50 People Share The Most Extreme Cases Of Helicopter Parenting That They've Witnessed

I know helicopter parenting is funny from afar, but...

My mom was a helicopter parent. She controlled who my friends were, what sports I played, and even the classes I took in high school.

For anyone dealing with a helicopter parent that requires absolute control, that praises you for your successes (much more than warranted), but punishes you for shortcomings (also more than warranted). Please cut them out of your life.

A personality disorder develops because of this. It is most prevalent in males, but can also be in females. When you're a child and your primary caregiver causes your emotions to constantly go from love, warmth, and trust to guilt, hate, and worthlessness, which are all constantly present emotions with a helicopter parent. You don't develop emotional trust, which in my mind is the most important human aspect.

When this happens to a child, a quite clever thought process take place. "If I can't feel, I can't get hurt." A child suppresses their emotions and chooses not to experience them.

As someone who took this route. It doesn't give you happiness. It gives you nothing. I constantly experience emotions, but on the inside. I despise people for showing theirs, but am truly jealous instead. I can't hold relationships or friendships.

I'm 21. It took me four years of my life to get to the root of my problem and its going to take me even longer to get better.

If you're someone who has experienced the unfortunate psychological abuse of helicopter parenting, remember, everything you learn, you can unlearn. It just takes more effort. Start reinforcing your behaviour that you enjoy about yourself and stop focusing on the bad. Your parent focused on the bad and only what they considered to be good. It is your turn to live.

My brother was injured pretty badly while training in Lebanon. (Israeli army). The base commander (equivalent to a captain in the us army) refused to send him to a hospital because he was partially to blame for the accident and asked the camp nurse to take care of him.

The nurse, after pumping my brother up on morphine, contacted my mom. Mom, who was a military police colonel at the time, proceeded to commandeer a chopper, fly up to the base, tear the commander a new a*****e and evac my brother out.

I mean, she literally took a helicopter. I don't think it gets more helicopter parent than that.

To be fair, she's a good mom and never really tried to control us too much. If s**t gets serious though, she'll happily take out anyone who threatens her family.

Till I was 18 years old, I wasn't allowed to listen to anything other than classical or country music, I wasn't allowed to wear baggy clothes (think 1997 when baggy jeans were the thing to wear) and I wasn't allowed to wear any style of skater shoes, or any brand name shirts or any band merch. My mother would go through all my stuff when I was at work, snap CD's, cut up shirts and jeans into a load of pieces and throw them away, and replace them with her approved items. 5 days before I turned 18 my girlfriend at the time took me to do my driving test, and my mom cut it up when she heard me on the phone telling my friend that I had passed it.

Flash forward to today, I'm 36, moved to England, got married, quite a severe case of misanthropy, no interest in having kids, I'm covered in tattoos, got a great job, and most importantly, an amazing wife who had a completely opposite upbringing but the same outview on everything as I do, also an awesome job. We told the family to mind their own business and got married in Vegas 6 years ago and will live happily ever after with our cats. :)

I worked at a science museum that had hands on for kids.

The aim of the game was for the child to solve a problem by themselves. Like "can you get x to do y", they make something, test it, and figure out how to make it better.

One day a woman comes in, practically dragging her five year old son. She sits him down beside me and starts poking me on the shoulder and I'm talking to another family.

"Tell my son what to do," she says, standing over him. I tell the family to hold on a sec, as I explain the challenge to the newcomer. The whole point is to work autonomously, so it was alright, and I was used to working with a few rude/pushy parents so I wasn't surprised. I tell the kid the prompt, tell him he had a wide range of materials...

But no. The woman wants me to tell him every step of the process. "Tell him the answer! Tell him the answer!" she says repeatedly, grabbing his hands to make him fold paper, or reaching for my own.

I start getting mad. "Ma'am, the goal here is to learn the scientific method. Make a hypothesis, test it, make conclusions and try again."

"But you already KNOW the answer," she says, "tell my son! Or I'm calling your manager!"

I don't even have a manager. In the mean time, the poor kid is looking so embarrassed. Ever time he tries to start something for himself, his mom reaches for his hands and tells him to wait for me to tell him what to do. The woman was so afraid of him failing when the whole point was to learn from one's mistakes. I'm so worried about how he'll deal with mistakes growing up, with her around.

As a kid, my sister had a friend and went over to her house quite a bit to hang out with her. The friend lived in a very nice, quiet neighborhood.

After a day of hanging with her friend at her house, my sister told me that her friend’s parents had placed cameras in her room. The camera was also equipped with a microphone to not only hear what was going on in her room, but also to speak to the child.

My sister told stories after coming home about the mom calling into the room to sometimes tell them to stop doing an activity or to be a little more quiet. THIS WOMAN WAS WATCHING THEIR EVERY MOVE AND LISTENING TO THEIR EVERY CONVERSATION!

I feel bad for the girl, honestly. To me that’s a huge invasion of privacy, as well as it is extremely creepy in general.

