One of the terms that has become increasingly popular in our contemporary lexicon is helicopter parent. These parents loom over their children like a news-chopper hangs over traffic, but instead of reporting outcomes, these parents are trying to shape them. Like many social phenomenon, the emergence of helicopter parents is firmly rooted in economics.
This is the conclusion of a pair of European economists who set out to study parenting styles. The economists, Fabrizio Zilibotti and Matthias Doepke, both themselves fathers, saaught to understand how economic conditions impact parenting. What they discovered is the following – the lower is wealth and income inequality, the less helicopter parenting there tends to be. When economic outcomes are likely to be grouped toward the middle and away from extremes, parents tend to relax, allowing for instance their children to have a free hand in determining their future occupations.
But when economic outcomes become increasingly unequal, which is the case today in American and in much of the advanced world, parents become more engaged and autocratic, fearing that their offspring will be vulnerable to very bad economic outcomes such as chronic unemployment.
