::Cough cough:: Women in the workplace ::cough cough::
I find that laughable, but I’ll note that it seems to have become more acceptable for college grads to live with their parents for a few extra years.
Ok, so, how does that support the view that CHILDhood extends up to age 25?
If you read that wiki link from the start where it discusses how adolescence is defined, it might make things clearer.
You do realise adolescence is considered part of childhood?
Otara
But the generation before that came from Russia and never saw their friends and neighbors again. And most of my aunts moved far from New York.
Well, I guess all the microprocessor designers I’ve worked with who did 12 - 14 hour days didn’t give a shit because they didn’t wear suits and shudder sometimes even wore shorts to work. We won’t even mention the CEOs who don’t wear suits and could buy you 20 times over.
Suits don’t make smarts.
I don’t think close familial ties or having an involved parent is the same thing as helicopter parenting. Helicopter parents are described as being far too overprotective of their little ones. i.e. Little Johnny can’t possibly walk or ride his bike to school because he might run afoul of a sexual predator so I better give him a ride. Even in adulthood, these parents continue to hover over their children by negotiating salaries with their child’s employer, submitting resumes on behalf of their children and even attending career fairs with their kids. That’s a bit much for a parent to do, I think.
Warning PDF from Michigan State University.
My parents were helicopter parents from the start. I was the first born, in 57, and my mother hovered over me. My father did too, to a lesser extent, until I became a teen, and then I was told that I wasn’t allowed to date until I was 18 or 25. Most of my friends were going out on group dates or even real dates by the time they were 14. I wasn’t allowed to just go out and wander the neighborhood as a child, as most of my friends were allowed to. I had to ask my mother for permission to go to a friend’s house, I had to get the friend’s mother to call my mother when I arrived, and the friend’s mother was supposed to call my mother when I left. Yes, even if I was only going to see someone who lived three houses away. I wasn’t allowed to go to any college except for the one in town, unless I wanted to pay for EVERYTHING myself.
This meant that I didn’t acquire social skills when my peers did. It also meant that I got married a few months before I was 20, just to get out of the house. I wasn’t quite estranged from my parents, but it took decades for me to want to involve them in my life very much. Yeah, I wanted them to know my daughter, and I wanted my daughter to know them, so I’d visit them on occasion, but I refused to live in the same area. I wish it could have been different, but if I’d been in the same town, my mother would have expected me to come over to her house every day, and to follow her advice/suggestions/orders on how I did everything. This was not a healthy relationship.
Slight tangent. I am curious about which gender is usually seen as hovering the most. In my neck of the woods, the term is usually “Helicopter mom”, no mention of the other parent. I have also heard “Hover mother” and the aforementioned “Jewish mother”. Are mothers more guilty of this behavior than fathers?
But they won’t be around forever, so would it kill you to call once in a while?
Personal observations, no hard data or citations:
In my experience, there’s a subset of young adult employees out in the working world these days (or, “Kids these days… let me tellya…”) who were probably victims of helicopter parenting and I can tell because:
•They have trouble making their own decisions. Their decisions have been made for them all their lives and suddenly, mommy isn’t around to tell them what to do. Which job should I take? Where should I live? Should I get cable or a satellite dish? What should I have for dinner tonight? Should I get a dog, a cat, a ferret, or no pets at all? This can lead to:
•Having trouble with problem-solving. When your mom stepped in and solved any crisis that came up in your life, you’ve never had a chance to figure out how problems get solved. This can lead to:
• The inability to come up with creative strategies and innovative ideas. If you can’t make decisions for yourself and you can’t solve problems by yourself, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to think outside the box and come up with a new strategy to combat an old problem.
• Also, poor negotiating skills. If mommy attends the job fair, and mommy calls HR to negotiate your salary, and mommy buys your new cars for you, and mommy negotiates with your landlord for you… how the hell are you going to learn to negotiate for yourself? How are you going to buy a car or a house when your mommy is gone? She won’t live forever, ya know.
•Possibly, poor money management skills. If your mom constantly covers your bank account and makes sure you have enough for whatever, how will you ever learn to live within your means? How can you even know what your means *are *when it doesn’t matter? If you run a little short, you call mommy, she transfers a deposit into your account and off to the club you go! But not before making a quick call to mommy to let her know you’re going out; that way, if you get too drunk to drive home, you can just call mommy and she will come pick you up!
There’s a whole lot of middle ground between hovering over your Precious Widdle Snowflake™ 24/7/365 (paying all their bills, solving all their problems, making all their decisions) until they’re 25 or 30 and completely ignoring your kids and throwing them to the wolves at 14 (not ever helping them at all, ever). My impression is that your job as a parent is to teach the little buggers how to become productive, responsible adults. If, however, you never hold your kid responsible or accountable for anything, and you make all their choices and decisions for them, then it really seems like you’re failing your kids. I listed some life skills above that I think are mission-critical in terms of people standing on their own two feet and living their own lives. It’s a difficult, competitive world out there. I think parents would be doing their kids a much better service by letting them fuck up and skin their knees a few times and teaching them how to solve their own problems and take responsibility for their own choices.
