Start Your Engines!

Ah the sounds of summer, crickets chirping, kids out playing and lawnmowers running. These days we hear lawnmowers running all year long, everywhere you go. That’s right, everywhere you turn you see diligent parents, using their lawnmower powers to clear every obstacle for their kids.

Move over the Helicopter Parent, your day is over, welcome the Lawnmower generation.  While the Helicopter parent would hover over their child’s every move, Lawnmower Mama (or papa) will make sure little Timmy has no obstacles in their path. Ever.

Do you think I’m exaggerating? Next time you are at the playground, watch carefully. Little Timmy gets into an argument with another kid over whose turn it is on the slide and Lawnmower Mama (LM) jumps up and intervenes telling the other kid they have to share.

Little Timmy signed up for basketball and during a game another kid knocked him flying, LM leaped to the rescue, running onto the court and reprimanded the other kid, then gave the coach and ref a piece of her mind for not paying enough attention.

LM was up super late last night working on Little Timmy’s science fair project. No way was that teacher giving him a B again, not after the hours LM put into the last project, too!

So those scenarios are fiction. Kind of. I have seen and heard variations way too often lately. What do you think the result of this style of parenting will be? We are going to end up with a generation that can’t make a decision for themselves because they never had to. Forget problem-solving skills, they won’t have any because their parents solved everything for them.

Lawnmower parents will think I’m lazy. If my kids argued I told them to sort it out themselves or they would both be punished. As for homework, I did more than my share when I was in school, no way am I doing it again! Will I read it over? Sure if they ask me to, I will even help them study with flash cards, but I’m not writing any essays or building a scale model of a solar system.

Lawnmower parents are going to end up with kids that expect everything to just come to them, eventually reality will sink in. You can maybe manage to scrape through college with LM’s help but I daresay your boss might have a problem when you bring mama to work.

There is nothing wrong with helping your kids, but there is a huge difference between helping and doing. How do we teach them how to walk? We help and encourage them, but at the end of the day, they are the ones that have to move one foot in front of the other. Life is the same, if you are doing everything for your kid ask yourself, when do you plan to stop and let them take over?