Helicopter parenting of children of lesbian parents

Carone, Gartrell, Rothblum, Koh & Bos (2022) published “Helicopter Parenting, Emotional Avoidant Coping, Mental Health, and Homophobic Stigmatization Among Emerging Adult Offspring of Lesbian Parents” in Journal of Family Psychology. I was interested in this study because helicopter parenting has been studied in younger children but I had not seen research on young adults with lesbian parents. Here’s the abstract:

Helicopter parents are highly involved parents who hover over and around their child, applying developmentally inappropriate levels of control and tangible assistance. Previous research with different-sex parent families indicates that helicopter parenting is particularly problematic in emerging adulthood as it may indirectly affect the offspring’s mental health through their use of emotional avoidant coping. Knowledge is lacking, however, on the antecedents and consequences of helicopter parenting in lesbian-parent families. The present longitudinal, questionnaire-based study investigated the effect of homophobic stigmatization in adolescence on mental health via helicopter parenting and emotional avoidant coping among 76 (37 females and 39 males) National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study 25-year-old offspring of lesbian parents. All participants were cisgender, born in the USA, and conceived through donor sperm, with the majority being White, heterosexual, highly educated, and no longer living with their parents. Parents who reported that their offspring experienced homophobic stigmatization in adolescence were likely to enact higher helicopter parenting in emerging adulthood. Then, higher scores on helicopter parenting were associated with offspring’s greater use of emotional avoidant coping, which in turn negatively affected the mental health of emerging adult offspring. Discussed in light of Bowen’s family differentiation theory, the results suggest that clinicians should examine helicopter parenting in the context of lesbian parents’ developmental history and potential tendency to project their own concerns about safety onto their child in order to reduce the distress of experienced homophobic stigmatization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Although the sample is small, it is balanced by gender and the findings are important. It makes sense to me that parents who have seen their children experience homophobic stigmatization are more likely to engage in helicopter parenting. It also makes sense that, when parents engage in helicopter parenting, their children more often use emotional avoidant coping. This suggests that clinicians need to ask more and better questions of young adults in order to assess prior stigmatization, parenting, and emotional avoidant coping.