Coddled, spoiled, and sheltered for their entire young lives, too many children and young adults today are the psycho-social products of what some are now referring to as “hyper-parenting.” We already know what it means and how it manifests itself not only in parent-to-child relations but also in broader social contexts as well, such as in trophies-for-all sports leagues.

This article below is about two Norwegian documentarians’ attempts to learn about hyper-parenting and ways to “cure” it. Oddly enough, they’re turning to France, where apparently hyper-parenting isn’t the norm as it is in many other developed countries, like Norway.

Pamela Druckerman writes for the New York Times:

A Cure for Hyper-Parenting

I recently spent the afternoon with some Norwegians who are making a documentary about French child-rearing. Why would people in one of the world’s most successful countries care how anyone else raises kids?

In Norway “we have brats, child kings, and many of us suffer from hyper-parenting. We’re spoiling them,” explained the producer, a father of three. The French “demand more of their kids, and this could be an inspiration to us.”

I used to think that only Americans and Brits did helicopter parenting. In fact, it’s now a global trend. Middle-class Brazilians, Chileans, Germans, Poles, Israelis, Russians and others have adopted versions of it too. The guilt-ridden, sacrificial mother — fretting that she’s overdoing it, or not doing enough — has become a global icon. In “Parenting With Style,” a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti say intensive parenting springs from rising inequality, because parents know there’s a bigger payoff for people with lots of education and skills. (France is a rare rich country where helicoptering isn’t the norm.)

Hyper-parenting is also driven by science. The latest toddler brain studies reach parents in Bogotá and Berlin too. And people around the world are breeding later in life, when they’re richer and more grateful, so the whole parenting experience becomes hallowed. Scandinavians complain of “curling parents,” a reference to the sport in which you frantically scrub the ice to let a stone glide across it. (In Norway, “we do not, for example, count goals in soccer for children under 12, because they should all feel like winners,” the producer said.)