Helicopter Parenting and the Elaboration Upon How I'm Sometimes Guilty

You know how Society frowns appropriately upon the controlling those of us who hover over our children a la the helicopter?  Despite the fact that I know all this and in fact, have studied formal, heady things with titles like "Child Psychology," I find myself hovering all the same.  It's not an instinct that I'm proud of, but I harbor it deep inside me nonetheless.  A controller by nature, I find it so difficult to impartially observe the difficulties presented as my Little Ones live out their lives, especially when those difficulties bring grief and sadness in their wake.  My eight-year-old will come home from school, wearing her sweet heart on her sleeve, telling me with great and pitiful enthusiasm about something unkind a friend said to her that day.  I know that with just one swipe of my magic mommy wand, or more succinctly, a quick chat to the like-minded mother of said child (very conveniently, a mature and wonderful friend of mine), I can assuage her growing hurt in one fell swoop.  A sort of magic "tears-be-gone" pill.  But is that what's best and most healthy for her?  Shamefully, I quickly realize that the answer is a resounding no.  At countless junctures in this journey of parenting,  I find myself battling myself inside my own head.  I have to very intentionally counter my own instincts in these matters and it shames me.  I always imagined that I'd be an Empowerer by nature, o-so-effortlessly a strong and beautiful Role-Model.  I imagined that the sometimes irrational tears of my children would evoke in me only a wise and perhaps condescending sort of loving pity, not this internal angst and struggle.  I want to sponge up all their pain and take it in for only me.  I want their childhood days to only ever be sunny.  I don't want the scraped knees and worse yet, the broken arms.  I hate, hate that their feelings sometimes get hurt.  And yet, in that small, deep part of me where wisdom resides, I know that it is precisely these things that will mould them into the beautiful people they're destined to be.