Exactly. The best you can do is provide your children what they need to allow them to become who they are, and maybe some guard rails to discourage them from the not so great parts of themselves until they can adequately self-reflect. Otherwise, the idea that parents can "mould" their children without also damaging them in some way seems unproven.

Case in point, I know someone who grew up with a helicopter parent who kept said person and their siblings effectively sheltered from adulthood well into their 20s. Despite all experiencing more or less the same childhood with a parent imposing the same values, each of the siblings ended up having very different personalities and attitudes towards life. They get along fairly well, but each is very different from one another, and none of them identify with the aformentioned parent. Although this person is more safety-paranoid than is average, which seems to be one of the few things to have been moulded by the parent. How positive!

There are many possible reasons for helicopter parenting, but I think one widespread cultural cause is the post Great Depression idea that failures in adulthood are borderline unrecoverable. When I was a young person not so long ago, a message we got from our authority figures was that, if we fail for whatever reason, it will have disastrous consequences; fail a classes or don't go to college and you'll be unsuccessful while your peers who did exactly what they were told will be showered with riches, safety, and happiness. This erroneous attitude is meant to keep young people in line and, though it doesn't always work, many young people internalize it, and their own parenting skills are influenced as a result.

Simultaneously, American society in the last century and half, and especially in the last two decades, has done far more to de-adultize young people than any society prior to it. So-called "adolescents" and even later teens, whom would have been considered adults until recent history, face a substantial amount of oppression from every level of society that more than ever are failing to launch at 18 or even after college. The more this happens, the less confidence that older adults have in the competence of young people, creating a cycle of more and more shielding.

Young people in America today are barely trusted with anything, which is ironic given that, in many parts of the world, they would be trusted with tasks like herding large animals and operating heavy machinery. Outside of a rural farm life, many young people are essentially treated as mentally challenged; they can't open a bank account without a parent having control over it, have their privacy routinely violated by their parents (not every parent does this, but it's extremely common), don't have control over their private property, can only work "safe" jobs for a limited number of hours, can't move away from their parents without begging a judge for emancipation, can't consent to their own medical treatment, can't vote, are subject to curfew laws, must go to public school, and so forth.

Garbage in, garbage out, anyone?

The view that children and even young people in their late teens need so much protection is a cycle that feeds itself, and there's scant evidence that such levels of protection are necessary. At worst, alienating young people from the adult world can be damaging and cause delays in becoming fully functional as an autonomous individual.