A former dean from Stanford University has written a book about how to cut the umbilical cord that so many young people and parents are afraid to sever. As a parent herself, Lythcott-Haims is sympathetic with the plight, but argues that parents’ over-involvement in their kids’ lives is harming children’s passage into adulthood. One critic has aptly described this book as “the Blackhawk Down of helicopter parenting.”

There was a time when parenting was hands-off, when moms would kick kids out the door and tell them to go play. Play was unsupervised and parents usually had no idea where their kids were. There were no cell phones, no tracking devices. Often kids would run to the other side of the neighborhood, to the creek, to the mall, to an abandoned lot. Childhood has undergone some dramatic changes.

Many key cultural shifts took place in the 1980s. In 1981, there was a child abduction and murder case that became known throughout the country. The story of young Adam Walsh became a movie that got almost 40 million views. Not long after, “Have You Seen Me?” photos began appearing on the backs of milk cartons. Adam Walsh’s father petitioned Congress for a government-funded center for missing and exploited kids, and went on to found the show America’s Most Wanted in 1988. Stranger danger became a huge fear.

Another change in parenting was the emphasis on achievement in school. A famous 1983 report called “A Nation at Risk” raised concerns that the children in the United States were lagging behind students in other nations.

It was also in the 1980s that the language of self-esteem gained currency in the United States. The self-esteem philosophy asserts that key to a child’s success is helping them affirm their sense of self rather than focusing on their performance.

Yet another notable shift was the invention of the playdate around the year 1984, and its impact on the essence of playtime for kids. As a surge of women flooded the workforce in the 1980s, there were fewer moments for play—especially unstructured play. As playtimes became more and more scheduled, parents not only watched their kids play, but became frequent participants in their play—to the point that leaving kids home alone became frowned upon. The unstructured, unsupervised play that is so vital to children’s development became increasingly uncommon.

In 1990, psychologists Foster Cline and Jim Fay were searching for language to describe those parents who “hover” over their kids, inhibiting children’s independence rather than cultivating it. “Helicopter parents” was the term they landed on—and the name has stuck.

The inadvertent movement toward helicopter parenting began with the Baby Boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964. In reaction to their distant parents and grandparents who expected children to speak when spoken to, many Boomers went to the opposite extreme, where they wanted to be emotionally close to their kids—perhaps too close. Being counted among your child’s best friends was seen as ideal. Baby Boomers were part of a seismic culture shift that pushed back against order, hierarchy, and the “because-I-said-so” blind obedience that Boomers had known growing up. It was this Baby Boomer questioning of mores and conventions that fueled the sexual revolution, counter-culture, the increase in divorce rates, changing views on dual-incomes, the protests against the Vietnam War and Civil Rights violations.

Baby Boomers continued to take the fight to the system as parents, going to bat for their children, providing a protective layer between their children and the many institutions with which children are inevitably linked—schools, hospitals, universities, and so on. Gen Xers and Millennials have continued the Baby Boomer legacy of helicopter parenting.

The author became concerned about college kids (or “college students” as they were called then) in the late 1990s while an administrator at Stanford University. She interacted with thousands of students over the course of 14 years, (late 1990s until 2012), and, increasingly, with their parents. With each passing year, there were more parents on campus ready to solve their kids’ issues and procure opportunities for them. The students increasingly seemed impotent. When they were by themselves, they looked bewildered and existentially malnourished.

The painful irony is that the Baby Boomers, a generation obsessed with self-actualization, has managed to rob its children of opportunities to do the hard but necessary work of developing themselves. Parents increasingly plan every aspect of their children’s lives, but the checklist childhood has made it difficult for kids to operate without parental involvement or move confidently into adulthood.

If you ask a parent today if they would ever let their child wander off on their own, that parent would probably be vehemently against the idea. And even if they were open to giving kids a longer leash, they would probably get cowed into shortening it again for fear of appearing negligent. The most common knee jerk reaction to the suggestion is “You can’t be too careful with creeps and pedophiles around.” 

One of the most harmful myths that keeps kids cloistered and underdeveloped is the ubiquitous assumption that stranger danger is lurking just around the unsupervised corner. We’ve taught kids never to talk to strangers, to stay close to mommy or daddy, to play where we parents can keep an eye on them. It’s harming kids and turning traditions like Halloween from opportunities to have adventures into closely monitored affairs, where parents tail their kids in the SUV and do not let the kids open candy until it’s been inspected for needles or razors. Halloween used to be fun. And, as it turns out, the majority of such reports about needles and poisons in Halloween candies have been determined false.

