The Benefits Of Engaged Parenting

Not being involved in your child’s life is next to impossible, but there is a way not to become a hovering helicopter parent. Dr. Gilboa offers this advice: "As parents, we have a very difficult job. We need to keep one eye on our children now--their stressors, strengths, emotions--and one eye on the adults we are trying to raise. Getting them from here to there involves some suffering, for our kids as well as for us" (Bayless 10). In realistic terms this means letting your children struggle, allowing them to be disappointed, when failure occurs, helping them to work through it, and letting your children do tasks that they are physically and mentally capable of doing (10). To put this into simple terms so every parent can understand take making your child’s bed for example. Making your 3-year-old's bed isn't hovering, but making your 13-year-old's bed is hovering. Dr. Gilboa offers one final piece of advice saying, “Remembering to look for opportunities to take one step back from solving our child's problems will help us build the reliant, self-confident kids we need” (10). While many complain of helicopter parents being all bad, there are some good things that come from being raised by a helicopter parent. “Engaged parenting has many benefits for a child, such as increasing …show more content…
It’s understandable as to why parents become so obsessed with their child’s life. They just want the best for their child, but these parents need to know when they’ve crossed the line. Parenting is the toughest job in the world. It makes it harder because there’s not instruction manual on how to parent a child. Sometimes the lessons we want to teach our child are often too late. “And because babies don’t arrive with an owner’s manual, the eventual lessons that we learn as parents often make themselves clear only after our experience of raising children occurs” (Glass