet," says Grant Moore, a Rockford, Illinois-based financial advisor at Savant Capital Management. He cites an example like paying off some of your kid's bills or credit card debt.
And it's easy to imagine many scenarios in which parents help their kids financially, and everything works out fine.
But you don't want to take things too far.
Michael McGrath, vice president of EP Wealth Advisors, in Torrance, California, says he occasionally works with clients who have come to realize they were too easy on their adult kids.
One client's ongoing misadventures with an adult son has been particularly painful to watch unfold, McGrath says. He has an elderly client who recently retired and decided to move. The client wanted to sell his house to help with his retirement and cash flow. But his son needed a place to live and didn't want his father to sell the house.
And the son, McGrath adds, has no job and already owes his father a lot of money.
"Ideally, the client would sell the home, give tough love to the son and solidify his own retirement, knowing he has already helped the son a great deal," McGrath says.
Instead, his client moved without selling the home. Meanwhile, the son is paying him cheap rent while the father's cash flow suffers -- not terribly, but it still hasn't been pleasant to witness.
"These are financially successful people who are used to setting goals, working hard to achieve them, and seeing them to fruition," McGrath says of wealthier helicopter parents who still have their kids as regular passengers. "You can't apply that approach to kids in the same way. You can't control them like you would your Outlook calendar."
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