We can trace the fear of child abduction to 1981, when a kidnapping case became highly publicized. Throughout the 1980s, the public was then bombarded with false and misguided statistics suggesting hundreds of thousands of children were being taken. What those compiling such statistics were doing was putting figures for runaway kids and kids taken by parents who didn’t have custody rights into the same pool as kids who had been kidnapped by strangers. This grossly inflated the numbers, terrifying the misinformed public. And, of course, good news never garners the ratings that bad news does, so the media amplified those fears.

The best first step to combat the stranger danger myth is to examine the available data. In 2002, The U.S. Department of Justice, released data that nearly 800,000 children had been reported missing. But of those 800,000, only 115 were the stranger danger variety of kidnappings. That means that 99.99 percent of cases did not fit that profile. And that .01 percent of cases of stranger abductions is limited to the sample of missing children reports, not to the nation’s population of children as a whole. That number becomes even smaller when we remember the vast majority of children in the United States were never reported missing that year. Moreover, since 2002, the FBI reports that the number of stranger abductions has stayed about the same—or even gone down. The data doesn’t support our perception that society is becoming increasingly violent and unsafe. 

Of course, any child’s kidnapping is tragic, and these statistics are not an attempt to dismiss the gravity of such cases. The point is to emphasize just how uncommon it is. The question for us is: Are we going to build our lives and parenting habits around a fear that is statistically improbable? There is a far, far greater likelihood that your child will be killed in a car accident than by a predator (one in 17,625 versus one in 1,000,000), but we don’t give it a second thought as our kids pile into the minivan.

The stranger danger conditioning is so strong that we parents can still feel anxious even if we know the facts. Instead of inculcating our stranger danger fears into our kids, let’s just teach them to be street smart: to walk with a friend rather than alone, to distinguish the bad stranger from a sea of good ones. If kids never learn to leave the yard without a parent, of course they will be beside themselves with fear if they’re alone on the streets. Teach them how to be fearless rather than to fear.

At the end of the day, far more damaging  than child abductions are fear-mongering crusaders and criminalizing parenting styles that allow kids to roam more freely. One of the biggest obstacles to the “free-range” childhood is judgmentalism—often in the form of demoralizing stares or rebukes for such “irresponsible parenting.” Even the police might chastise the parent for breaking some rule—a rule that’s a poorly founded convention rather than codified law. One champion of “free-range kids” recommends pinning a note on a shirt or backpack of a wandering kid that says “I’m not lost” and offers a pithy explanation for the parenting decision.

A prominent psychology journal published a survey in 2007 that had asked young people (aged 18 to 25) what they considered markers of adulthood. Among the most common criteria listed were taking responsibility for the consequences of actions, parents becoming more like peers, being financially self-sufficient, and forming a system of values without outside—and especially parental—inputs. When asked if they were adults according to their own criteria, 84 percent said “no,” and the vast majority of their parents concurred. This is a problem. Kids aren’t learning basic skills that help them in life. There was one particularly painful example of a Stanford student who had a package dropped off outside his dormitory, but it sat out there because it was too bulky and heavy for the student to bring up to his room and he didn’t know how to ask for help. This boy’s parents let him down.

Of the 20,000 or so students with whom the author interacted at Stanford, the most needy and unsure of themselves were not the first-generation Americans or the low-income kids, either. The most dependent and least prepared for life were the middle- and upper-class kids, and they looked most comforted when mom or dad stepped in. This was the trend not just at Stanford, but at universities across the United States. Deans at other schools were reporting a similar growing trend of “learned helplessness” among students.

Here’s a list of life skills that are vital for every 18 year old to know:

-capable of talking to strangers

-capable of learning to navigate a new town or city

-capable of keeping track of to-dos and meeting deadlines

-capable of helping keep a household running

-capable of navigating conflicts with others

-capable of taking life’s struggles in stride

-capable of getting and keeping a job, managing his or her own funds

-capable of taking calculated risks

The acid test of whether young people have these skills is if they can resolve their dilemmas without calling mom or dad for help. If a young person is calling home for something, that “something” is not yet a skill they’ve acquired. Any loving parent is happy to do what they can for their kids, but if parents are constantly talking to strangers on behalf of their kids, reminding them to complete their assignments, fixing and cleaning everything in the house without asking kids to jump in, removing anything that might cause them to struggle, and giving kids money whenever they ask for it, they are keeping their kids underdeveloped.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your kids won’t suddenly become adults by the end of the week. If you look at your children and worry that they’re not on track to fend for themselves when they turn 18, that’s okay. Take a breath. You start from where you are, and so do your children. There are small life skill milestones that parents can aim to inculcate by certain ages that make the process seem more manageable and less mystifying. Here are a few benchmarks to consider incorporating:

By age three, your child should be able to perform basic chores, like putting toys away, bringing his plate to the counter after eating, washing face and brushing (with help), and dressing himself (also with help).

