Helicopter parenting drives children to become depressed.

There is a fine line between involved parents and over-involved parents. When parents start making every decision for the child, it is no longer parenting. A helicopter parent decides the clothes, the subjects to study, the extracurriculars, and in most cases even the friends the child should have. The child is robbed of the habit of thinking. When such a child goes to college, the bill comes due.

Until high school, the overparented kid has done everything right — but has never done the most basic thing of existence: take responsibility for his own decisions. If the child got low grades in an exam, the helicopter parent dissected the whole exam for him.

Community service is one of the expected parts of a college application. The point of community service is to help the child mature, teach him empathy, and help him adjust to unfamiliar situations. But when a helicopter parent gets involved, the child still logs the hours — without any thought or interest. Since the parent is driving the service, the child stops thinking.

The overparented kid does not choose an extracurricular because he is interested in the activity. The parent decides the activity that will look good on a college application, and the overparented kid follows mutely.

Overparented kids are almost always high-performing students in high school. The helicopter parent watches the kid like a hawk, preventing any kind of failure.

Then comes the real world. The overparented kid goes to college — and the parent has to let him loose on a vast campus alone, incapable of making any decisions. Researchers have found that such students struggle with depression at higher rates: they feel inadequate in new situations — a roommate with a different sense of "clean," a professor who wants a paper revised but won't say exactly what's wrong, a friend who isn't so friendly anymore, a choice between a summer seminar and a service project when only one is possible. The inability to sit with discomfort, weigh options, talk it through, and make a decision becomes a problem of its own.

The helicopter parent negates the basic psychological needs of a human being: self-determination. The first and most important component of self-determination theory is the basic need for autonomy — feeling free to make one's own choices. The second is competence — feeling confident in one's abilities and accomplishments. The third is relatedness — feeling part of genuinely caring relationships. When these basic psychological needs are met, a person experiences greater life satisfaction and lower levels of depression. When parents are over-controlling, they reduce their child's sense of autonomy and competence, and undermine their own relationship with the child.

A child who has never been allowed to fail has also never been allowed to learn. That is what college teaches them — the hard way.