I attended a webinar this week presented by Joanne Connell PhD based on her work and book ” Flying without a Helicopter: How to prepare young people for work and life”. As a parent a child development expert she asserts that parents are doing their children a  disservice by overprotecting them from the world and never letting them fail. When asked ” How early should parents be letting their children struggle and fail in order to succeed?” she responded “from birth really”.

I have long been concerned that children are being raised without a sense of consequences. They seem to pass not because they succeed but because their feelings can’t be hurt. They try something once and give up because “they don’t like it”. “Parents are following advice on how to sculpt their children into the perfect applicants before their children are even born. The problem is that the mold the parents are working from does not generate young adults who are able to succeed at work—with or without the coveted college degree. This problem is growing, not declining, with today’s hyper competitive, helicopter and lawnmower parenting trends.”

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