Parenting

Helicopter Parenting And Watering Plants

By  | 

There’s more than one way to kill a plant. We all know that not paying enough attention does the trick. Sooner or later it withers and dies. It sends out plenty of cries for help along the way, communicating its need for proper care and attention in the only language it has at its disposal. First it starts to droop, then some of its leaves start to fall off, then it turns brown and brittle, finally it gives up and dies. But maybe you’re too busy or maybe your’re not observant enough or maybe you just don’t care or maybe you never really wanted the plant in the first place. Whatever the reason is the result is the same. The plant dies and never gets the chance to grow into what it could have been.

But too much attention in the form of over watering does the trick too, actually a lot faster than leaving the plant to its own devices. What’s so nefarious about over watering is that the plant actually appears to be thriving, it doesn’t know how to manifest ‘too much!’ on the outside, maybe it believes you’re doing it a favor or at least thinks it’s supposed to believe that, and it just keeps presenting the facade of healthy foliage, a too deep green foliage if you know how to look for it. But down at the roots, down where the real Self of the plant resides, what’s occurring is not nearly so pretty. It’s all rot and mold, the plant is drowning in all that attention. And it ends up paying the same price as the plant that never gets watered.

Under watering and over watering amount to the same thing from an existential perspective, which is not really knowing what the plant needs to grow and thrive. Love and respect don’t just mean showering attention, they mean really seeing and understanding the living entity in front of you. You can’t love what you don’t know. Taking proper care of a plant means trusting that the plant intrinsically knows how to grow and thrive and under the correct conditions, including the proper amount of time and space, it will grow and thrive. Because whether it’s a desert plant or a tropical plant or anything in between, too much water will kill it just as surely as no water at all.

Related posts:

  1. Watering Plants And Self-Actualization The leaves on the plant are all that are visible to you. If you weren’t familiar with how to take care of plants and were asked to water one you’d be forgiven for only paying attention to the leaves while completely neglecting the roots. In fact this is exactly what many people do the first […]...
  2. Talking To Kids About Evil Most of us want to protect kids but this very desire traps us in a seemingly insoluble dilemma. Do we shatter innocence and alter the way they see the world by talking to them about evil, hopefully giving them concrete tools to better protect themselves? Or do we let them continue on with their pleasant […]...
  3. Kids Don’t Differentiate Between Positive Attention And Negative Attention If you have one problem child while the rest of your kids are pretty well behaved it’s time to take a step back and look at your own behavior for a moment rather than focusing on the behavior of your kids. You don’t want to admit to yourself and you definitely don’t want to admit […]...
  4. Power Struggle In a very real sense parenting young children is about power. Someone needs to be in charge and by dint of your life experience and the fact that you’re an adult, with the rights and privileges that go along with your station, that someone has got to be you. So the question that remains is […]...
  5. Discipline and Child Rearing In the wake of the child abuse accusations leveled against Adrian Peterson, the comment sections on articles describing his actions have become battlegrounds where people alternately defend and attack various styles of child rearing and the role of discipline. The problem is that most have no idea what they are talking about. Their ‘expertise’ is […]...
  6. Silent Rebellion Any time you are confronted with a behavior that on the surface seems destructive or against a person’s best interests, you’ve got to consider whether an unhealthy power imbalance might be in play. Power relationships define Western culture. Parents and children, teachers and students, bosses and employees, very often husbands and wives or vice versa. […]...
  7. Subjective Reality I observed some interactions amongst a grandmother and her two grandsons aged around seven and nine at a coffee shop. She is doing great as a caregiver and we will talk about the psychological concepts that back up this claim. Then we’ll look at how to improve upon it in order to help your kids […]...
  8. Empty Nest The empty nest syndrome is really a problem of meaning. People tell themselves that they’re feeling weird because they’re missing their children, and of course they are missing their children, but the hard to pin down psychological and emotional distress they’re experiencing stems from a different source. This source is the existential anxiety produced from […]...
  9. Environmental Needs We have said that humans can live under the most varied environmental conditions but this doesn’t mean that they should. From the existential point of view, everyone has their own unique potentialities, their own Self that they are capable of becoming, and from this point of view the goal should be to make environmental conditions as […]...
  10. Affection Through Touch If you’ve been in a relationship a long time it’s likely that you don’t touch your partner as much as you used to. At the start people basically drape themselves over one another, there’s no such thing as too close, but then things cool off and before they know it physical contact becomes an afterthought. […]...
  11. Flower How is it possible that many of us become more concerned with offending the checkout guy, the bank teller, or some acquaintance than we are about offending our partners? We grow complacent and start taking the people we care most about for granted, as no longer in need of much cultivation or care. Many erroneously […]...
  12. Adaptive Parenting Parents who have an inkling that they’re creating unhealthy environmental conditions for their developing children are likely to seek out confirmation that they’re doing things correctly in order to silence that uncomfortable inner voice. In a lot of cases it can be boiled down to simply taking a hard line parenting stance and therefore missing […]...
  13. Parenting And Dealing With Disobedience Many parents of young children here in the West instinctively view obedience as a virtue and disobedience as a vice. This is because at the unconscious level the parental relationship reinforcers the pleasant feeling of being godlike, of being the ultimate source of authority and power. Disobedience from the child can therefore create an irrational, […]...
  14. Parenting and Power The feeling of power can be intoxicating. Everyone has heard the expression ‘Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely’. The relationship between parent and child automatically creates a complicated power situation since your children cannot and should not be in charge. Many parents wonder how to deal with this intrinsic power in a psychologically healthy way. […]...
  15. Parenting And Control A powerful psychological motivation to produce and raise offspring, even though it’s not always consciously recognized, is the immortality project. Childrearing provides the unique opportunity not only to insure the continued survival of one’s own DNA but also to implant certain norms, values, and taboos for living, to pass on certain ways of being. It […]...
  16. Narcissistic Parenting Imagine a mother in her early thirties and her ten year old son at a small noodle shop getting lunch together as part of a Saturday afternoon outing. The restaurant is intimate and seating is somewhat cramped. He asks her what the scenario will be like at their next stop and she has no idea […]...
  17. Parenting Your Kids Using Behavioral Psychology If you feel raw about receiving parenting advice you can at least in part thank the societal expectation, an expectation you’ve probably bought into, that you’re supposed to naturally and effortlessly know how to raise your kids, that it’s in your DNA, that somehow by wearing the mantle of primary caregiver you’re suddenly endowed with […]...
  18. Authoritarian And Permissive Parenting Styles An adult with an authoritarian parenting style observes some kids running wild throughout the day while the primary caregiver looks on without doing much to stop them. There’s no apparent structure, no rules, no discipline, and the authoritarian parent thinks, with a mix of condescension and disgust, ‘What a bad parent’. An adult with a […]...
  19. Authoritative Parenting Fits Our Existential Condition There has been a great deal of psychological research on parenting styles and most of it has come to the same general conclusion, which is that both the permissive and authoritarian styles lead to bad outcomes while the authoritative style leads to good outcomes. Think of permissive parenting as being Laissez–faire, letting your kids do […]...
  20. Existential and Behavioral Psychology Combined For Parenting We recently did an article on drug addiction that shows how existential and behavioral thought can complement each other quite well and want to continue down that rabbit hole by showing how it’s the underlying relationship between trainer and trainee that determines whether a reinforcement is interpreted as positive or negative. People believe that they […]...
Related Items