Overbearing Parents

Parenting isn’t easy. This is something every parent knows. I have told my boys on more than one occasion that things would have been a lot simpler if they had each come out with an instruction manual tied to his big toe.

They didn’t, and so I made mistakes as a father. We all do. Moms, dads, stepmoms, stepdads, grandparents raising their kids’ kids … when you are trying to mold a tiny human into a productive member of society, you’re going to mess up.

I was raised by a father who said he never made a parenting mistake, who said he has never had to apologize in his adult life because he has never intended to hurt anyone or do anything wrong. Besides being incredibly narcissistic, this philosophy had the nasty side effect of making me feel like a failure as a father in my early years as a parent. It was only that I sussed out the narcissism and realized exactly how flawed my birth parents are that I realized he had set up this model of fatherhood and adulthood in which it was impossible for a healthy individual to thrive.

My first male role model said he never made a parental mistake; I seemed to be making parental mistakes from the get-go with my boys. So what was my deal? Why was I such a screw-up? It took too many years to realize where the flaw actually was.

This is why I have been honest with my boys about my mistakes, why I have apologized when I needed to apologize. Intentions don’t mean Jack shit when you have a child who was hurt by something you said or did. It’s their developing personalities, their sense of self that is at stake. When the consequences are that high, an “I’m sorry I hurt you” seems like an incredibly small price to pay.

But.

There are some matters in which all parents should simply know better. No, your kid didn’t come out with an attached instruction manual, but increasingly uncommon common sense should tell you that what you’re doing is, well, just plain stupid.

As Exhibit A, I bring you this: A study of 1,000 Gen Zers by resume service Zety revealed that 20% had a parent join them on a job interview. Worse, HR professionals who spoke to the Remnant Journalists at The Wall Street Journal said they are fielding calls from parents of young employees asking about their performance reviews, benefits, raises, and more. They are even calling in sick on their kids’ behalf.

Pendulums swing. That’s what they are designed to do. The stupid parenting of my birth parents and others like them in the so-called Greatest Generation swung back and, as is wont of pendulums, reached this other extreme.

And it wasn’t unpredictable. These frantic hoverers produced entitled brats by the wagonload, and now they make up 20% of the workforce. As a general rule, they are empirically underdeveloped, at least from a professional standpoint. The logical end of their helicopter parenting are things like phone calls to excuse little Kaitlyn from work or appear as special guests at job interviews for candidates who look remarkably like younger version of them.

It was so much fun to read the Wall Street Journal article in which these weirdo parents tried to justify their behavior. They say it’s a tough job market out there, and they’re just trying to help. Recruiters and the devils who are HR people say that they are most definitely not helping, that aggressive parental involvement during the hiring process signals a candidate who just might not be ready to show up to work without a blankie.

More pertinently, this type of “help” doesn’t actually help. Those same HR demons say they are less likely to hire a candidate whose mommy extols his virtues.

Well duh.

I am not advocating a return to old-school parenting. Remember, it was the reaction to that style of parenting that produced children who grew up to be these helicopter parents who are now ruining their Gen-Z adult children. But I am saying that the best place for the parenting pendulum is not at the extremes on either end of the swing. Yes, we all want what’s best for our kids. No, none of us really knows what we’re doing.

But we try. And sometimes we step over the line.

This is one of those times.

Overbearing Parents

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