"I do it because I love them"

Yes. I've left this one until last among the beliefs because it's the truest and the hardest to argue with, and I don't want to argue with it. I want to ask what love wants.

Love wants Ava to have her shoes on and be warm. It also wants Ava at eighteen to be a person who can do things, who sits down in front of a form and fills it in, who moves into a flat and knows how a washing machine works, who has had ten thousand small experiences of trying something, doing it badly, and doing it again. Both are love. The takeover serves the first and starves the second, and it's easy not to notice because the first is standing in the hall in front of you and the second is fourteen years away.

There's a body of research on what the second looks like when it goes wrong, under the name helicopter parenting, which is the researchers' phrase and not mine. Terri LeMoyne and Tom Buchanan surveyed three hundred and seventeen students at an American university about how involved their parents had been and were, and found that more involvement of that kind went with lower psychological wellbeing and higher use of medication for anxiety and depression. Julia Vigdal and Kolbjørn Brønnick reviewed thirty-eight studies of the same question in 2022 and found that most reported a link between this style of parenting and symptoms of anxiety and depression, and then said, carefully, that the studies had problems which undermined the finding. Most are surveys of students at one moment, most rely on the young person's memory of their parents, and none can show that the parenting caused the symptoms rather than the other way round or a third thing causing both. I'd take that caution seriously. What I'd take from the research is only this. Nobody has found that the young adults whose parents did everything are doing better.

I'd put the argument in plainer terms than the research can. A child who has never been allowed to do a thing badly arrives at eighteen with no evidence that they can do things. They may have been told they can. They haven't seen it. And the parent who loves them is the one who, out of love, removed the evidence one shoe at a time.

So the belief is right. You do it because you love them. The question this book asks is whether the love could take a different form on Tuesday, which is standing a bit further back. It's a less visible love and it's harder to do. It's also the kind they'll still have when you're not in the hall.