As I read a recent article on “Supermoms" in the July 2008 issue of Oprah Magazine entitled Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Supermom!, I had to shake my head at the stories of the steps some mothers now take to involve themselves in their children’s lives even while they were in college and after. Of course I had heard some of these stories before. A friend told me of a mother who called her son’s employer after three months to ask him to give her son a raise. I know a pediatrician who tells me that when he challenges his interns, male or female, they tear up. The woman who handles my speaking engagements tells me that the interns in her firm expect to be praised and regularly given raises.

To be sure these parents do not represent all or even the majority of parents in this country. There are many children today who, like myself in an earlier generation, grow up in immigrant families and who often serve as interpreters between their parents and the larger society. In contrast to helicopter parents, these parents are often frightened and intimidated by the schools and by teachers. Many non-immigrant low-income parents in one, or two parent, families often work more than one job and struggle to find adequate child care services for their children. So helicopter parents are only one subgroup of the larger parent population.

Nonetheless, as I read the Oprah article I could not help but think what Freud might have said had he read the story. While I certainly can’t speak for Freud, his theory of the Oedipus complex is suggestive. Freud argued that around the age of four or five, boys vie with their fathers for the love of the mother. Because the father is larger and stronger the boy identifies with the father and attains the mother vicariously. In girls, a similar pattern, the Electra complex takes place. In the healthy course of development the adolescent is attracted by those in the opposite sex who most resemble the parent of that sex. This attraction ends the sexual attachment between son and mother, daughter and father.

From this perspective helicopter parenting is unhealthy and suggests the perpetuation of an attachment that should long ago have been transformed into a less libidinous and confining one. Erik Erikson demonstrated that adolescence is the time when young people experience an identity crises the need to establish a sense of personal identity, a sense of self that is constructed out of all the disparate parts of the personality yet integrated into a working whole. The construction of a personal identity gives the young person a sense of continuity with the past and guidance for the future. My guess is that the failure to break from the parental attachment, may well delay or impair the young person’s identity crises and the establishment of a secure sense of self. For the parent, it reflects an unwillingness to let go and give the young person the independence he or she will need to find their own place in the world.

Technology has made helicopter parenting possible. But technology is only a tool and can be used for healthy or unhealthy purposes. My guess is that Freud might argue that helicopter parenting is not in the best interests of either the child or the parent.