As I write this I’m sitting on the floor of the living room in my pajamas struggling to find that internal parental peace that will prevent me from jumping in and rescuing my daughter from her struggles. She’s a few muscle-fibers short of being able to prop herself into a crawling position and in an effort to do so she is performing failed, faux push-ups and bemoaning the fact with an ongoing vocal tirade that is enough to drive me some sort of intervention. But in the name of all things ‘independence’ I resist, and so I’m distracting myself with a blog post.

I wonder if so called helicopter parents, those folks who drop into life’s sticky situations and rescue their kids from uncomfortable encounters well into their university years started their parenting practices with just such a dilemma. Junior is laying face down on the floor, fighting with his own body to coordinate a three act play of hands, arms, and torso that will push him into an elevated hunch. But as the very young tend to do, he groans, moans, whines, whimpers, and shouts out in all chords of the tune baby-angst. Those helicopter parents, as they have been called, swoop in and yank Junior from his efforts, conceding the value of that little lift of independence in favour of a happy child.

And, objectively, we sit back and ‘tsk-tsk’ them for their methods.

Yet here I am. Sunday morning and a girl is wide-eyed and glowering at me with that ‘for the love of all things pasta, rescue me dad!’ look. And I’m faced with the heart-wrenching choice: do I pull the rip-cord and parachute her to safety, or do I sit back, open the laptop and let her squirm in the face of this minor adversity? It takes all my strength and then I explain aloud that it’s for her own good: “I’ll be saving you for the rest of your life if I don’t break the habit now, hon.” And she moans a little more and flails her whole body against the cushioning of her blanket spread out below her.

Independence is a tricky game, I think. It means letting go a bit at a time and that pulls more heart strings than I would ever have imagined possible.