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Parenting is hard. Children of all ages run into problems and challenges around every turn. Whether their kids are struggling with a hula hoop or a driver’s test, parents have to decide when to step in and help, and when to let their child struggle toward their own solution. It’s not always clear or intuitive how to respond. It’s fairly easy for caring and well-meaning parents to become overly involved or even controlling of their child, beyond what is developmentally appropriate.
This phenomenon, known as overparenting, is very similar to the idea of a helicopter parent. Parents may take an overactive role in decision-making or solve problems unnecessarily on behalf of their child. They do this out of a sense of protectiveness, wanting to shield their child from the possibility of harm, challenges, or failure.
What does overparenting look like?
Helping with decision-making and protecting a child from harm are essential parts of parenting. As a parent, recognizing overparenting behaviors is particularly challenging because the “right” amount of help is always changing depending on a child’s age and developmental stage. So, where is the line between parenting and overparenting?
Imagine a child is anxious about their first day of school. Many parents would agree that comfort and support are appropriate responses, but where is the line? Walking your anxious child to their class might be a reasonable response for their first day of kindergarten, but not so appropriate for their first high school class.
While age is a very important factor to consider in parenting, it is also important to understand that every child develops at their own pace and has unique needs. Children learn self-advocacy over the course of their adolescence, and parents have to negotiate how to support them through that transition. Two students struggling in the same class might both need support from their teacher to succeed. But while one student may be able to confidently approach their teacher for help, another student might not know how to do that. While the second child might need their parents to help them contact teachers, the first child might instead be dissuaded from advocating for themselves in the future if they believe their parents will solve the problem for them.
What drives overparenting?
Parental anxiety is the best understood driver of overparenting (Yaffe, 2025). Indeed, overparenting can alleviate many of the common anxieties faced by parents (Yaffe, 2025). For example, a parent who is anxious about their child’s grades might feel less anxious after helping their child complete an assignment, or even completing the assignment for them, when the child could have completed the assignment on their own.
For anxious parents, overparenting or overinvolvement may also provide a level of closeness and bonding with their child that they may struggle to feel otherwise (Yaffe et al., 2024). Overparenting typically provides a clear way of supporting a child through an immediate challenge, and it allows the parent and child to have a sense of connection during an otherwise stressful moment (Yaffe et al., 2024).
Is overparenting harmful or helpful?
As with so many things, the answer is “it depends.” In the immediate short term, overparenting reduces the anxiety of both the parent and child, but it can have the opposite effect in the long term. Specifically, overparenting prevents a child from learning how to cope with hard situations and emotions and can reinforce the idea that the child isn’t able to do things on their own, leading to more anxiety and negative outcomes in the long term.
Research into the effects of overparenting has primarily focused on young adults, showing mixed results on the overall impact on the parent-child relationship. Overparenting of young adults can directly foster connection between parents and their young adult children (Yaffe et al., 2024). However, it can also lead to increased anxiety and a decreased sense of self-worth for young adults (Sadoughi, 2024). Overparenting can also indirectly create strain in a relationship, usually resulting from the lasting overdependence of the young adult on their parents (Yaffe et al., 2024).
Parenting Essential Reads
Overparenting of children and adolescents has not been as thoroughly researched as in young adults; therefore, the long-term effects of overparenting at this age are still largely unknown. A recent study published in Family Relations (Yaffe et al., 2025) aimed to change that by specifically studying the effect of overparenting in parents of adolescents. The study conducted a survey of 278 parents with adolescents aged 10 to 14. The survey asked parents to complete scales measuring their general anxiety, their child’s anxiety, their separation anxiety, and their overparenting behaviors. Here’s what they found:
- Overparenting was associated with (1) parents’ separation anxiety and (2) parents’ general anxiety
- Overparenting explained the correlation between parents’ anxiety and children’s anxiety in the short term
- When looking at these associations separately for moms and dads, only maternal overparenting was linked to the child’s anxiety
In summary, caring parents can become overbearing when their actions go beyond their child’s needs. Anxious parents are particularly at risk for overparenting behavior. It is important to recognize overparenting behaviors because they can have a detrimental effect on a child’s development and family dynamics.
Leila Bernbeck contributed to this article. Leila is a student researcher in the Cognition and Affect Research and Education (CARE) Lab at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School and an undergraduate at Wesleyan University.
