Young adults who said their parents hovered over them, stepping in to make their decisions and smooth their way, reported less self-control, a weaker sense of being in charge of their own lives and poorer social skills than young adults who described less hovering. That was the finding of a survey of 302 Americans aged 18 to 24, carried out by Kristin Moilanen and Mary Lynn Manuel of West Virginia University and published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies in 2019.
The study captured everyone at a single point in time, so it cannot say which came first. Parents may hover because a young adult is already struggling, and the authors say so themselves. This is one study, not settled consensus. It is worth a close look anyway, because it fits a wider body of research on what happens when caring, well-meaning parents do too much for too long.
What “hovering” meant in this study
The researchers described helicopter parents as warm and loving but overinvolved: intrusive, closely entangled in their children’s lives, and ready to step in when things do not go to plan, such as by contacting a professor about a grade. The point of the label is that these parents are not cold. The trouble, in the authors’ account, is that their involvement can crowd out a young person’s chance to run their own life.
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To measure it, the young adults first named the parent they felt closest to or spent the most time with. For about 70% of them that was their mother. They then rated five statements adapted from earlier work by Laura Padilla-Walker and Larry Nelson, such as whether that parent makes important decisions for them, including where they live, where they work and what classes they take.
The survey also asked about three more familiar sides of parenting: warmth and acceptance; psychological control, such as making a child feel guilty or withholding affection; and firm control, meaning setting limits on behavior. That allowed the researchers to check whether hovering mattered on its own or was simply standing in for these other habits.
What the young adults reported
Even after accounting for warmth, psychological control and firm control, more helicopter parenting went with three things. The young adults reported lower self-regulation, a broad measure of their ability to manage attention, emotions and behavior in pursuit of a goal. They reported a weaker sense of mastery, measured with statements such as “I often feel helpless in dealing with the problems of life.” And they rated themselves as less socially competent, for instance at heading off a disagreement before it grew into a fight.
Some expected links did not appear. Helicopter parenting had no direct association with substance use, criminal behavior or helping others. Its link with depression shrank once the other parenting measures were taken into account, though the analysis suggested an indirect route: hovering went with lower mastery and self-regulation, and those in turn went with more depressive symptoms. The authors concluded that helicopter parenting seemed to matter more for young adults’ emotional and social lives than for their behavior.
Which way does it run?
The biggest limit is direction. A young adult who has trouble organizing their life may prompt a parent to step in, and a parent who keeps stepping in may leave fewer chances to learn. A single survey cannot separate the two, and the authors call for studies that follow families over time.
There are other limits. Everything was self-reported by the young adults. Only one parent was rated, so the study could not compare mothers with fathers. About 84% of the sample was recruited online through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, most participants were women and most were white, so the results may not describe every family.
What the wider research shows
Other studies help fill the gaps. A 2023 meta-analysis by Qi Zhang and Wongeun Ji in Development and Psychopathology pooled 52 articles on young people with an average age of about 20. More overparenting was linked to more depression, anxiety and related symptoms. The links were modest in size, and they held across different income levels, cultures and study designs.
A longer view comes from research that started much earlier in childhood. Nicole Perry and colleagues followed 422 US children, observing them with their parents at age 2 and checking in again at 5 and 10. Children whose parents constantly directed their play at age 2, telling them how to use toys and how to tidy up, showed poorer control of their emotions and behavior at 5, the American Psychological Association reported. Children with better control at 5 had fewer emotional problems and did better socially and at school at 10.
The longest view of all comes from Britain. A study of people born in 1946 asked them at age 43 to recall how their parents had treated them, then compared their answers with measures of well-being across their lives. Mai Stafford and colleagues found that people who remembered more psychological control, such as parents who “tried to control everything I did” or tried to make them feel dependent, reported lower well-being, including in their 60s. Rules about behavior showed no consistent link. Those memories were gathered decades after the fact, which can color them, but the pattern points in the same direction as the American studies.
Where that leaves parents
None of this research says that helping a grown child is harmful, or that warm, involved parents are doing something wrong. The West Virginia study took warmth into account, and the links with hovering held regardless. What the studies keep returning to is a narrower habit: making decisions and solving problems that a child or young adult could handle, or learn to handle, themselves.
Moilanen and Manuel suggest why that might matter. Parents may believe they are helping by stepping in, but stepping in can also take away a young person’s chances to practice managing their own life. That reasoning fits their results, which pointed to self-regulation and a sense of mastery as the routes through which hovering was linked to young adults’ emotional and social difficulties.
The research cannot yet say how much stepping back is right, or at what age. It does suggest that one useful question for a parent is whose problem this is, and whether the child might learn more from handling it than from having it handled.