This Type of Parenting May Impede Your Young Adult's Career

Helicopter parenting kids when they are little has been linked to plenty of disadvantages for those children—from increased anxiety and depression to difficulty navigating emotions and life’s challenges.  

But being overly involved with your Gen Z young adult may bring negative consequences, too—specifically when it comes to their burgeoning careers, a new study has found.

“Specifically, our findings suggest that parents who are heavily involved with their children — spending lots of time advising them, sharing many activities, etc. — actually hinder the child’s ability to launch,” said co-author Anna Manzoni, professor of sociology at North Carolina State University, in a Jan. 14 news release from the university.

For the study, published in the Journal of Youth Studies, the researchers analyzed data from a nationally representative survey of 2,680 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 28 who answered a range of questions every other year for up to a decade. The researchers paid careful attention to two key concepts— “family social capital,” or the support parents provide through everyday interactions with their children, and “occupational prestige,” which is the average education and income for a given occupation.

“We know that parents play an important role in shaping their children’s occupational outcomes, but we wanted to study specifically the effects of family social capital on early occupational attainment of young adults,” said co-author Tom Leppard, a postdoctoral researcher in NC State’s Data Science and AI Academy.

What Manzoni and Leppard discovered took them “by surprise,” he said, which was that “too much parental involvement was associated with a negative impact on the occupational attainment of emerging adults.”

This, despite a body of research showing how family social capital positively impacts everything from school success to healthy behaviors. “Our findings at first seemed contradictory,” he said. “But what the findings suggest is that, during the transition to adulthood, there can be too much of a good thing. This is an age in which young people need to make the transition to independence. And failure to do so is associated with professional constraints early in their careers.”

The message for parents, then, is clear: Give your grown-up babies some space, as hard as that can sometimes be.

“As young people move into early adulthood,” said Manzoni, “the parental role may need to shift away from intensive guidance and toward a more hands-off, supportive posture that allows children to develop autonomy, make mistakes, and navigate the labor market on their own.”

And while more research is needed, the researcher has a hunch that “strong family ties may pay off in later adulthood,” even if being overly involved at the critical young-adult moment may thwart professional growth. In other words: Your kid still needs you. Just be patient.