Helicopter fathers can cause school burnout in kids, says study

Such children go on to develop low self-control skills and find it challenging to manage emotions and behaviour due to fewer opportunities to practice in the growing years.

3 min readNov 28, 2019 03:16 PM IST First published on: Nov 28, 2019 at 03:16 PM IST

Paternal helicopter parenting would have a greater negative impact on school burnout than maternal. (Source: Thinkstock/Getty)

Helicopter parenting, especially from fathers, leads to lower self-control and contributes to school burnout in emerging adults, according to a study. In a report, published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, researchers suggested that helicopter parents, who are known to hover around their children and remove obstacles from their path, may harm young adults.

Such children go on to develop low self-control skills and find it challenging to manage emotions and behaviour due to fewer opportunities to practice in the growing years.

The report said, “The results of our study suggest that helicopter parenting behaviours may hinder the development of self-control skills among emerging adult college students, which are associated with feelings of school burnout. Further, helicopter fathers may have a more direct negative impact on college students’ feelings of school burnout than helicopter mothers due to violating their child’s expectations of the typical fathering role. The implications of the findings for practices in higher education were also discussed.”

The study, conducted by Florida State University (FSU), was titled Helicopter Parenting, Self-Control, and School Burnout among Emerging Adults. It said, “We examined the mediating role of self-control in the relation between helicopter parenting and college student school burnout and whether the relation between helicopter parenting and college student school burnout varied by parental gender. Specifically, we hypothesized that (1) there would be a positive association between helicopter parenting and school burnout through lower reports of self-control and (2) perceptions of paternal helicopter parenting would have a greater negative impact on school burnout compared to maternal helicopter parenting.”

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In a statement, Professor Frank Fincham, an FSU Eminent Scholar and director of the FSU Family Institute commented, “Self-control allows us to regulate behavior in order to achieve our long-term goals,” said. “It is a skill that can be learned. For example, people can learn to recognise impulsive thoughts and set a time limit before they act on them. They can also learn to remove temptation, like switching off a cell phone and putting it in another room, which makes self-control easier.”

Talking about burnout, Fincham added, “They feel increasingly helpless, hopeless and resentful, exerting less effort on their studies, which leads to lower grades. In some cases, students end up dropping out of college.”