By age five, she should know her full name, her parents’ names, her address and phone number, as well as a rudimentary understanding of how money works. This is a time to teach basic safety tips. She should be capable of dressing herself and picking out her own outfit, and performing simple chores.

By age seven, he can start learning the basics of cooking (mixing, stirring, and so on), and making himself a sandwich. He should know how to wash the dishes, to identify and use basic household cleaners without poisoning himself, and to be able to make his own bed and bathe himself.

By age nine, your kid should be learning to take pride in and responsibility for her possessions. She should be capable of folding her own clothes, keeping herself hygienic without constant reminders, following a recipe and cooking a simple dish, making a grocery list, sweeping the floor, and performing simple tasks in the yard, like raking or pulling weeds.

Between ages 10 and 13, your child should be learning more independence, and be capable of handling more tasks without supervision. He should be okay at home by himself, be able to do his own laundry, be mindful of little brothers and sisters, be able to handle simple tools and mow the lawn and be able to operate the washer and dryer.

Between 14 and 18, your kids should be proficient in many of these skills and capable of performing them without your supervision: filling up the car’s gas tank and tires, changing a tire if necessary, cleaning a drain or stove, cooking more complex dishes, and interviewing for (and getting) a job.

This list is not canon, nor is it exhaustive. But if the goal for our children is independence and self-sufficiency, then this can be a helpful template from which to begin.

A general progression for building skills into our kids is:

-We do it for them

-We do it with them

-We watch them as they do it

-We let them do it independently, without help or supervision

There’s a growing shortage of children who have made it to stage four, but the world desperately needs such kids—or, rather, adults-in-the-making. A good, independence-promoting rule of thumb is that if your child is capable of performing a task with little or no help, then there’s no need to do it for your kid.

It is evident that young people are increasingly raised without the life skills they need. So many are clueless when their car breaks down or they show up at the ER when they have a cold and just need a good night’s sleep. They leave heavy packages outside their dorms because they were never taught to ask for help or come up with an innovative solution.

The fruits of overparenting show up in many other domains, too, and it’s disconcerting.

-Childhoods are being co-opted into arms races to accrue more resume-worthy items than the next kid. If we’re not careful, we join the frantic race and push our sons and daughters to stockpile accolades. We don’t let them have fun if it has no resume value.

-Even excellent academic performance is horrible if your high school rank is tenth and not first. They’re more miserable than the high school students with a mediocre GPA.

-The obsession with SAT scores and GPAs is creating what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences,” where a 20-point difference in SAT score and a .2 difference in GPA seems like a yawning chasm, and the difference between success and utter failure—when in fact it’s not a big difference at all, and these markers are hardly the best measures of a complete human being.

-Some kids, unable to keep up with the workload demands of school, have to take Adderall and other stimulant drugs that heighten focus. It’s creating a growing addiction crisis among young people just trying to keep up with their work.

-We harm their job prospects when we do everything for them because they never learn to contend for themselves

-Not only is this model damaging to kids, it’s deleterious to parental health as well. Parents are stressed for their kids. The cost of so much pressure to help your child stay at the top of the stack is often anxiety and depression.

There is a better way forward. We use the phrase “raising kids” easily enough, but if that’s the language we want to use, that’s what we will inadvertently create: kids. We love our kids to pieces, but we want to love them in such a way that makes them adults instead of keeping them children.

Helicopter parents come in two varieties: the authoritarian and the permissive. The authoritarian parents stunt growth by never allowing their kids to make their own decisions (e.g., so-called “Tiger Moms”). Permissive parents pay so much attention to their children’s feelings that they remove anything that could hurt them and prevent them from developing resilience. Ideally, we want to strike a balance in which we blend loving firmness and latitude for our children’s exploration.

So allow your children to chart their own courses. Give them time for unstructured play and exploration without adult interference—however well-intended. Remember in all of this that it is helpful to your child that you have your own course. Otherwise, you will be more tempted to make your kid’s course your own course, and their journey becomes about you.

Kids don’t always get it right and neither will you. As you train and encourage a child to chart her course, slowly introducing new responsibilities and opportunities to explore, accept the current version of your child—not the future version you want her to be. Struggle and failure are part of the journey and the best thing you can do is normalize that for your kid. Struggles and setbacks don’t make life imperfect—they make life “life.”

The United States is called the land of the free and the home of the brave. We need to reclaim this legacy again in our parenting, so that instead of operating in fear and seeking to control, we start to grant our kids enough freedom to pioneer their own lives. If we want healthy, close relationships that continue into our children’s adulthoods, then we should want them to declare independence from us and build their lives for themselves, rather than making them carry out our hopes and dreams.