Very interesting article. I'm an example by-product of the opposite extreme. My parents kept me from my neighbors, other kids in school and other people in chu

Very interesting article. I'm an example by-product of the opposite extreme. My parents kept me from my neighbors, other kids in school and other people in church (I can count on one hand the number of guests that came over to hang out with me throughout my childhood). I also had no access to TV, the internet, the library, etc. I was isolated to such an extreme that the only thing I think I really developed was an active imagination. I guess my parents were a little more extreme than typical "helicopter" parents, but also unable to afford any structured activities for me, so I was closely watched and kept indoors all the time. By my teenage years, the home-schooling program my parents were putting me through was so isolating and so obviously worthless on its own that I started to spiral into depression and contemplated suicide. By that point, I was convinced that I was wasting away mentally and physically such that when I would attempt to enter the adult world, that I would fall on my face and simply never be able to "catch up" with my peers who had two decades of normal development. Things did get orders of magnitude better when I was in college the next year and working multiple jobs. I managed to move out somewhere after I turned 18 with nice roommates and cheap rent. I think I managed to close most of the mental/social/physical gap that I had perceived in my teenage years, but I would be lying if I said that I was a completely normal 25-year old. I have the strangest deficiencies that crop up now and again in my life, and I have a strong suspicion that kids who come from "helicopter" households will share these problems (such as difficulty reading people's emotions, difficulty in executive function, strange worries, low self-esteem). So when I consider the possibility of having kids, I really like the idea of letting them socialize with other people, explore, and solve problems on their own without my constant interference. That's much better than my experience of growing up, with only fantasies of being outside and doing stuff. But if that's culturally unacceptable, then there will be a generation or two of people like me, who struggle daily with the little things I never had a chance to deal with growing up.