I had a mother turn up at my workplace accusing me of racism [because] I didn’t hire her daughter. We’re a very multicultural practice, and myself and two other people are white English, six Indian staff, two Greek, two Nigerian, three Chinese, and three Pakistani.

I took her to our photo wall of staff and asked her why she thinks I was racist, and she said that her daughter “looked more Indian than the other staff”... Her daughter, who was more than qualified, didn’t get the job for a couple of reasons:

1) She refused to put her phone away during the interview in case her mother phoned.

2) Her mother phoned more than 10 times and she answered every call.

3) She asked if she could keep her mum on the phone to listen [in on] the interview in case she needed help to answer my questions.

How could she run a practice if she needed to have her mum help her at the interview?

Working summer orientation for my old community college, and we have new students register for classes towards the end of the session. Counselors are there to help with class selection.

This one mom was literally hovering over her son telling him which classes to choose and completely ignoring the counselor's advice, when she had [her son] stand up. She proceeded to sit down, and she herself started registering her son for his classes.

I tried to intervene, letting her know that we ask that the student [to] register themselves, and that he'll be doing online registration for the rest of his college career. I was told to f**k off.

Later, I pulled him aside and told him to change his password and swap into a class more appropriate for his placement exams.

It was this incident that triggered us to design a parent orientation to keep them away from their kids.

Had a mother call me to find out why her son didn't get the job.
He's 40.
And an attorney.

I was homeschooled from the second grade to the 10th grade due to difficulties with shitty teachers.

- Wasn't allowed to wear tight fitting clothes. Everything had to be a size or two too big because Mom didn't want me "profiling".

- I couldn't be at friends' houses or parties without my mother being there.

- Couldn't listen to anything other than gospel music and disney songs (yes, even well into my teens). Mom explicitly banned non-gospel music on Sundays, not even allowing me to have my ipod on the way to church.

- No sex ed. Mom bought some christian girl talk book, but grounded me for a month when she caught me flipping through it without her consent.

- If I were going to hang out with a friend, Mom had to know who would be there, where we were going, and what we were doing, even to the point of asking for peoples' numbers. She only really ever let me hang out alone with one person. Ironically, the one person was the one who helped me sneak around to hang out with other people.

- Wasn't allowed to watch movies above PG, read/watch anything with magic or witchcraft (aside from disney movies because f**k if I know), or play video games outside of like, Legend of Zelda. I also wasn't allowed to be on the internet half the time since we had dial-up.

- No sex. I came home from college and Mom about shat herself when she found my Depo shot reminder that had fallen out of my purse.

- No pills or therapists. My parents let me see a therapist and start taking Prozac since I was 23 and they were legally unable to stop me, but they let me know just about every week how much they're not okay with it. I'm supposed to be praying the depression away, dammit!

- Inviting themselves to my therapy appointments. As in, calling me at 8pm the night before, long after the office has closed, to tell me they're coming with me to my appointment. Which also f***s up my therapist's schedule.

- Constantly berating me about my spending habits. I know I have a shitty handle on spending. I'm currently attempting to budget, and I do not need to drive down to the house 45 minutes out of my way to be lectured about it.

- Whenever they have some kind of beef with me, they won't tell me what it is. All I get is, "you need to come to the house tomorrow, I'm not in the mood to talk about it right now" if I even as for so much as a preview of what's going on. After spamming the hell out of my phone with calls.

- I'm not allowed to be angry with them or anything. If I express any kind of objection, it's "talking back" or "being a smart alek." I speak in a VERY monotone voice when I'm around them, because I don't feel like being snapped at to "watch my mouth" if I offer any kind of inflection.

Basically my life. I'm still moved out, but they still tend to act as if I'm still living with them.

I was a manager of a bagel store. Had an interview with a kid, I think he was about 16.

His dad came to the interview, and basically answered every single question I asked the kid.

At the end of the interview I turned to the dad and said "You're hired.", look on his face was priceless. The kid laughed his a*s off.

edit:
Since quite a few people have asked. The kid came back for an interview on his own a few days later, and I hired him. But ultimately it didn't work out.

He was a nice kid, and reasonably smart, but had absolutely no work ethic. And couldn't perform even simple tasks really. I have always assumed that this was due to his parents pampering him. He only lasted a short time (I think it was about 2 months).

I used to teach/lecture at a university. I had one poor homeschooled student who's mother insisted on attending the university with him. She enrolled in the same course and used to follow him around to observe his social interactions, and dictate to him who he should be friends with etc. He had limited social skills as it was, and this made it much much worse. In the end I put them in different lecture streams so that they had to attend separate lectures and labs. She spat the dummy and took me before the Dean to change them into the lecture streams, but the Dean was pretty happy with what I had done. A few weeks later the student came and thanked me personally.

I had a friend in high school whose mom was terrible. Every time there was a party (and, mind you, most of my friends were Mormon so they were supervised, appropriate parties) she would come just to make sure her daughter wasn't getting into trouble. She wouldn't let her watch pg-13 movies (even at 17), had a strict curfew, and became a constant and judgemental fixture at every social event. One time she called me a s**t because she saw me kiss a boy at a school dance (she wasn't chaperoning, she was just there to watch her daughter). The best story though was one time my friends and I went to my house to watch a scary movie. Sheltered friend comes. Helicopter mom shows up. My dear mother distracted her in the kitchen so my friend could have a little peace and just be a teenager. My mom later said she had no idea what to talk to her about so they talked about cats for 2 hours. My mom is a saint.

