Amongst the seemingly infinite items teachers and coaches across schools and youth sports have to work through is the challenge of navigating a helicopter parent (defined by Merriam-Webster as a parent who is overly involved in the life of his or her child).

Are you a helicopter parent?

Clearly you may or may not be.

Here are some signs though of traits often exhibited by helicopter parents which may provide insight as to the answer to that question:

1) You Roll Up Your Sleeves and Fight Your Child’s Battles: Your kiddo comes home in tears after a disagreement with a friend, do you immediately call the parent of your child’s friend or do you take a step back, support your child and train them on how to manage their emotions, and then examine ways your child may be able to work through things with their friend directly?

2) You Attempt to Train Their Coaches: If you find yourself shouting tips at coaches from the stands or sidelines, it may be time to reel it back a bit. Sports can instruct our youth how to cope with adversity, work hard to accomplish goals, lead, and at times deal with scenarios that do not work out as planned. It may be more beneficial to teach your young athlete how to work through situations with their coach on their own (not to mention how impressed a coach may be with the initiative the athlete is taking).

3) Your Children are Kept on the Shortest of Leashes: You stare at your kids practices from the bleachers or parking lot waiting to pounce either on a coach at a later point or on your kid after practice. Not only is this potentially distracting for your athlete, but it will also most likely be annoying for coaches who are simply working to best position all of the athletes on their team for success.

4) Excessive Boasting: There is certainly nothing wrong about being proud of your athlete and their accomplishments. However, being over the top by persistently posting pictures upon pictures on social media every time your athlete does any microcosm of an athletic feat, may be a bit over the top. Dr. Chris Stankovich (a noted sports counselor) encourages parents to talk up their child’s team (or program), not just their athlete themselves.

5) You do not Allow Your Child to Fail: We all have made plenty of mistakes in our lives, this is a necessary part in our development as we learn from our shortcomings and become educated as to what works vs. what does not. If you do not allow your child to fail, how will they learn? Nobody likes to lose or be looked upon as the reason their team lost a particular game, competition, or event, but if we do not experience the agony of doing something incorrectly, how can anyone be expected to grow from these situations? Yanking your child from either a higher level of competitiveness or certain situations where a failure of some type may occur denies them this golden opportunity to mature.

While these are certainly not the only indicators of someone who may be fitting the criteria of a ‘helicopter parent’, they should provide valuable points of awareness for a parent who although may have intuitive instincts to engage in any one of these potentially disruptive behaviors, may be completely unaware of the unintentional harm they are causing their child (and subsequently others around them) by engaging in these actions. Cheer Up Athletics