Toughen up, head tells ‘helicopter’ parents whose fear of failure damages their children

“Helicopter parents” who try to prevent their children from experiencing disappointment and failure are damaging them and need to “toughen up”, the head of a leading London girls’ school warned.

Heather Hanbury, head of the £23,000-a-year Lady Eleanor Holles school in Hampton, said parents who micro-manage their children’s lives do so because they do not want to deal with the worry of seeing them unhappy.

But, by removing all obstacles from their children’s path they risk hindering their development and maturity.

In a blog post titled “F words — fear, futility and failure”, Mrs Hanbury said schools must work hard to change the attitude that children have to get things right all the time.

She wrote: “It is very hard for the average parent to be relaxed about their child failing. Many are so worried about it that they seek to fix everything so that their child never has to deal with the disappointment of failure. These helicopter parents are doing a lot of damage. As their child’s version of international search and rescue, they are preventing their children from learning how to solve their own problems and from gaining the confidence in themselves that is an essential requirement of maturing.”

She added: “My advice to parents is to toughen up — those who micro-manage their children’s lives only do this to save themselves the worry and unhappiness of dealing with unhappy children. These children will recover from disappointment far faster than their parents.”

She advised parents not to give empty praise to their children and not to shy away from telling them if they have got something wrong. Otherwise, children will not know how to cope when they get answers wrong in tests and exams.

Even when children are asked to give their opinions in class, they ask teachers “what is the right answer?” she warned, adding: “We must work hard to change this attitude: learning is not about getting things right all the time, it is about experimenting and trying new ideas and methods. Sometimes you will fail but you will learn in the process.”

But she warned that failing without learning is demoralising, and it is not helpful to repeat the same mistakes. She added: “This type of learning only works well if you have input from a skilled teacher or trainer…We in school must aim to be those skilled teachers and trainers.”

In a separate post, Mrs Hanbury also warned that the mental health of teenagers had reached crisis point. She said pupils at her school were being taught how to manage and understand anxiety so it did not spiral out of control.

She wrote: “The statistics speak for themselves; we have reached a crisis point. Never before has the mental health of our children and young people been so high on the political agenda or been so at risk. Now is the time to act.”