snowplough parent

plural snowplough parents

1. British standard spelling of snowplow parent.

   Making life safer and nicer for our children is a reasonable aspiration. Stripping it of any jeopardy is not. For one thing, the snowplough parent is almost always over-involved.

   2014 August 27, Anne McElvoy, “Watch out, snowploughers are at the school gates”, in Evening Standard, London, →ISSN, archived from the original on 31 Aug 2014, page 15, column 3

   3 more examples

   It’s easy to be confused by the traits of the Snowplough Parent. It doesn’t mean someone who is funded by the council, difficult to manoeuver and only comes out in inclement weather. It actually refers to manipulative elders who remove any obstacle from their offspring’s path, thereby ensuring they always get where they want to go.

   2018, Shari Low, “The Parent Label”, in Because Mummy Said So, London: Anima, Head of Zeus, →ISBN

   Over the years she had passed on to me a barrage of ‘how-to’ books and advice columns listing ways to be a better parent/book-week-costume-maker/cake-baker/gardener/hubby-pleasing fellatrix, while also being thinner, prettier and less cellulite-riddled. I’d endured conversation after conversation about whether she would be a helicopter mum or a tiger mum or a snowplough parent, a domestic goddess or a sex goddess, or possibly all at once.

   2020, Kathy Lette, chapter 4, in HRT: Husband Replacement Therapy, London: Head of Zeus, published 2024, →ISBN

   At the car, Josephine shows me how her booster seat fits in the front. ‘I do my own seatbelt now,’ she says and tries three times. / ‘You can do it next time.’ I know I’m being what the books call a snowplough parent.

   2021, Katie Allen, “Bat-shaped”, in Everything Happens for a Reason, London: Orenda Books, →ISBN