With millennial children now in their 20s, more helicopter parents are showing up in the workplace, sometimes even phoning human resources managers to advocate on their child’s behalf.
Megan Huffnagle, a former human resources manager at a Denver theme park, recalls being shocked several years ago when she received a call from a young job applicant’s mother.
“An employee was hired as an IT intern, and the parent called and proceeded to tell me how talented her son was, and how he deserved much more [compensation], and that he could make much more money outside of this position,” Huffnagle says.
Parents haven’t changed so much since the time when the mother of James and John tried to get her boys promoted.
I wonder if my mom would call the bishop and tell him what a great priest I am.
Yes, Ian+, and how you could make soooooooooo much more money on the outside.
Well, this was inevitable. We’ve watched as this generation of parents first seemed convinced that their kids (individually) were the Second Coming; they then devoted their lives to signing them up for a myriad of activities and playing taxicab, ensuring they were in the “right” everything. They relived their high school days through their kids’ experiences and some even made pests of themselves at the collegiate level (hence the “helicopter parents” moniker and the warnings we all received at orientation).
Universities may feel the need to tiptoe around parents; employers will not. I hope they introduce some reality to the situation. Someone needs to cut the apron strings.
Boy! That sounds like a real career killer.
In my first command I had a spoiled rotten Lieutenant Junior Grade who I restricted to quarters for an extremely serious violation of a direct order in a combat situation.
Unfortunately for me, he was the son of the most senior Rear Admiral on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I had proxy “helicopter parents” all over me who were senior to me and above me and in my chain-of-command.
The real helicopter parent, the rear admiral, stayed ‘behind the curtain ‘ while he ‘pulled strings’ to make life difficult for me.
He did make life difficult for me and I didn’t back down.
And this would be the ultimate in ridiculous “helicopter parents,” I do believe:
http://news.yahoo.com/sheriff-facebook-spat-led-2-shooting-deaths-220228661.html
Over a Facebook deletion? Really?
I can see that companies are going to do what they need to to manage something as daft as ‘helicopter parents’ (in the cases in the report though its more like a group of spec ops being airlifted into position than a simple helicopter). But a big part of me wishes they’d all take the harder route and not try and redirect the parent’s energy but simply say, “No, any more contact from you will harm that (prospective) employee’s chances”. It’s not good for the people involved, or society more broadly for this dynamic to be continuing into the children’s adulthood. While that’s always happened with some, it is a [i]long[/i] time in the West since that has been accommodated in the workplace.