In the Neolithic Village environment children learn by using a mix of self-discovery (exploring), peer activities (play), and helping parents and other adults (apprenticing). The result is these kids spend a lot of time in many different environments dealing with many different situations. Thanks to modern prosperity, parents can have a lot more control over what their children experience. As with other elements of civilized living, this is a powerful blessing if good head-thinking is mixed in, and a curse if too much heart-thinking is used.
Helicopter parenting is an example of too much heart-thinking.
The root thinking that drives helicopter parenting, a modern phenomenon, is the feeling that the more time parents spend with their children the better the children will be raised. This same from-the-heart thinking shows up in dramatic stories as a plot device which has the parent, at some dramatic moment, confessing that they should have done more with their kids. One of the odder forms this “be with my child”-feeling takes on is a pregnant mother-to-be listening to classical music or reading classical literature out loud in a way that lets the fetus in her womb also hear it.
Conclusion: This feeling that spending lots of time with a child is good for the child is a powerful instinct.
In the Neolithic Village environment having this instinct be a strong one pays off well because there are so many equally important competing priorities that a parent must deal with in day-to-day living - such as finding and preparing food and dealing with the many calamities and catastrophes that are so common in that lifestyle. “Stay on target,” this instinct is shouting, “Your kids are important, too!”
Meanwhile, the child has his or her own set of instincts, which are growing and changing rapidly as the child grows and matures. But at the heart of them is the child learning by personal experience (as discussed in the Introduction of this section). This means part of the child’s learning experience is getting out on his or her own, and encountering surprises. These experiences, however, are in direct opposition to the “Stay on target” instinct of the parent, especially when that parent instinct gets reinforced and transformed by lots of prosperity and community-enforced prescription to “stay on target”.
Civilized parents have more resources and control at their disposal than their Neolithic ancestors. If these are used well, the child of Civilization can learn many more powerful techniques than the child of Neolithic Village and be a much more powerful force for good. A 20th century icon was children becoming adults who could manufacture steel, which was then used to make all kinds of stuff that improved 20th Century civilized living. The early 21st Century icon is children growing up to become software developers.
The essential ingredient for maintaining this kind of continual improvement is the use of good head-thinking about the goals of a child's education. Parents and the community must all be thinking hard about educational goals, experimenting to find better techniques, and using strong analytic methods to evaluate the results of the experimenting.
When a parent aspires to too much certainty in what the child experiences, the child's ability to deal with surprises suffers. If the child becomes an adult who also lives in a world that presents few surprises, this is not a big handicap. One of the blessings of the civilized environment is that nasty surprises are dramatically decreased, so, in theory, a child doesn’t need as much of this ability.
On the other hand, the disadvantage of too much certainty is Comfort Zone living. In this case, when life’s disruptions come, they will be much scarier for the Comfort Zone person than for someone who is used to experiencing surprises. This is important because the essence of progress in the civilized lifestyle is introducing a never ending stream of disruptive improvements to how we live. There may not be many big, dangerous catastrophes in civilized living, but there will be lots of steady disruptive change. The civilized world is not a certain world.
Helicopter parenting is a not surprising outcome of mixing the “I must care for my child” instinct with the prosperity and good communication technologies of civilized living. Yet, it is wasteful when parents become a “given”, a constant, in their child’s environment - as in, they are always there. This limits the child’s ability to experience surprises and to learn to deal with them. This is wasteful because much of childhood learning is about learning how to deal with surprises - and we still have many surprises to experience in the civilized living environment.