I Just Learned About 'Potted Plant' Parenting – And Let Me Just Say, No Thanks

"Refusing to disappear into the background has set me up for a full life, and I’m ready to step into it."

One morning last week, while sipping coffee in bed and scrolling on my phone, my social media feed presented an article about parenting teenagers using the “potted plant” method.

“Get this,” I said to my husband Chris, next to me in the bed. “This article says that teenagers don’t want to engage with their parents, but they still want them nearby, hovering quietly in the background – like a ‘potted plant,’” I said using air quotes.

Chris looked up from his phone. “So first it was helicopter parents, then snow plow parents, and now potted plant parents?”

He rolled his eyes and went back to Wordle. However, I was interested enough to read on.

The concept was introduced by clinical psychologist Lisa Damour in a New York Times article in 2016.

“While normally developing teenagers seek new levels of emotional and physical distance from their parents perhaps they, like toddlers, feel most at ease when their folks balance active engagement with detached availability,” she writes.

The research cited in the piece is convincing: physical proximity alone, whether or not you’re actually connecting, does appear........

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