How to tell if you’re a ‘Lawnmower Parent’ and what to do about it

Welcome to , an ongoing series at Mashable that looks at how to take care of – and deal with – the kids in your life. Because Dr. Spock is nice and all, but it’s 2018 and we have the entire internet to contend with.

Helicopter Parents have reigned supreme in the media these last few years but they’re being replaced by a hyper-concentrated version of themselves with a new moniker: Lawnmower Parents. If you’ve never heard of lawnmower parents, take a seat now because you’re about to have some strong feelings.

Lawnmowers don’t just hover over their kids to make sure that they are safe, they for their kids by curating every aspect of their childhoods. These parents tend to do extreme things, such as choose their child’s friends, practice “” to ensure their child’s early academic ease and success, and even jump into arguments on their child’s behalf to prevent their kid from having hurt feelings. 

Thanks to a perfect storm of social and tech evolution, parenting, like so much else, has splintered into “tribes.” Where there was once a community understanding of “it takes a village” there are now strict codes of parenting philosophies. From the Free-Range parents to the Tiger Moms, the Hot Mess Moms, and the Perfect Parents with their sanctimonious status updates on Instagram, all of them feed the idea that kids these days are growing up woefully underprepared for adulthood.

Where keyboard warriors may see arrogance, I see parents who live in pressure cookers

In 2015, a Harris Poll for The JED Foundation, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and The Jordan Porco Foundation surveyed 1,502 first year college students and found that a staggering 60% of them reported feeling emotionally underprepared for the real world.

“When parents try to remove all obstacles for kids, they are doing them a great disservice,” , Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, and author of How to Talk to Your Kids About Your Divorce tells Mashable. “Kids need to learn that they are competent and have agency in the world. If their parents pave the way for them to have an effortless life, then what will they do when an effort is required in adulthood?”

In some ways, I can’t blame parents for feeling compelled to turn to extreme measures. Where keyboard warriors may see arrogance, I see parents who live in pressure cookers to get parenting not just right, but better than everyone else. As a mother of three, I can understand the impulse to create a soft landing for my children when it comes to school, friends, and the world at large, but often that parental impulse blows up in our faces anyway. 

I was reluctant to let my oldest son learn how to use knives to cut his food until the morning he played “for real” Fruit Ninja with an incredibly sharp carving knife. Horrified and impressed at the sight of the bananas he’d whacked into a thousand pieces, I realized that it was clearly time to let go of my fear and teach this kid how to use a knife properly. I temper my instinct to hold my kids back for the sake of safety with the realization that they must learn how to negotiate every kind of perceived danger in order to grow up into resilient and strong people.

“This is all about fear, and worry, and wanting to do our best by our families,” Says KJ Dell’Antonia, author of How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life and Loving (Almost) Every Minute and former lead writer and editor for the Motherlode blog at The New York Times. “I’d never call it vanity. I think we’re just afraid that if we do less than the next person, our kids will end up living under a highway somewhere because all the clear paths we used to see to success have been muddied by change, technology, and the economy. Scary times, scared parents.”

She’s right. At a time when technology is moving at warp speed, the kinds of jobs that my kids will soon be training for don’t even exist yet as I type these words. How can I imagine future stability for my kids when I can’t even comprehend the social or economic demands that will be made on them?

Amy Joyce, editor, and writer for the Washington Post’s On Parenting section tells Mashable that the best way for parents to prevent themselves from becoming lawnmower parents is to get out and connect with their communities.   

“I love to ask parents of older kids or grown kids what they did in whatever situation it is I’m facing at the moment. I seek out advice and find that helps me bond with people,” Joyce tells Mashable. “The best thing my neighbor with three grown kids has told me is that my kids are going to be okay. No matter the issue, they are who they are and we’ll guide them, but we can’t do everything for them. Hearing that and telling myself that allows me to back off a bit.”

Raising children is tough, but it doesn’t have to be a pressure-cooker of stress to get every aspect just right. While I may secretly want my kid to be the strongest, smartest, kindest, best one out there, the fact is that he won’t understand how he fits in this world if I am interfering. So if you need me, I’ll be standing by and wincing with a knot in my stomach while my kids screw up left and right.

Read more great stories from Small Humans: