overprotective
/əʊvəprəˈtɛktɪv
/adjective
Having a tendency to protect someone, especially a child, excessively: it may be that parents are just being overprotective...
- The first of these heresies was the tendency to be overprotective of people, at the expense of individual liberty.
- Lee has reasons to be a little neurotic, among them an alcoholic father, an overprotective mother and a shallow newlywed sister.
- She was a smart girl who grew up with an overprotective father and was quickly isolated from her peers.
Derivatives
overprotect
/ verb ...- Pink's mother proceeds to overprotect and stifle him as a means of preserving what is left from his father.
- To overprotect children is almost as bad as not protecting them enough.
- What do you think - are we overprotecting our children?
overprotection
- Large corporations, mostly family-owned conglomerates, are forced to remain inactive because of the government's overprotection of labor interests to the detriment of the economy.
- Such restlessness has not just been a by-product of institutional overprotection.
- ‘We see this overprotection now - kids are feeling stifled,’ she says.
overprotectiveness
/ noun ...- The impact of stress can result in family dysfunction manifested by excessive worry, denial, and noncompliance, anxiety about parenting and discipline, and overprotectiveness.
- There was a history of destructive conflict between the school staff and Elaine, whom teachers saw as an uncooperative and hostile parent whose overprotectiveness was handicapping Mary educationally.
- I think the conditions of the working class just make it harder for the parents to enforce the kind of overprotectiveness we think of as adding to ‘childhood innocence.’