I don't necessarily see helicopter-parenting and absentee-parenting as mutually exclusive. The typical helicopter parent is always nagging, harassing, and invad

I don't necessarily see helicopter-parenting and absentee-parenting as mutually exclusive. The typical helicopter parent is always nagging, harassing, and invading the privacy of his/her children -- which is a sort of omnipresence, sure, but it's not a constructive emotional presence. You might as well not even be there in that moment; you'd accomplish the same thing sending a preprogrammed nag-bot into your kids' rooms to chide them and/or dote on them constantly. In fact, it's possible your kids are actually tuning your presence out when you're in their faces all the time. The magic combination seems to be: 1) let your kids discover the world (and make mistakes) on their own, just enough to let them learn and grow up; 2) be there for them when they need you. At one point in our history, this combination seemed intuitive. These days, after several generations of successive, fear-based sales of self-help books, advice, and programming, our culture has short-circuited parental instincts.