Any child who blames their parents for robbing them of the opportunity to “learn necessary adult skills” has created their own illusion and false sense of entitlement. If you’re too scared to move out, and tackle the world on your own at the age of 18 without the safety net of your parents support, you clearly aren’t ready to be treated as an adult. And, if they want to complain that their parents are being invasive of their life in trying to create the best opportunities for them, then I’d want to ask them what is it that actually fuels the guilt they will likely claim to will have as justification for why they simply don’t shut their parents out of their life and be their own adult? Otherwise, they’re just as scared about not being able to do it on their own as much as their parents are worried of seeing them endure the pain and struggle of overwhelming failure. This is not to say this justifies the parents’ actions, so please don’t get me wrong. But blaming parents for not giving them more freedom is like blaming the birth control pill failing to act as a contraceptive when the person taking it was inconsistent with their doses. Teens that want to learn more about necessary adult skills? Step 1: Take responsibility; Step 2 Accept responsibility and stop blaming your parents for your own shortcomings.

As for snowplow parents, ya'll need to get a grip. You survived worse and your kids are stronger than you if you raised them right. Stop holding their hand and giving them a fish every time they’re hungry. It would be more constructive to teach them how to fish then to lure them home to feed them every weekend because you want to see them. Help them grow up to be an adult rather than be the reason they can’t act like an adult when their parents hang on to a fantasized role of being everything their child needs when what they need is to be able to grow up and be their own person.

Try authoritarian parenting or Tiger parents as described by Ruth Chao and Amy Chua with a published paper in the scientific journal for Child Development (1994) and the published book (2011) Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother respectively. Then you’ll find studies that aren’t about opinion of parents and where they stick their nose or parents admitting to helping their kids in some way, you’ll find a form of parenting that is so detrimental that these children, as an expense, had lower levels of socio-emotional health in exchange for higher academic achievement. Work by Eva Pomerantz suggests that in some Asian American cultures, mothers think, “My child is my report card,” and that they see the academic success of their children as a chief parenting goal. So perhaps the opportunities snowplowing parents can brag about at the cocktail party is their way of finding solace in knowing they did better than their parents ever did for them. To that regard, it’s much less toxic than hearing your parents get in a bragging competition over whose son or daughter has succeeded the farthest among their peers and who sometimes will go so far as to instill this degrading attitude to their children who may be more resistant to such hostile and self-loathing behavior.