Helicopter Parenting One Reason for Children’s Lack of Resilience, Jordan Peterson Explains

Jordan Peterson speaks at the 2018 Student Action Summit at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Dec. 20, 2018. Gage Skidmore/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

One of the reasons behind emergence of the “snowflake generation” has been attributed to helicopter parents—parents who are highly involved in many aspects of their children’s lives—but Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson said this phenomenon has much deeper roots.

The term “snowflake,” first coined by the movie Fight Club, is used to describe a person who is overly sensitive, entitled, not resilient, and intolerant towards dissenting ideas. Millennials and Gen Z are often referred to by the older cohorts as the “snowflake generation.”

Many hypotheses have been offered to explain why the young generation lacks resilience. Some argue that technological development has provided an escape from real-life problems; that economic development has allowed people to indulge in such a high level of physical comfort it diminishes their coping mechanisms; or that it has been caused by a breakdown of traditional moral codes and the replacement of post-modern values.

Mr. Peterson, who describes himself as a traditionalist and classic liberal, recently weighed in on the topic.

He said there is “definitely an epidemic of overprotective parenting,” but noted that it was driven by “very fundamental biological and cultural phenomena that aren’t generally considered in relationship to this issue.”

“We don’t have very many children,” he told John Anderson, former Australian deputy prime minister, in an interview on Dec. 11. “We don’t have 12, six of whom die. We have one or two, and that makes them very precious.”

“We’re unwilling to take risks with them, and no wonder.”

In a household with many children, parents simply don’t have the energy or time to closely monitor each child and the siblings would be “raising each other,” Mr. Peterson said.

“But with a single child landscape, or dual child landscape ... you’re going to overprotect, and then that ethos starts to permeate the schools and it starts to permeate the higher education institutions as those children mature.”

Another reason is that parents today have children much later in life compared to the previous generations, he added.

“If you have a kid when you’re 18, you’re still a kid. You’re gonna go out and have your life right?”

“But if you’re 40 and you have one child, it’s like all your eggs are in one basket. And the probability that you’re going to take undue risks with that precious person is very, very low.”

The advantage of this, Mr. Peterson noted, is that parents can foster the development of their children by devoting resources to them. However, the disadvantage is that parents “have every motivation to hover.”

“And maybe you’re also extraordinarily desperate as a mother to maintain that bond with your child because you’ve struggled so long to achieve it.”

The Rise Of Single-Child Family Unit

In many countries, the single-child configuration has become the fastest-growing family unit. This demographic structure shift reflects not only the drop in fertility rates and the change in women’s child-bearing practices but also the dramatic change in economic and social norms.

According to Jack Lam, an education professor at Brandon University, Canada, the increasing prevalence of single-child families is a multi-faceted issue, and it would be futile to pursue it “in a piecemeal approach.”

“Historically, such a phenomenon was attributed to periods of economic hardship and war but more recently, to the high divorce rate, increased numbers of women in the labour market, and economic recessions,” he wrote in a 1987 study (pdf).

In a different social setting, the Chinese communist regime in 1979 initiated a population control plan called the one-child policy, which has led to over 300 million abortions over four decades, as well as forced sterilisations and the killing of infants.

Another ramification of this policy is that it gave rise to a generation of “little emperors” who are “intensively nurtured by all family resources,” said Zixuan Ma, a Chinese scholar in the Department of Psychology at Durham University, United Kingdom.

“These different experiences may make them weak in empathy and lack of ability to cooperate and ‘inclined to avoid difficulties and problems,’” she wrote in a study in 2021.

Some governments, such as Japan and Korea have rolled out incentives to encourage couples to have more children, but parents said job pressures and the heavy financial burden of raising a child deterred them from doing so.

“Today, parents can’t have more than one child, even if they want to,” Rose Dao, a mother of one, told The Epoch Times.

“In the past, it was enough to feed the kids, send them to school, and dress them with some clothes. Nowadays, you need to feed them with nutritious and delicious food to help them grow, spend money on tutoring and extra-curricular activities, and buy beautiful clothes.”

“It’s also because society is becoming increasingly competitive.”

What Does The Research Say?

While the view of an only child being self-centred and spoiled is still prevalent in the public sentiment, findings from empirical research and theories have been inconsistent.

A 2019 study conducted on over 20,000 New Zealanders found that adults without siblings reported “lower levels of conscientiousness and honesty-humility than participants with siblings, but higher levels of neuroticism and openness.”

However, they noted that the personality differences were “very, very small.”

Meanwhile, an American study in 2015 that surveyed nearly 12,000 children found that children raised without siblings are more lacking in social skills than those with siblings. But researchers noted that this gap was gradually narrowed during adolescence.

In her 2016 study, Ms. Ma made a similar observation. “Except for some natural personality traits, a person’s social communication ability and psychological endurance will change with different experiences or deliberate training.”

How To Melt The Snowflake Mentality

One way to help build resilience is to expose young people to “increasingly threatening situations that cure them” with their consent, Mr. Peterson said, adding that schools have been doing “exactly the opposite.”

As for the family, Mr. Peterson said parents are presented with two choices.

“You can let them go out in the world and be hurt, or you can overprotect them and hurt them that way,” he noted during the interview.

“So here’s your choice, you can make your children are competent and courageous, or you can make them safe, but you can’t make them safe because life isn’t safe.”

“So if you sacrifice their courage and competence on the altar of safety, then you disarm them completely. And all they can do is pray to be protected.”