Ditch the helicopter — children need submarine parents

The birth rate is falling. Population collapse is imminent. The world is graying. We are living through a massive population bottleneck.

It’s so large and so gradual that it’s hard for us to see. We can’t even really feel it … yet.

The submarine parent doesn’t do anything for his kids that his kids can do for themselves. The submarine parent steps back and gives his kids room to breathe.

Large swaths of the population are being culled. Entire socio-cultural blocs are simply being eliminated from the game. The future will not look like the present. There is heavy selection going on. But it doesn’t feel like it because it is all based on choice. Everyone is free to have children or not.

Bare care

And who chooses to have children in an era of population collapse? Who are the ones deciding to inherit the future? While it’s a varied assortment of people from a variety of backgrounds, there is one pitfall that haunts us all.

It’s very simple. If you are consciously deciding to have children during an anti-natalist era, you most likely really want to have children. You probably didn’t end up with a couple of kids by accident. It was a very intentional choice.

For many, it means going against the grain. You care a lot. You probably “care” more than your parents did, most certainly more than your grandparents did before them. Your grandparents probably didn’t critically examine their parenting style daily. That verb, parenting, didn’t even exist in popular consciousness when they were raising kids.

If you are choosing to have kids today, you might be obsessed with your kids. And this obsession is exacerbated by the fact that there are fewer and fewer kids around. That you are in the minority accelerates all of this. It’s more fuel for your fire.

You are laser-focused on raising your kids right, so determined to give them the best opportunity possible. It almost becomes your identity. The temptation is to become so neurotically focused on your kids that you become a helicopter parent on steroids. We all feel it. We all love our kids so much that we can’t help ourselves.

This is the struggle.

Brat factory

By virtue of the fact that you have kids during an era of population collapse, you are predisposed to over-caring and over-parenting. As with so many things in life, a positive contains the seed of a nascent negative, even if it isn’t always obvious on the surface.

Everyone knows that only children have certain issues that children raised with siblings do not. While having lots of one-on-one time has certain benefits, there are also negative impacts.

Crudely put, if you are a kid and you are always the center of attention with the perception that the world revolves around you, you often turn into a brat. This tends to be how snots are made. It’s the truth. Every parent knows it.

How do we very involved parents having children during this strange era avoid this fate for our children? How do we avoid creating a brat factory?

We need to restrain ourselves. We need to step back. We need to realize that our natural inclination is to care too much. We need to realize that that strong desire to have a family becomes a curious weakness at a point.

That sounds provocative, but it’s true. We need to realize that we live in extreme times and that all of us who have kids have some kind of extreme feeling inside us that resulted in us having kids, and we need to temper that.

Submarine parenting

We need to, somehow, raise our two kids as if we have five kids. Or raise our four kids as if we have eight kids. We need to realize that we do not risk doing too little. We risk doing too much. We cannot be helicopter parents. We need to be submarine parents.

Helicopter parents are always hovering over the children making sure everything is right. They are always there making sure they have the best of the best. They want to make sure they have every opportunity. They are always at their children’s beck and call, obsessing over the latest and greatest fears Instagram serves up.

The helicopter parent takes on all the stress of her child in hopes of making her child’s life as easy as possible. Helicopter parents love their children. They just don’t realize how that love hurts their children and themselves. We are already stressed about everything; we are already embarking on the task of maintaining civilization amid population collapse. We can only take so much.

The submarine parent isn’t always visibly there waiting to correct anything that might be troubling the youngster. The submarine parent doesn’t do anything for his kids that his kids can do for themselves. The submarine parent steps back and gives his kids room to breathe.

Dive!

Submarine parents realize that there is effectively no chance that they run the risk of being absentee parents. They realize that they have spent hours researching the best techniques for sleeping, introducing foods, conscious choices about discipline and technology, and every other possible consideration known to mankind.

There is zero chance they aren’t involved. There is zero chance they are checked out. They are the most involved generation of conscious parents ever to have walked God’s green earth. In light of this, they must relax and embrace the submarine.

Submarine parents are always there, of course. But they aren’t hovering. They aren’t making everything easy. They aren’t the entertainment committee. They aren’t always correcting every inconvenience or every minor trouble.

We love our kids so much that we have to realize that our love can be a hindrance. It can manifest in ways that aren’t helpful.

Our natural drive and desire that led us to have children in the first place run the risk of driving us, and our kids, crazy. We have to to temper it and realize who we are. It’s okay. We have to relax a bit. If we don’t want to run a brat factory, we must reject the helicopter and embrace the submarine.