Snowplow Parenting: What It Is, Impacts, & How to Avoid It

What Is Snowplow Parenting?

Snowplow parenting – sometimes referred to as bulldozer or lawnmower parenting – is a parenting style that is focused on helping their child avoid difficulties. Just like a snowplow that removes snow to create a clear path, a snowplow parent removes all obstacles their child may encounter so they have a clear path.

This is sometimes confused with helicopter parenting, but the difference is that helicopter parenting jumps in to rescue their child at the first sign of danger, whereas a snowplow parent anticipates and removes any barriers or discomforts before their child has a chance to encounter them.

While snowplow parenting isn’t considered child abuse, it is still considered pretty overprotective and controlling. It’s important to recognize and address snowplow parenting, because it deprives the child from crucial skills they will need in adulthood – such as developing healthy coping skills and resiliency, learning problem-solving, and being able to recognize normally stressful situations from potentially dangerous ones. Snowplow parenting can have long-term ramifications for the child, including low self-esteem and higher risk for psychiatric disorders.¹

Signs of Snowplow Parenting

The fundamental component to a snowplow parent is when the parent engages in a cognitive distortion that is called “fortune telling”; this is when you look into the future, expect things to go poorly, and then identify the specific ways that things are going to go poorly. Once a snowplow parent identifies the things that can go wrong for their child, they set out to actively circumvent those barriers.

Signs of a snowplow parent include the following:

• You mediate conflict before it begins by being in close and constant communication with important people in your child’s life – friends, teachers, coaches, etc.
• You repeatedly bring homework, permission slips, or projects to school if your child leaves them at home – or you pack their backpack for them before they leave.
• You don’t allow your child to engage/enroll in activities they might not be good at naturally.
• You rarely (if ever) tell your child “no” or deny a request.
• You’re quick to assume that your child can do no wrong, causing you to defend a child’s side of a story automatically.

Impacts on Children

A snowplow parent’s goal is to help their child – and to a certain extent they do – but this attempted helpfulness and protection is also harmful when it goes past a healthy level. Snowplow parenting prevents a child from problem-solving, building resiliency, and developing confidence in managing interpersonal conflict.

These can make it difficult for a child to navigate independently of a parent in the short term, but it can also have long-term effects such as higher stress levels then peers, increased risk for anxiety disorders, making poor coping choices, and even potentially developing narcissism.²

Snowplow parents can impact their children in the following ways:

Your Child Struggles with Being Told “No”

Since a snowplow parent removes any obstacles possible (including the parent withholding anything from the child themselves), hearing a “no” is an unsettling and confusing thing for the child to hear. This could result in the child struggling to regulate themselves, take the “no” as a personal attack, and even throwing tantrums.

Your Child Develops a Fear of Failure

Since children of snowplow parents are not getting the message from their parents that it is okay to try and then to fail, the concept of failure becomes much scarier than it already is. This fear of failure is so detrimental to a child because it stifles a child’s ability to be independent, to see themselves as capable of handling difficult situations, and ultimately cultivates a mindset that the world is inherently scary.

Your Child has Poor Problem-Solving Skills

Children make sense of their world and master different tasks by trying things over and over again. While doing this, they’re also learning their own process of how to go about trial and error. This is crucially important because kids that are not allowed to trial-and-error then become overwhelmed by any task, which can ultimately lead them to not even attempt the task.

Your Child Becomes Easily Frustrated

In addition to learning the how of trial-and-error, children also learn how to deal with frustration in their repetitive trek to master tasks. Low frustration tolerance in children means they usually give up on tasks quickly, which means that these children are often learning less overall. Low frustration tolerance has even been identified as a key factor in developing depression.³

Your Child is Generally More Anxious Than Other Children

Because snowplow parents are acting in ways that attempt to soothe their own fears instead of modeling how to manage anxious situations and feelings, the parents actually end up training their children to be anxious as well. Long-term impacts of anxiety can include difficulty within relationships and life functioning, and is regularly co-occurring with other psychiatric disorders and health complications, such as irritable bowel syndrome.⁴

Your Child Has Low Self-Confidence

Self-confidence is built by a parent highlighting a child’s strengths, helping them learn to work with their weaknesses, and modeling for your child how to handle desirable and undesirable outcomes effectively, among other things. Snowplow parents don’t allow their child to work through frustrations and build a solid foundation for believing in themselves, which makes it difficult for their children to develop self-confidence.

Your Child Develops a Sense of Learned Helplessness

Learned helplessness is when a child feels like they have no agency over outcomes, including their own independent ability to prevent negative outcomes. This sets a child up for feeling and acting helpless in the face of potentially dangerous situations, and also has been linked to depression.⁵

How to Avoid Becoming a Snowplow Parent

While this is an unhelpful parenting style born from a desire to be helpful, it isn’t impossible or too late to change how you interact with your child. The first step is realizing what you’re doing isn’t actually as helpful as you’d like it to be. You then have to give yourself grace, and resist the urge to beat yourself up over it. Once you’ve done that, there are some accessible and actionable steps you can take to be the supportive parent you’re wanting to be.

