Helicopter Parents at Work

Can you imagine your mother negotiating a job offer for you? Calling your prospective employer on your behalf or even actually sitting with you during a job interview?

No comment here, but the Wall Street Journal's CareerJournal.com has an interesting story about how some parents are crossing the line from being involved with their children's employment to actually running the show for them.

Apparently, these types of parents, whom some call "helicopter parents," are not new to the scene and, not surprisingly, engage in the same type of hovering behavior when their children are at college as well.

In fact, in the Higher Education and the Law Seminar that I am teaching this semester, one of my students is doing her research paper on Helicopter Parents at higher education institutions and ways in which various university offices can deal with these suffocating parents from a legal perspective.

The Journal article explains that when it comes to employment, employers are taking many different approaches to dealing with these types of parents, from sending copies of recruiting and job offer letters to parents to making the parents feel like part of the process when they actually aren't.

In kinda reminds me of that Woody Allen movie scene in "New York Stories" in which wherever Woody Allen's character goes, his mother follows him in the sky as an omniscient presence. Yikes!

PS