Posted on 10/25/2009 2:54:07 PM PDT by paltz
It’s that time of year. College seniors from around the world are graduating, and they are hitting the career world looking for a job. And the interesting thing is that most are not doing it alone. Many parents are by their Gen Y’s side and not just for support and to be a sounding board. If you are a helicopter parent who is hovering over your adult child’s job hunt and interview process, you may be hurting your child’s professional development and their chances to land the job.
Helicopter parents have not only been bombarding college campuses, they are now flying way too close to the workplace. Parents are now involved in the hiring and interview process and calling HR departments to negotiate terms for their children or to berate them for not giving their sons or daughters an offer. Parents believe they are doing their child a favor, but this behavior can actually stunt a child’s adult development and hamper their ability to think and survive on their own. The hovering is also hurting the young adult’s chances to land the job, as employers roll their eyes and pull their hair out over the barage of phone calls from parents making demands, negotiating salaries and grilling them about benefits.
Do you Obama Truth Squad people live in a world so isolated from events that you are ready to just dump an entire generation of tens of millions of young men until they come up with their own solutions?
I had a retail business in the 80's. I wouldn't hire someone who's parent came in asking. If the kid didn't have the drive or guts to ask for themself, too friggin' bad.
Unfortunately, it’s true. I’ve had parents call and ask to participate in job interviews. The first time I heard it I thought someone was playing a joke on me. This is a characteristic of both helicopter parents and the Gen Y student/applicant.
When you get up to 20 million unemployed young men, you are not talking about a handful of dregs who haven't already practice interviews, etc.
They have.
We are talking about our future generation of leaders and men of action who are being left hanging.
I love my parents, but they have no business sense and have given me some of the worst business advice I’ve ever received. But, to my knowledge, they have never called an employer or potential employer about my career.
This has to be a joke article.
***It’s a different generation going through the process now. My brother was the soccer coach at a state college and he got out partly because there were too many parents hovering over their kids’ soccer prospects & performance. That’s in COLLEGE.
:-) Were they all involved with the legal profession?
How about they join the military?
We didn't have that many under arms during WWII.
It's much more likely they'll form their own "military".
I'm just old enough to have benefited (initially) from the birth derth of the Great Depression.
My daughter is way smarter than me, so she doesn’t need my “help” at all. I am serious, she will do just fine without dads help and I am ok with that.
I’m failing to see how Mommy calling up and negotiating vacation time, arguing that Jr needs insurance immediately, not after 6 months or that OT isn’t fair because he has X to do 3 nights a week, is helping young adults. Part of growing up is learning how to deal with unfair employers, yucky jobs and sneaky contracts. I was stuck at a lousy job for 2 years, frantically looking the whole time for another, but I stayed, I did what I had to do, I took the boss’s needling and put up with it because I needed the job. Part of life.
My youngest son just got his first job. He’s busing table, cleaning up, washing dishes, deliveries. The pay sucks, they’re not very nice and the hours are way too long (IMO) for someone still in HS. I’m not going to call and demand better treatment or shorter hours. I would LOVE to make it easier for him. But I can’t because he won’t learn how to do it himself. He was really sick last week and wanted me to call him out, I gently made him do it himself. I’d also love to say something to the PITA who is making my older son miserable at his job. But I can’t. I won’t.
Time to pull your head up out of the sand and notice that we are nearing 20 million unemployed young men in this country.
There aren't enough tables to hop.
They’re talking about parents who call up and ask for favors for their kids or negotiate benefits. These are adults, 22+. How is that a good thing for an adult? Shouldn’t they learn that you don’t get favors right away before you’ve proven yourself at work? That Mom and Dad can’t make it all better for you every time? These aren’t kids.
I helped my sons in every way. Talked to them about what they should wear, how to do a really *good* handshake, looking in the eye, what to say, what *not* to say, what to ask or not ask. That’s where the parenting should end. Mom should not be asking why my son has to work every weekend. PuhLEASE!
I hired people for 10 of my 17 years at a hospital. I would never have hired someone who brought a parent or had their parents call to ask questions they should have been asking - or to negotiate their hours or days. And obviously other companies feel the same way. So they are NOT helping their kids get jobs by calling to ask why they have to work in a cubicle instead of getting an office, just because they have a degree. They’re actually killing their chances of kids obtaining employment.
I think if necessary I would go much further than in a normal period ~ in Pakistan sometimes they simply kidnap a member of a family that owns a business and hold them for job ransom ~ hire so many people and the kid goes free.
In Indonesia it is common for the local mullah to come to a wealthy person and dictate to them how many house servants they will support, and who.
Very much more third-world unemployment rates and that's how it will be done.
The police will beat you up for refusing to participate.
And actually, when I did hire, I preferred to hire 5o-somethings. Because every d*mn time I hired a 20 something, it wasn’t 2 months before they were complaining about having to work every weekend or at nights (made very clear to them several times during interview process that we were a 24/7 dept and that as new hire, they would be required to work these). Or they were calling out on Sat. am because they’d partied the night before. They came in late, wanted to leave early, didn’t want to work extra when we had an emergency.
In contrast the older women I hired were ready to work at the beginning of shift, pitched in whenever needed, worked nights, weekends, holidays without complaint. They were positively awesome. If I’d had a mom calling asking why Jane had to work Christmas Day, I’d have been screamingly annoyed.
Why are the HR people even talking to the parent in the first place?
Actually, there haven’t been ‘plenty of jobs’ in my area over the past 20 years. When I left the hospital for various reasons, after 20 years of continuous employment, 17 of those at the same place, it took me almost a year to land another job that wasn’t anywhere close to value or pay in what I’d been doing before. One of the other things I learned when I was in my 30s, you’re not as in demand as you thought you’d be!
Many did pretty good when it came to paying their bills first but some ran out of money fast. lol I rememer one had to sell his car because he couldn't pay his rent or daycare bill.
I wasn't aware that October/November were known to be heavy college graduation months.
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