Helicopter Parents

An article last month in HRM Asia raised the issue of parents coming to their children’s job interviews. While the article drew data from the US and Canada, plenty of anecdotes from around Asia suggest that some parents get very, very involved in their child’s job search.

On M*A*S*H, Radar O’Reilly’s cry of “Incoming choppers!” meant the doctors were about to get some challenging visitors; it would be nice if you could get similar warning about your own incoming helicopters. “Helicopter parents” are called that because they tend to hover over their children, trying to watch them and take care of them in every situation. For the last couple decades many parents have become more controlling of their children’s lives, something every extracurricular club leader, sports team coach, and elementary school teacher has experienced. As those kids start to enter the workforce, our hope that those parents would vanish into the mist has turned out to be wishful thinking, and they are not only coming to interviews, they’re also getting involved in salary discussions and calling managers after performance assessments. What was once the stuff of comedians’ monologues is now interfering with your business.

This is not particularly new; some elements of it have been going on for centuries. There’s a warning that emerges from that history: societies that exercise very tight control over their children tend not to be as creative, because children are held back from taking chances, risking failure, or challenging conventional thinking. Patterns of behavior that are learned in childhood, and that are passed from generation to generation, are often difficult to change later.

That is the point that matters for you. While it is certainly annoying to have Mom or Dad call and berate you about the size of Junior’s bonus, the real problem is that their over-parenting may have inhibited Junior’s creative thinking. You need to figure out what their impact has been and decide if Junior does in fact have the potential to be a good employee, of if instead the potential benefit falls far short of the cost of the aggravation.

There are some techniques you can use for dealing with these parents. Many authors suggest not antagonizing them, and that is probably sound advice, though you may want to politely let them know that it does not make the employee look good if they cannot handle their work issues on their own. Just as they would not come in and do their child’s actual work, they should not be involved in the administration supporting that work (though be careful making this point; some parents might take that as an invitation to come in and start doing their child’s work!).

More importantly for you is dealing with the employee. You need to first determine if they know their parents are involved; some will be mortified to learn this from you because they had no idea. For those who knew, you need to let then know how inappropriate that is, and then decide if they “get it” or not. If they do, and you can wean them off Mom and Dad (or at least get the phone calls to stop) then perhaps you can focus on developing their talents without interference. If they don’t — if you think they are looking to their parents for leadership at work rather than at you — that is a bad sign, and you need to consider cutting them loose. Chances are they don’t have the right frame of mind for the work you need them to do, so they are unlikely to be worth the hassle.

You need to deal with the immediate problem of parental meddling, but you also need to look at the long-term implications for both the employee and you. Each situation will be somewhat different, depending on the parents’ actions and the employee’s response and abilities, but the bottom line is that Mom and Dad do not belong in their child’s workplace, and you need to hold firm to that.