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Last year, Mary Mayo of Columbus, Ohio, sent an e-mail message to the chief executive of the public relations company in Philadelphia where her daughter, Kristen Forbriger, works.
Mayo wanted to have a surprise sushi lunch delivered to Forbriger, and requested the executive’s help with the ruse. At the same time, she asked how her daughter was doing at work, and whether “I could help find him business contacts here in Columbus because I know everyone.”
Then, in November, Mayo called the owner of the bakery where her 21-year-old son, Arthur, worked. Why was her son scheduled to work on Thanksgiving? Mayo asked. Forbriger was given the holiday off.
Helicopter parents — so named because they hover over their children — have reached the workplace. The same generation that turned parenting into a competitive sport, prepping 3-year-olds for preschool, then replacing the umbilical cord with a cellphone once they reached college, are pulling up their virtual Aeron chairs and “helping” them at the office.
Yes, we are still talking about a minority of parents. But a survey last year of 400 respondents by the career Web site Experience Inc. found that 25 per cent said that their parents were involved in their jobs “to the point that it was either annoying or embarrassing.”
Career service directors were the first to feel the tide of parental love. Julia Overton-Healy, who runs that office at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, tells of a call from a parent demanding to know the time and place of her son’s on-campus job interview, so she could be there, too.
Seniors at Roanoke College in Virginia freely acknowledge to their career director, Toni McLawhorn, that their résumés were actually written by their parents.
“Employers are having a nightmare with this,” says Stephen Seaward, director of career development at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut.
“I’ve heard of instances where parents were calling employers on their child’s behalf and asking why they didn’t get the job or where they’ve called to negotiate salaries. Meanwhile, the employer is thinking, ‘Can this student handle himself if they have to have someone do this for them?’ ”
Such parents are deliciously easy to mock. Too easy. Although I certainly started out intending to criticise, what I came to feel during a week of interviews on the subject was sympathy.
These days, everything about being a parent — particularly in certain socioeconomic circles — says “jump in, get involved, take charge.”
Gone are the days when Jimmy could come home and ride his bike around the neighbourhood until dark; now a responsible parent knows where his or her child is at every moment. Gone are the days of pickup baseball games in the corner lot; they are replaced by structured leagues, with parent-coaches who wear their hours logged as a badge of honour.
Time was when decent students simply applied to college and were accepted. Now it requires a spreadsheet to keep track of their ever more complicated résumé-building.
Parents do all this, balancing too much help against not enough. Then, one day, we are told to stop. Cold turkey. “I just can’t help wanting to help them out,” Mayo says. “I still want to get involved. I still want to help.”
Forbriger, who roundly chewed out her mother for her e-mail to the head office — “It makes me feel young,” she says — believes that her mother is an example of a generation of women who cut back on work when they became parents, and poured that energy into their children.
Mayo says that is nonsense.
She says that she worked through her children’s entire childhoods, and that if her daughter’s memory is that mom was always there, this is simply a testament to her ability to give her all at work and at home. In her view, that ability would go to waste if her daughter stopped needing advice.
Whatever the reason for today’s overdone state of affairs, an earlier generation of parents managed not to get so entangled. Mayo’s own mother, Kathleen Mayo, raised four children and says she “would never think of calling the boss; I don’t know where Mary got that idea.”
The elder Mayo remembers sitting back and letting her daughter “handle it herself” early in her career when the job she had been promised at a bank was given to a man.
“Today’s parents would have had their attorney in there to get a hold of the boss,” Kathleen Mayo says. “Parents then didn’t go to bat for their daughters.”
Note to self: I think it’s safe to say that there’s too much pinch-hitting being done if parents find themselves calling their child’s boss. Or professor. Or job interviewer.
Mayo says she knows that, and is working on backing away, but she is surprised it is so hard to do. “I just want everyone to be happy,” she says. “That used to be my job.”