(PS12-27) Parental Hover: Unveiling Gender Differences in Helicopter Parenting and Its Impact on College Students’ Motivation

Helicopter parenting is an intrusive parenting approach that is overly concerned with their child’s wellbeing and has been associated with an array of negative affective, social and behavioral outcomes. Helicopter parenting involves the parent being over-involved in the child’s decision making, with attempts to shield them from any negative consequences and can lead the parent to “take-over” and “do” for their child.  Such behavior has been shown to negatively impact the child’s development of autonomy and impede transitions, such as entering college. College success comprises of multiple facets but a commonly used metric of success is GPA. GPA is negatively associated with having a helicopter parent. One factor strongly correlated with GPA is motivation. Motivation can be understood as an individual believing that they can accomplish a task, that they find the task valuable, and that anxiety during the task is low to moderate. Research has identified 6 distinct motivation facets: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Goal Orientation, Task Value, Control Beliefs about Learning, Self-Efficacy for Learning and Performance, and Test Anxiety (Pintrich, etal. 1991). Although some studies have found a negative association between helicopter parenting and global motivation in college students, neither the constituent factors of motivation nor the gender of the parent were explored. In US culture, mothers and fathers often assume different roles and have different levels of involvement in their child’s life, with mothers expected to be more involved. As such, it may be that the effects of having a helicopter mother are different from having a helicopter father. We explored this question in terms of students’ overall motivation and its constituent facets. Participants were 210 undergraduate participants (53.6% female, 74.3% White) at a midsize university. Participants identified which parent was their primary caretaker, and completed the Helicopter Parenting Inventory (HPI; Odenweller et al.,2014) and an adapted Motivation Strategies for Learning Questionnaire. Many more mothers (n = 183) compared to fathers (n = 27) were identified as the primary caretaker. Results indicated that overall motivation (r = .014, p</em> = .95) and none of the motivation scales were associated with helicopter parenting when fathers were the primary parent. When mothers were the primary parent, overall motivation was not related to helicopter parenting (r = -.10, p = .18), but one motivation facet showed an association with helicopter parenting: a negative relation between helicopter parenting and Control Beliefs about Learning emerged (r = -.189, p = .01). This suggests that the more the mother engaged in helicopter parenting the less the student believed that their learning efforts made a difference in their academic success. Although modest, this one association is consistent with prior research showing helicopter parenting is negatively related with children’s autonomy and self-efficacy. However, taken as a whole, our results suggest that helicopter parenting is largely unrelated to motivation or its constituent elements. Further research is required to identify and better understand the pathways through which helicopter parenting exerts its negative influence.