The Beta-Mom—New trend, or just a return to reasonable parenting expectations?

Published on Psychology Today

Last month, the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled, “The Era of the Tiger mom is over. Enter the beta mom.” The article is referring to a recent TikTok trend featuring “beta moms” who reject intensive, highly managed parenting in favor of a more relaxed approach. The “beta moms” are pushing back against a trend that started in the early 1990s favoriting hyper-involved parenting, especially for mothers, stemming from a growing knowledge-based economy that made a lot of parents fear that their children would fall behind their peers if they didn’t have a competitive edge. What we ended up with was a lot of helicopter parents, who are overly involved in their children’s lives, especially in academic or achievement-related activities (Odenweller et al., 2014).

A helicopter parent removes obstacles that their children face in order to encourage them to succeed. These parents are generally well-educated, well-resourced, and very well-intentioned—mostly just trying to protect their kids from trouble and provide them with opportunities. But despite the good intentions of most over-involved parents, children of helicopter parents don’t necessarily perform well in school. In fact, helicopter parenting is associated with lower academic performance in children, more extrinsic or reward-based motivation, and avoidance goals for learning (Schiffrin & Liss, 2017). Further, according to a recent meta-analysis of over 200 studies, helicopter parenting is associated with increased anxiety symptoms in children (Ryan et al., 2026).

And we haven’t even talked about the toll on parents yet. The “beta mom” trend seems to be a direct result of mothers being overwhelmed by the invisible labor involved in being a parent, and are rejecting the over-planning, over-scheduling, and over-management of their children. These parents are opting for less structured schedules, more independence for their children, and the idea that accepting the mess and imperfection of a less hands-on approach is “good enough” parenting.

This seems like a completely logical approach that these new “beta moms” are taking. But is it really all that new? Back in the 1960’s, Diana Baumrind from the University of California at Berkeley famously identified several distinct parenting styles. The “authoritarian” parents she observed 60 years ago were a lot like the helicopter parents of today: they had very high standards for their children’s behavior and exerted a large amount of control, allowing children very little autonomy. In contrast, the “authoritative” parents were supportive, had reasonable expectations about their children’s behavior, but were less hands on than the authoritarian parents. And perhaps most importantly, authoritative parents were flexible—they got more relaxed about rules as their children matured, which resulted in children who could also flexibly deal with the challenges they faced (Baumrind, 1966). In fact, Baumrind found that children of authoritative parents were the most well-adjusted, and the most likely to be independent and well-socialized.

This work happened around the same time that British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined the term “good enough mother” when he noticed that children benefit from watching parents make mistakes. He argued that kids develop better coping skills when their parents are reliable and responsive to their needs, but not necessarily perfect. By denying children a model for making mistakes, parents are denying them the ability to develop the flexibility to learn from those mistakes, and how to bounce back from them (LeMoyne & Buchanan, 2011). In fact, cognitive flexibility is one of the best predictors of academic achievement (e.g., Blair & Raver, 2014).

So although the idea of the “beta-mom” might not necessarily be all that new, it is definitely a step in the right direction—a step towards returning to reasonable parenting expectations. Although as a parent, I know very well that we all want to put our kids first, but that doesn’t mean completely abandoning your own needs, and it certainly doesn’t mean doing everything for your children. Making mistakes in front of them isn’t a bad thing, because it normalizes mistake-making, and models coping skills about how to recover from those mistakes. In the end, there is no perfect parenting, and sometimes being “good enough” is actually what’s best for our kids.

Photo by Michael Sauers/Flickr

References

Baumrind. D. (1966). Effects of Authoritative Parental Control on Child Behavior. Child Development, 37(4), 887–907 .

Blair, C., & Raver, C. C. (2014). Closing the achievement gap through modification of neurocognitive and neuroendocrine function: Results from a cluster randomized controlled trial of an innovative approach to the education of children in kindergarten. PloS one, 9(11).

LeMoyne, T., & Buchanan, T. (2011). Does “hovering” matter? Helicopter parenting and its effect on well-being. Sociological Spectrum, 31(4), 399-418.

Odenweller, K. G., Booth-Butterfield, M., & Weber, K. (2014). Investigating helicopter parenting, family environments, and relational outcomes for millennials. Communication Studies, 65(4), 407-425.

Ryan, K. M., Zimmer-Gembeck, M. J., Hawes, T., Kovacs, T., & Leahy, N. (2026). Intrusive Parenting and Adolescent Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms: Three-level Meta-analytic Reviews Considering Parenting Concepts and Methodology. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 1-23.

Schiffrin, H. H., & Liss, M. (2017). The effects of helicopter parenting on academic motivation. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 26(5), 1472-1480.