Young people rise to the occasion when warranted. Most college-bound kids in America now lead relatively sheltered lives where the basic questions of survival and coping are not relevant. At a certain point, however, we all face a point where we realize that failure is not an option, and we do what we have to do to make it. This point comes earlier for some than for others. It is empowering, however, to face that test and pass it. Helicopter parenting deprives young people of that empowerment.
My D is privileged, as are we. We have easy and secure lives compared to many. However, in the past year she was in a situation where she had to find her own housing abroad or risk having to return to the US and terminate a program she had tried very hard to access and succeed in. If I could have helped her, I would have swooped right down and done so; but we were powerless. We could not help her; she was on her own in a foreign country. She solved the problem and found her own housing. Frankly I think she learned more from this challenge than she has learned in any of her classes thus far. Now obviously she wasn’t going to starve to death, and she could have returned to the US licking her wounds, but she didn’t want to to that, and she found the strength to avoid that outcome. “There is no limit to what you can do when failure is not an acceptable option.”