Now I’m going to have to talk to my recuiter buddy in HR to find out the local scoop. I’ll try to get back while the thread is still active.
Another big complaint is that kids coming out of school can barely craft a business email. OTOH, I couldn’t craft a business email when I came out of school either for the simple reason I never worked at a company that had email until 1997.
My generation (X) was known for being “latchkey kids”. Our parents were always working and too busy to hover around us so we came home from school and were pretty much left to our own devices. Probably why we are such cynical slackers.
Is it more the case that there are more parents doing the networking for their young adult children than in the past? Because it makes sense for a parent to come to their kid’s interview if they show up to shake hands and chat with their well-placed buddy, who just happens to be the interviewer. So it’s kind of a case where an “off the record” meet-&-greet kind of becomes a “wink wink nudge nudge” interview with your dad’s golf buddy.
I can also see parents attending job fairs with their kids if the Millenials are as open to receiving parental advice as the Forbes article maintains. Granted, that’s a sea change from my generation, but apparently the “rules” are different now.
My son’s first job…he was 14 I think…and I talked with the manager simply because my kid was underage and the guy wanted to make sure I knew that this was not going to interfere with school. It was a 5 minute courtesy call that I was appreciative of.
Helicopter parenting is a definite problem, but I don’t know of any real life instances where it carried over into the over-18 set.
Except there really ARE thousands of cases of Porcine flu.
True. But we are not at pandemic levels, much to the media’s dismay. Basically, I’m reading very few articles that “how bad it is” and instead focus on “how bad it could get” (which is usually somewhere in the realm of a bad sci-fi movie).
It’s the same way with these helicopter parent stories. It’s alway “it’s so bad, some parents even did this” instead of “this is what parents are doing”.
The focus is always on the outlier case and then saying that’s how it is everywhere.
Replace “need” with “want” or “think they need” and you’re on to something here.
Not much to add…just a few anecdotes to share from my own college campus:
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A student’s angry father called to complain about his son getting a low grade on a paper and insisted it was a great paper and should have been at least a “B.” When asked why, he replied, “Because I’m the one who wrote it!”
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An angry mother sent a two-page email to one of my colleagues, haranguing her about how her darling daughter was stressed out and crying because of the workload and how she couldn’t find what she needed on a computer search, and how the family “can’t afford a computer with a massive search engine.” [Obviously, this person knows naught about computers and how they operate.]
If the student had actually followed the prof’s directions and/or asked for help, she could have found what she needed in just under ten seconds.
Fortunately, we are protected by a privacy/confidentiality law that lets us get away with not replying to wacko parents. -
A friend of mine was unhappy about her daughter’s college’s parking enforcement (with good reason, actually) and said she was about to call the school. I told her, “Let [daughter] handle it on her own. She’s 18 now.”
In my particular institution, if a parent calls or drops by and wants any information about their (adult) child, the answer is always the same: “I"m sorry, we cannot discuss any individual student, as that would contravene the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act. I cannot even confirm that your son/daughter is a student.”
I have dealt this way with exactly 2 parents in 10 years. Both understood.
If a parent wanted to come to a student’s job interview, I would explain to them that this would render their son/daughter unemployable.
Four percent of 725 is 29 companies in this one survey alone that have reported seeing parents tag along on job interviews. While that’s not a big number, it’s not just one isolated incident either.
And yes, there is definitely a qualitative difference in attitudes toward this sort of thing from my college days 25 years ago. Back then, having your parents involved with your college life in any significant way (except for paying for it, of course :dubious: ) would have been seen as embarrassing and mortifying. On the whole, we had a real chip on our shoulders about being “independent adults”, and needing your parents to intercede for you would have been a confession of failure in that regard.
I don’t think the new style is all bad: I like that young people seem to be viewing their parents more as trusted advisers and helpers than as clueless, domineering nuisances. It’s nice that they have the humility to recognize that they aren’t totally self-supporting yet, and it’s nice that they feel close enough to their parents to stay in touch with them all the time. But I do think that this warmer relationship has come at the price of increased dependency and slower maturation.
If you have two working parents, or worse yet are a single working parent, “need” is a better description of daycare & nursery school than “want” or “think they need”.
In much the same way as most people “need” to work and have an income, rather that “want” to do so. You can’t really work without daycare, as your average baby isn’t quite ready to be left on his or her own for 8 hours (social services may have a few words to say about that); most workplaces frown on bringing babies with you.