This is an excerpt from a post published on The Star website on March 18, 2020.

The antidote to helicoptering our teens? Parenting from the periphery

Our teens can get themselves places and wipe their own noses — and we can more easily string together five or six hours of sleep. But the work that remains feels much higher stakes.

We’re faced with a short time horizon before they reach at least theoretical adulthood and, in many cases, departure from the nest for post-secondary education. When their habits are less than stellar, it’s easy to despair that we’ve gone wrong with their character development and work ethic.

But today, some moms and dads are beginning to move away from the notoriously helicopter parenting ways of their immediate predecessors with an aim toward launching Gen Z youth into the world with a little more experience doing things for themselves. That means backing up enough so that, in some cases, they’ll fall on their faces, reflect on missteps and internalize the lessons we’ve been trying to badger into them.

Educator Lindsay Sealey, author of the new book “Rooted, Resilient, and Ready,” calls this “parenting from the periphery”: an approach that allows teens a little more space to get to know their own competencies while parents are still around for support.