The distinctive note of Charles Péguy’s poetry is that he often writes it as if the speaker is God. In his poem “Freedom,” God the Father reflects on the balancing act vis-à-vis his children that freedom poses on him. Freedom requires his child to take risks to stand on his own two feet but, like any good parent, God wants to protect his child. It’s like the dilemma, he says, of a father teaching his son how to swim: when do you hold him up, when do you let go?

Such is the mystery of man’s freedom, says God,
And the mystery of my government towards him and towards his freedom.
If I hold him up too much, he is no longer free
And if I don’t hold him up sufficiently, I am endangering his salvation.
Two goods in a sense almost equally precious.
For salvation is of infinite price.
But what kind of salvation would a salvation be that was not free?

My reflections are occasioned by a piece in the June 7 Wall Street Journal, “Helicopter Parents Show Up in the Workplace.” The thrust of the article is how modern employers are having to cope not only with young employees but young employees’ parents.

I am not making this up.

As a parent of three children, aged 15-26, I’ve had my share of encounters with “helicopter parents” in a somewhat woke northern Virginia “little city.” Because I was older when I became a father — 37 with my first daughter, 49 with my last son — I’ll admit some amusement with younger parents. Watching kids play on a local playground, I often thought that the modern child does not play so much with other children as alongside them, each precious offspring under the attentive gaze of a parent. 

When COVID came, even the “alongside” ended. Consistent with our virtual age, today’s child has “virtual” friends. They believe (as do a few teacher’s union reps still defending the extended closure of schools) that “virtual” friends are no different from flesh-and-blood ones. Perhaps our gnostic age believes that, but I can only think of the exchange between the Ghost of Christmas Past and Ebenezer Scrooge when the former laments the young Scrooge’s Christmas abandonment in a Victorian boarding school:

“He has his friends, Ali Baba and the Sultan’s Groom.”

“But not a real child to talk to. Not a living person.”

“Robinson Crusoe not real? Friday and the parrot — not real? He may do, this boy.”

Like Scrooge, do our modern times seek to rationalize an impoverishment that is evident but unadmitted?

I’ve suspected that helicopter parenting ill-prepared this generation for real life. Experience seems to have borne me out.

The playground children of helicopter parents eventually made their way to college and university … where they demanded “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” lest uncensored exposure to challenging ideas prove too discomforting. I’d argue that law school students who chase away federal judges are not so much certain of their convictions as afraid to consider whether other arguments might force them to engage in the critical thinking. It might compel them either to accommodate those new ideas, or ask whether their thinking itself needs revision.

Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, helicopter kids have found their way into the workplace, and they don’t feel comfortable.

The WSJ speaks of parents helping send out job applications, coaching students in the middle of interviews, and even pushing their adult children to demand raises and other recognition on the job. The WSJ generally derided parental apron strings in the workplace, concluding that occasionally such intervention backfires even among the new employee’s peers: a parent tried to get a child’s restaurant work schedule adjusted so he could watch Sunday sports games. The result: he became a “laughingstock” among his peers.

At least he had peers healthy enough to recognize when apron strings need cutting.

Parenthood involves various stages that must be traversed for the good of the child. One of them is transitioning a child into autonomous adulthood.

I’ll admit I’m no expert: with a 26- and 23-year-old, I’m in the process of learning what that involves myself. But, notionally, I admit I have a responsibility to let go. Even, maybe, to push one out from the comfortable bedroom on the other side of the wall.

I’m grateful for having gone to an out-of-state school. Even though I later came home and worked in New Jersey, four years in Michigan was beneficial. And learning to stand up on my own two feet started the second night I had a roommate who couldn’t sleep without the radio on and I listened to the announcement, “This is 3WE, WWWE, Cleveland, Ohio. It’s 4am.” 

Young people’s “failure to launch” is not to their weal.

I’m not sure the “helicopter parent” generation is doing that. If parents are still poking their noses into their adult children’s jobs, there is something really wrong with that picture.

By the time a young person is looking at his first job, he needs to learn to stand on his own two feet. That’s not happening. Helicopter parents shielded kids from life. Schools — primary, secondary and higher — have followed suit. Now, are parents ready to engage the HR apparatus to protect their little ones?

There’s another aspect to this phenomenon the WSJ ignored, one perhaps more invidious than even Mommy directing Mary and Johnny how to go to work. The mania following gender ideology threatens to ensconce today’s helicopter parents in a permanent parental role. 

Acquiescence in the chemical castration and physical mutilation of minors, far from being “therapeutic gender-affirming care,” means one’s children will always be children who can never replace their helicopter parents because they can never be parents as a result of those interventions. “Gender-affirming” parents make it impossible for their children ever to succeed them as parents because they have allowed those children to be sterilized.

That is not “responsible parenting.”

Starting one’s own family — by marriage and parenthood — was long the next generation’s “declaration of independence.” Today’s helicopter children are getting married later than ever before (30 for men, 28 for women). Parenthood is increasingly deferred, and fertility rates are falling through the floor. We even think sterilizing them is “therapeutic.”

We speak of those who grew up during the Depression and World War II years as “the greatest generation.” One wonders whether “helicopter parents” have anointed themselves as the new “greatest generation” that cannot let go of an infantile relationship with their kids … even after they should be adults and ought to succeed them as parents.