Rejoinder: Discussing culture and childhood

This comment agrees with Prof. Zuckerman that careful inquiry about the effects of culture, in terms of actual parental behaviors and some disparate subcultures, is warranted. It argues, however, that parental anxieties, based on a sense of children's vulnerability, affects even many remiss parents and explains widespread behaviors and areas of excessive supervision; the anxieties also may help account for an indifference to concerns about children in general as opposed to one's own offspring. The helicopter parent is a real and somewhat troubling phenomenon in the United States.