More and more parents even use helicopters in the playground: schools are fighting back

Created: 06/18/2022, 06:11

Worse than taxis for parents: More and more helicopter parents don't even leave their children alone in the playground.

The first schools erect privacy fences.

Hamburg – They are the horror of teachers and many other legal guardians – and in their boundless “love” simply unteachable: helicopter parents who, according to researchers, have even produced a “generation unable to live”.

Other educators accuse helicopter parents: "Overprotection is neglect."

And yet the phenomenon is taking on ever more blatant forms: More and more dads and moms are no longer satisfied with the "job" as parents' taxis - they even make their way to the schoolyard to fight arguments for their children, bring food or comfort them .

Many schools are now taking action, reports kreiszeitung.de.

Helicopter parents at school: "Vigilante justice in the playground"

The morning chauffeur services of diligent legal guardians have been making headlines for a long time, even the police are active in the fight against parents' taxis and chaos in front of Hamburg's elementary schools.

However, this seems to be just the beginning.

Reports are piling up that overprotective parents don't even take their eyes off their offspring on the school grounds and are literally ambushing them there.

Author summarizes: “Parents wait in the cloakroom or hide in bushes in the schoolyard”

"Then the parents come into the school canteen and still want to cut their children's food into small pieces.

Or they wait for the lesson in the cloakroom in order to be able to comfort the child during the breaks, or they hide behind bushes in the schoolyard to observe whether their child also has many friends and is not left out in the schoolyard," reports the book author Carola Padtberg to “Deutschlandfunk”. 

Because helicopter parents "supervise" children even during breaks: school builds privacy screens around the playground

The Eichendorff School in Offenbach was forced to take drastic measures precisely because of such incidents.

Helicopter parents themselves followed their offspring around the school to monitor them and their well-being.

A privacy screen was erected to protect the children from the obtrusive adults, as reported by op-online.de: Feeding prohibited: New fence is to protect the school from obtrusive helicopter parents.

"In the past, there were always problems with overprotective mothers who fed their children at the fence or shouted instructions to them in the playground," says school head Paul-Gerhard Weiß, describing the bizarre scenes.

Completely exaggerated: Parents threaten students in the schoolyard because they want to protect their own child.

© Rupert Oberhäuser/Roberts Ratuts/imago

Helicopter parents intervene in children's disputes: "Vigilante justice" in the playground

The problem is also known in Switzerland.

Again and again, parents turn up in playgrounds and get involved in the children's conflicts.

The problem is known in around half of Swiss schools.

The headmistress of the Rickenbach primary school even appealed in a letter to the parents that they should stay away from the schoolyard. 

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"Recently, a father was in the playground during the long break and scolded a sixth-grader because he believed that he had attacked his son," quotes the "Thurgauer Zeitung" headmistress Stephanie Schildknecht.

This behavior is intolerable: "What the father did was vigilantism."

"Helicopter parents are fear-driven," says author Carola Padtberg

In the end, the abusive behavior of parents is counterproductive.

Not only the controversial educator Albert Wunsch is tearing up today's children's education: He accuses that overprotective parents make "softened miserable figures" out of their children these days.

Carola Padtberg, herself a mother of two children and author of the book "I have to go on a class trip, otherwise my daughter can't sleep" is highly critical of the trend: "Helicopter parents are very fear-driven, including fear of precarious life situations, of insecurities, of this one globalized world that hardly anyone can overlook.”

Parents in helicopter mode "then sit at the university in the lectures"

This fear manifests itself in the fact that they try to remove all obstacles from their children's way.

“And some of them really do it for a really long time.

They then sit at the university in the lectures and take notes,” Padtberg sums up to “Deutschlandfunk”.

The 13-year-old, who was abandoned on a lonely island as a punishment for truant parents, should probably not be shown such overprotectiveness.