Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us

Helicopter Parents: Hovering at home, college and even the office

Many of us raised our children to be independent. Once they were adults, we wanted them to come to us for our advice, good counsel and, yes, the occasional handout. But in college, they would be on their own in dealing with professors and deans. In finding a job, we might prep them on how to put their best foot forward, but they would be on their own. Once on the job, they would figure out how to perform and to stand up for their rights and benefits. So I thought.

I was misled. In a trend that's been picking up momentum, adult-child parenting is heading to a new and higher hover level. Parents are jumping in to complain to colleges about their child's grades or dorm situation and continuing that oversight into the work years.

Let me trace some of this for you. Five years ago, NextAve ran this headline to a story:

When Parents Go Too Far to Help Their Kids Land Jobs: Helicoptering has reached the workplace, with some moms and dads even going to their kids' interviews.

Five years later, the hovering has moved from helping a child land a job to dealing with the nitty gritty of the work place. By way of example, a recent NYTimes article reports the findings of a former Stanford freshmen dean, Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of “How to Raise an Adult.”

[O]fficials at Teach for America have been mystified in recent years by the volume of parents who intervene on behalf of their adult children, whom the group employs as teachers.

A Teach for America administrator told Ms. Lythcott-Haims that parents had called him with complaints about such issues as their child’s being disciplined by a principal or having a run-in with a fellow teacher, as though the adult child were still a student.

It isn't just Teach for America. Workplace blogger, Lee Caraher, wrote this recently about parental interplay with their adult child's job:

What does this look like? Millennials’ parents joining their adult children at interviews; parents calling managers to lobby for better reviews or higher raises. Or parents actually doing the work for their adult children – which all unravels when the employee doesn’t have the luxury of time to participate or complete a task.

 When I mention this phenomenon to a friend who, as a parent, is a generation or two behind me, he tells me he knows such parents. He has friends, he says, "who seem to think they're still responsible. They don't feel the least bit guilty about intervening. We tell them, 'we think you're out of your  mind.'"

Now comes this word. Companies are recognizing the phenomenon and accommodating it. Some are setting up newsletters so that parents can learn more about their child's workplace. A growing number of companies are hosting "Bring in your parents to work" days. Count LinkedIn and Google in that number as well as a number of small companies.

 Call me (and my friend) old-fashioned or out of touch with the current culture, but this doesn't seem like the road to independence--for our kids or us.

 

 

 

 

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Observations: A Stanford Dean on the effect of helicopter parenting on college students

Parenting Grown Children: We are at our peril when we give advice they didn't ask for

Leaving a Legacy: The case for giving them a share of your worldly goods now

The headline is provocative: "Why I Am Giving My Children Their Inheritance Now." The NYTimes story was told in the first person by a man who said of his financial standing, "I know what wealthy is. And I know my wife and I are not." Nonetheless Paul Brown, an occasional columnist for the NYTimes and the author of best-selling business books, clearly has a comfortable amount of disposable income and not many major expenses ahead of him--he has finished financing his children's college education.

That is why, he writes, he and his wife decided to begin to give each of their four children part of their inheritance now. Now, as in while their children are still setting themselves up in life as opposed to later when Brown and his wife are no longer around and the children are set up--living their lives with presumably there own reservoirs of disposable income.

Turns out the headline is a tad more provocative than what Brown is doing. Many of us give our grown children financial gifts in the here and now--or "loans" that we do not expect them to repay. Most of us do it on an ad hoc basis. Brown is more organized. He gives each of his children an annual check. He reports that the money is used by each of his kids in different--albeit responsible--ways: to buy a house, to fund a college account for a newborn, to start a business, to boost a savings account.

He seems to be saying what paterfamilias and I have long believed: If we are fortunate enough to have raised children who don't feel entitled --as Brown says his children do not--and who don't have wild or crazy spending habits, then why not share the wealth now when they need it. It's all well and good to believe they should be independent and stand on their own two feet. But how pleasurable it is to help them out.

Here are three reasons Brown gives for giving himself that pleasure:

They can use the money now

They are going to get the money anyway, in the form of an inheritance.

Who wants them waiting around for you to...... Brown spells it out this way: "Why, as a parent, would you want your children — even if it is on some tiny, tiny, tiny subconscious level — waiting around for you to die, so they can inherit money they could use now?"

Brown also notes that he and his wife have prepared the best they can for the future, saving money for retirement and carrying good health insurance. They are giving their children money that is expendable. It brings to mind a post I wrote  about a question Carl Richards (the "Sketch Guy" financial adviser who also writes for the NYTimes) raises about money: How much is enough? When we can answer that query we may want to share the excess with those we love.

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