Military recruiting - the helicopter parents who would try to have us recruit their kid without their consent were staggering. Parents would call to make appointments for testing, and were furious when we said we had to speak to the kid. If the kid is a minor, the parents have to sign a waiver, and at that point we can no longer give any information to the parent, so some parents would call and pose as their child in order to get test results, book appointments, and so on. Some parents even tried to attend the testing with their child and were furious when we said no.

Then, invariably, when little Johnny got turned down for being a s**t pump with no initiative, we'd get an earful from Mommy about how their child is the most special human being on the earth. Those were the fun times when I could say "have you stopped to consider that Johnny isn't getting a job because he has no initiative or desire to be here based on a parent pushing him into a career he doesn't want, rather than him being allowed to make his own choices?" Usually didn't go over well, and then I'd hang up.

Girlfriend's father was terrible. In addition to being emotionally abusive, he demanded to know every detail of where she was going, who with, and when she would get there. He basically said she was a child who couldn't do anything on her own and needed him to whip her into shape because that's what his parents did to him. He was also a bible thumper when it benefitted him and his strict rules.

My girlfriend got kicked out on her 18th birthday without so much as a "call your mother to pick you up" she had 5 minutes to pack as much as she could in a trash bag and get out. I got a call at 12:30 at night from her and had to go pick her up.

Years of abuse had taken a major toll on her. She had major self esteem issues and body issues, and some health issues that the doctor said were stress related. She had major trust issues with men because of her "father approved" boyfriends who would fake love until they slept with her, then leave her. I was the first guy she ever really trusted and the first she told any of this to.

She lives with her mom now and is doing much better. She's even going to college now for social services because she doesnt want anyone else to suffer like she did. We're currently looking for a place together and i'll be proposing next September on our anniversary if everything keeps going like it has been. I'm excited

An acquaintance of mine getting yelled at by her parents when she decided to get an apartment for herself. She was 30 at the time.

I work at an admissions front desk for a university, so I get helicopter parents all the time over the phone, but I had a mom that had me laughing over the phone because of how ridiculous she was. Let's call her Susan for reference.

At first, she was normal, asking about general admissions processes and what are the requirements.

However, where she messed up was when she admitted [that] she did the application for him because, "He is a boy, and you know how boys can be, so I just did it for him."

Then she started to fly off the walls. She asked if the campus was open because she wanted to visit her son EVERY SINGLE DAY since they live 15 minutes away from the main campus. Susan tried making herself not sound crazy by sliding in her bringing him baked goods and home-cooked meals, but I know she just [wanted] to pester her child.

There was another talk about how she wanted to get access to his student account to see his grades. I told her that she was not going to be allowed to get that access because her child will be considered an adult, and the student has to give her permission by [filing] a FERPA form. She wanted to know how and where to get those documents ASAP.

As far as social life, Susan asked if there were parties on campus. It's a college, of course there are going to be parties. The worst part is that she asked if they are supervised... by PARENTS!

This is where I couldn't help but laugh because why did she think that this was a high school setting? Susan then followed up with, "Well, how will I know where he is going or if he gets in trouble?" and I said, very casually, "Ma'am, if your student decides to do something illegal and gets caught by campus police and gets arrested, you'll be getting that phone call."

And she had nothing else to say

I was at college orientation, and one parent came up to my friend and said, "That girl over there is my daughter. You go up to her and introduce yourself to her and be her friend." It wasn't done in a cute way. It was semi-threatening.

While working at new student orientation in college, I was told a story from a previous year. The parents who attended orientation were housed separately from the students. One mom wanted to stay with her daughter and took the bed of another student. The mom told the student she can find somewhere else to sleep.

The student, not knowing what to do, ended up sleeping in a chair in the common area of the dorm.

Fifth grade overnight trip to nature center. A kid's mom went (was only parent that wasn't a teacher to go) and had a complete meltdown when she was told that her kid would be sleeping in a cabin with other kids and not her... She was told this before [the] trip as well. Four teachers per cabin, basically overnight school. She basically spent the entire night outside watching the cabin, really creeped everyone out...

Man, the rants she went on [on] Facebook... at least her friends and family called her out on her nonsense. [I] imagine quite a few people got blocked that day

My wife, being a teacher, had to deal with this on a regular basis. Usually, she would have that parent do menial tasks so they would not bother the class.

One parent became so overbearing (demanding to see lesson plans, making my wife take class time to re-explain subjects), my wife deliberately left a quiz out. This parent took the quiz and slipped her kid the answers. Knowing the kid was not a good student, my wife got the parent to fess up to taking the test and passing the answers. This went to the principal, and he banned her from the class.

The parent made multiple complaints, even going to a district meeting. The school board [upheld] the ban