I also blame sentences that start with “I feel like…” on Generation Snowflake™. We’re so worried about people getting their precious widdle snowflake™ feeeeeelings hurt, that we won’t just come out and say, “Here is my opinion,” or “I think…” We have to couch everything in terms of feeelings, because you can’t take offense at how someone feeeeeeels. And disagreement = personal attack. Therefore, you must pretend that your opinion is an emotion so the precious snowflakes™ don’t feeeeeel attacked.
Standard disclaimer: YMMV, not everyone is like this, of course I’m not talking about you.
Except you’ve never actually observed these things. Frankly these stories about Mom sitting in on job interviews sound a lot like those tales of welfare cheats tootling around in their Benzes and using their Link cards to buy lobster thermidor. If any actual, living, breathing twentysomething does meet your description, they are profoundly anomalous.
Olds have forever been bemoaning the generation that succeeds them.
Although see here for another take on “Generation Snowflake™”
How could you possibly know what I’ve observed? :dubious:
Well, for instance, some of your observations include “When your mom stepped in and solved any crisis that came up in your life, you’ve never had a chance to figure out how problems get solved,” … sooooo, unless you’ve been following these kids around for their entire lives, my surmise is that your observations have been in the form of “Once upon a time, I saw this kid excessively depend on their parents for something. From this, I made a character assessment and presume that this kid has acted in conformity with that character in the past and will continue to do so in the future.”
This is precisely why I allowed my daughter to take JROTC in high school. I thought that it was not a good course and that she wouldn’t get much out of it. I told her this, and I told her that if she signed up for a semester, that I wasn’t going to get her pulled out of the class when she found out she hated it.
As it turned out, she loved it, and took it all four years. And I’m glad that I let her take the class. I COULD have chosen her high school classes for her, but I left the choices completely up to her, though I did make sure that she was getting enough of the right credits in order to graduate on time.
Lisa lived with her daddy and me throughout college, and even after college, until she got a job that was in another state. We required her to buy her own auto insurance when she was 18 and working part time, though we would help her with research if she asked for it. She researched apartment living when she was 18, and again when she graduated college, and then she shuddered and started buying some of the groceries instead of moving out. 
We left the choice of moving out or staying at home completely up to her, we told her that she was welcome to live at home as long as she wanted to, as long as she was willing to do part of the housework and pitch in with some of the groceries. She was able to do the math.
Kids do have to learn how to make choices, and they do need to have the freedom to make some bad choices that won’t have permanent negative effects.
This. I learned a while ago that as a parent I am raising confident adults, not kids.
Helicopter parenting has been around since Da Vinci’s time. Though, to be accurate, back then it was called Aerial Screw parenting.
I don’t agree with “kids these days” sentiments at all. Today’s teens and young adults are more likely than ever to go to university, travel abroad, work professional-track jobs and take other steps towards independence. It’s a more competitive world than ever, and kids are developing focus and motivation at an age when, in the 1970s, they’d probably smoking pot behind the cafeteria and working at McDonalds to save up for a muscle car.
The “turn 18 and start settling down independently” was a short-lived moment of time in a specific culture (white America) and is pretty anomalous worldwide. In modern China, for example, it’s still pretty much the norm to live at home until you are married, and then get a house and have your in-laws/parents move in with you and live there forever. Indeed, that’s pretty much the global norm, now and through history.
But in the US we had a few moments where we had so much darn money that young people could afford to do stuff like buy property in their early 20s, and stable enough that people could start families and make major investments at a young age.
Those days are gone. We don’t have the jobs that make it possible for young people to afford property. We don’t have the stability that allows people to have kids extremely young. In order to succeed, young people need to use their relatively unencumbered status to establish themselves in the workforce by doing stuff like working unpaid internships, relocating, and working unstable jobs with unreliable hours. This makes our labor market more globally competitive by being more flexible, but it has effects on society on the whole.
In any case, a lot of what we are seeing with “boomerang kids” is a large scale settling back towards the norm brought on by economic change.
There is also ample evidence that first-generation college students are at a a disadvantage precisely because they don’t have guidance from someone who has been through college. If I have a child, I can tell them a lot about how to make sure they fulfill their requirements, get enrolled in the classes they need to graduate, use the various support services on campus, etc. First-generation students (like myself) often experience culture shock as they need to do a whole lot of things (choose classes, deal with dorm life, etc.) that they’ve never seen anyone close to themselves doing.
Please. This is 2012 and we aren’t Neanderthals. They’re welcome to come too!
Ah, the guilt is strong in you, young Jedi.
The way the kids were conceived has nothing to do with it!