The following are tips for how to avoid being a snowplow parent:

1. Begin by Handling Your own Anxiety & Guilt Related to Parenting

Parental guilt or mom guilt can impact every parent, but they don’t have to rule your life. Start by looking at your thought patterns – are you holding yourself to unrealistic expectations, are you typically thinking in worst-case scenarios, or are you often beating yourself up/thinking you’re not good enough? How we think about ourselves impacts all our relationships, particularly with our children and parenting. Shifting this is the foundation for shifting your interactions with your child.

2. Let Your Child Take Small Risks Safely to Build Their Self-Esteem

Children learn by trying things and seeing what happens afterward. You, as the parent, get to structure those trials so your child is taking developmentally-appropriate risks. Progressively allow for your child’s exploration and testing of their world. Gradually give your child more and more independence within tasks, and focus on only giving them the minimum amount of help that they need to try a task. Do your own work to be okay with whatever the outcome turns out to be.

3. Change Your Language Toward Your Child to Build Their self-Esteem

The goal of this is to empower your child and to build their confidence. Building a child’s self esteem includes giving specific praise, giving encouragement to try again after a failure, and showing your child through your use of language that you trust them. Children take cues about their world and about themselves from the adults in their life – if you aren’t communicating that you trust your child to be independent, they will not trust themselves to be independent either.

4. Allow Your Child to Struggle – or Even Fail – & Be There for Support Afterward

Your job as a parent is not to protect your child from every disappointment of the world and life; it’s impossible and unsustainable to try. It is your job to be your child’s ”safe harbor” when they do go through those disappointments and heartache.

Allow your child to mess up, coach them through handling things differently on their own next time, and let them know you will unconditionally be there for them without jumping in to fix things immediately. This helps prepare your child for the reality of independence and adulthood, which they will inevitably have to learn at some point.

5. Set Appropriate Boundaries With Your Child & the Other People That Interact With Them

To let your child struggle and fail means that you have to allow enough space for them to be able to do this, which is where boundaries come in. Let your child know that you cannot always jump in to fix things for them. Let your child’s teachers know that you only need to get involved if there is a barrier to your child’s learning or having healthy social interactions with peers.

Don’t insert yourself into conversations between your child and their friends unless there seems to be physical or emotional harm happening. The key here is to walk the line of being involved enough to be “in the loop” when things go awry, but it’s okay if you don’t know every detail about everything happening within your child’s life.

6. Coach Your Child Through Independent Communication With Trusted Adults

If your child isn’t used to advocating for themselves, you will have to guide them through how to do this. Before getting involved with other adults, walk your child through how they might advocate for themselves. This could include talking through scenarios, doing role-plays, listening to your child’s concerns and fears and helping them to look at those differently.

Let them try advocating for themselves before you become involved. You might eventually need to step in anyway, but giving your child some practice with advocating for themselves on relatively harmless topics, such as expressing disappointment to a coach that they aren’t getting more playing time, or talking with a teacher about a lower-than-expected grade.

7. Try to Engage With Mindful Parenting

Mindful parenting is the way of being in the present moment with your child, regardless of what that moment holds. This helps you to slow down interactions, be more cognizant of your emotions, and to be more intentional with your reactions.

It’s helpful to identify when your own fears and anxieties are coming up, to model for your child what it looks like to regulate in real time, and to let your child know that you are the place for your child  to bring difficult situations and emotions to in order to get reflection and understanding, instead of getting a reactive behavior from you.

8. Learn How to Tell Your Child “No”

Learning how to say no to your child is tough, particularly if you aren’t used to doing it. However, this is crucially important for your child to learn from you, because you are a safe person who aims to love them unconditionally.

Your child is going to hear “no” in their life – it’s unavoidable. It’s best for your child to hear this from you first because you can help them handle their emotions that come up after hearing “no”, and you can show them that “no” does not reflect who they are as a person.

How Therapy Can Help

If you are feeling like this article applies to you, but you’re struggling to implement change on your own, it can be helpful to see a therapist that specializes in parent work and working with children, which therapists sometimes refer to as parent coaching. Therapists that offer parent coaching can help you overcome barriers to making changes, hold you accountable, and help you hold space for yourself when you slip back into old patterns.

If snowplow parenting sounds like the way you were parented growing up, therapy can be a helpful avenue for you as well. A therapist can help examine the patterns this has created in your life, how this has impacted your view of yourself and the world, and can ultimately help you to live in the ways that work best for you.  If you’re asking yourself “Do I Need Therapy?”, it may be helpful to explore an online therapist directory to connect with mental health professionals who can help you.

Final Thoughts

While snowplow parents only want the best for their children, it can actually end up doing more harm than good. It’s normal and healthy for children to encounter challenges, take responsibility for their actions, and to learn that they can be alright despite a failure. Encourage and guide your child through taking healthy risks, and seek your own support if you’re finding this difficult or distressing to do.