Grow Up

I’m not sure if you read this article from yesterday’s New York Times. Very enlightening. It speaks of parents who take their kids to college and then stick around, sometimes for days. As someone who has been through this process – twice – I can tell you that it’s awful. Leaving the person you’ve protected since birth hundreds of miles away with strangers is a frightening, difficult event. I still refer to the first time as one of the worst days of my life and the second time was a little easier only because the school is only 90 minutes away (and I can do it in 60 if I don’t mind a couple of tickets). So why should you care? Because it affects you if you hire any young people.
This generation, way more than mine, certainly – has been sheltered from just about everything. They’ve been told since they were little that they’re God’s gift to the planet. They’ve been protected from unsupervised games, spontaneous play, and failing grades (love the schools that pass everyone!). I’m not bitter – there are a lot of dangerous things out there – the Internet being pretty high on the list – and I don’t blame the kids. It’s the parents.

The business aspect? If you’ve hired any kids right out of college, you might be surprised at how many of them have no clue about the real world. Things like showing up on time for work and meetings, dressing appropriately, not sharing everything, and understanding that they have a tremendous amount to learn.  Sorry kids – your parents should have told you about this instead of driving around doing your paper route while you played.  Unfortunately, while I’m happy to teach you a lot of stuff, I’m not prepared to finish the job your parents were too afraid to wrap up.

I’ve yet to have a parent accompany an employee to work (OK not true but they were there to visit after the kid had been working there for a while).  At some point, that cord gets cut and while one feels as if there really isn’t a good time, the start of college – a huge step into adulthood – is as good as any.  As a parent, our job is to get these kids ready to deal with a sometimes miserable world.  Helping them to understand and cope is not the same as hiding them from the misery.  As businesspeople, our job is to develop employees while serving our customers and investors.  But that’s not the same as being a parent.

So it’s the parents to whom I say grow up.  The kids will do that on their own if you’ll let them.  An hopefully they do it before they come to work.  As the article says:

Some undergraduate officials see in parents’ separation anxieties evidence of the excesses of modern child-rearing. “A good deal of it has to do with the evolution of over-involvement in our students’ lives,” said Mr. Dougharty of Grinnell. “These are the baby-on-board parents, highly invested in their students’ success. They do a lot of living vicariously, and this is one manifestation of that.”

Am I out of line here?