In 2001, a graphic designer in New Jersey refused to sign a non-compete agreement required by her employer.
The woman’s father, an attorney, had advised her not to and the
decision cost her the job. Years of litigation followed, with the state
Supreme Court ultimately ruling that the company had justly fired her.
The
incident is a worst-case scenario of what can happen when parents
meddle in their adult children’s careers, said John Sarno, president of
the nonprofit Employers Association of New Jersey.
Almost 20 years
later, parents are asserting themselves to an even greater degree by
sitting in on job interviews, filling in job applications, badgering
employers to give their children raises and promotions, and — in at
least one case — bringing a cake to a child's potential employer,
according to a survey by a subsidiary of Robert Half, a global human
resource consulting firm.
“Sadly, it’s not a new phenomenon,” said Dora Onyschak, the New Jersey metro market manager for Robert Half. “Bulldozer parents and helicopter parents are
kind of similar in that really they just want what’s best for their kid
so they want to try and help them to be as successful as possible. But
that can sometimes blind them to the fact that maybe they’re being too
involved or their involvement can be inappropriate or certainly
unprofessional when looking for a job.”
“Helicopter parenting”
became part of American lexicon in the early 2000s to describe the
practice of hovering over children and monitoring their every move. The
behavior has since evolved into that of bulldozer, snowplow or lawnmower
parenting — when parents remove obstacles in their children’s lives so
they never have to face adversity or failure.
Sarno prefers to
call them “advocate parents” and traces their rise to increased
diagnoses among children of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as
well as intensified competition to gain admittance to good colleges.
Both converge to create anxiety-riddled parents who feel obligated to
overly protect their children, he said.
“It’s really about a
parent who has had this identity, this role as the advocate through the
public school, often through college, and they can’t give up the role
when the young adult starts their career,” Sarno said. “I really think
it’s about parents that can’t let go.”
Part of that reluctance
stems from the 2008 financial crisis and changing social attitudes that
have delayed typical markers of adulthood such as marriage and home
ownership, said Jacob Goldsmith, director of the emerging adulthood
program at Northwestern University’s Family Institute. Studies show that
unlike more prosperous previous generations, half of children born
since 1980 will not out-earn their parents.
“It really scares
parents,” Goldsmith said. “I think there are a lot of parents looking
around and realizing that their kids are not going to make the same
money that they did, that their kids are not reaching the milestones
they did at the same time and they don’t know what to make of that and
they really want to be helpful, so they jump in.”
Fourteen percent
of U.S. adults surveyed this year by Morning Consult for The New York
Times said they had pulled strings in their professional networks to
secure a job for their 18- to 28-year-old child. About 11% of
respondents said they would contact their adult child’s employer if the
child had an issue at work. Another 16% said they had written all or
part of a job or internship application.
Both Goldsmith and Sarno
said parental interference in work matters is rare and not unique to
millennials, who have been unfairly maligned by some as lazy or
entitled.
Most of the parents Goldsmith works with as a therapist
exert more subtle control. They will not sit in on job interviews, but
they will edit job applications for their children or perform other
tasks on their behalf, he said. Instead of teaching, they take action.
“Part
of why we as therapists get worried about bulldozer parents is we worry
that these kids don’t learn the skills they need to do this stuff
themselves,” Goldsmith said. “I see a lot of emerging adults who
struggle to know how to have difficult emotional conversations with
their bosses. That’s hard, there’s no class for that, we often learn
that by talking to our parents. But if the parents step in and do it for
you, you never learn it.”
Children of bulldozer parents often
resemble children who have been neglected, he said. Both hit adulthood
without a toolkit for dealing with adversity and feel like they have not
accomplished anything on their own.
“What I see, and this is a direct result of helicopter parenting, is
kids who hit 25 and they’ve never hit a major roadblock in their life
and they are terrified of failure, paralyzed because they feel like life
is only successful if you make no mistakes,” Goldsmith said. “Kids that
were helicopter-parented in many ways look like the kids who never had
opportunities… because they’re never really doing it themselves.”
Most hiring managers are put off by candidates with meddling parents, said Onyschak.
“As
an employer, do I then become concerned about the candidate’s ability
to think independently, do I worry then that they perhaps are not good
decision makers?” she said. “It questions their level of independence
and maturity and you don’t want that to be the reason the person does or
does not get the job.”
Still, employers like Google, Amazon and
LinkedIn have embraced the close relationship between new hires and
their parents, launching “Take Your Parents to Work” days to give
parents a glimpse of their children’s work lives.
Onyschak said
she supports parents who provide more hands-off guidance: helping their
children practice job interviews, helping them weigh the pros and cons
of multiple job offers, looking over cover letters and resumes. But the
oversight should stop there, she said.
"We’re not hiring the
parent, we’re hiring the individual, so we want candidates who can think
for themselves, who are assertive, who can ask their own questions,"
Onyschak said.
For parents feeling the urge to become more heavily
involved, Goldsmith recommends taking a step back and asking if they
are facilitating — or enabling.
“When you’ve got a parent who’s
really tuned in and providing good support and facilitating growth, that
kid’s going to fly to the moon,” he said. "But when you have a parent
who responds to anxiety by stepping in and trying to run the kid’s life —
even if it’s not as egregious as showing up at a job interview – you
still end up with a kid who doesn’t really trust the tools they have to
be in the world.”
