One phone call from a trainee's mother cost him his Wall Street job

In 2005, a young man named Richard graduated from an Ivy League college and landed a fast-track job at a prestigious New York investment bank, earning two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and working brutal hours. His mother, Jan, decided he was being worked too hard. She tracked down the unlisted landline number of Richard's boss and called him one weekend to complain.

The following Monday, instead of being waved through the elevators to his desk, Richard was met by a security guard holding a cardboard box of his belongings. A note sat on top: Ask your mother.

Julie Lythcott-Haims doesn't defend the boss's response, but she uses Richard's story as the far end of a pattern she traces from childhood all the way into the workplace, one she calls being there. Parents who spend eighteen years managing outcomes for a child rarely know how to stop once that child has a paycheck. She hears the same instinct from Teach For America, the organization that places new college graduates as teachers in low-income schools. Its Bay Area executive director, Eric Scroggins, describes parents calling him to say their daughter's placement is unsafe or that a principal is incompetent, and that someone needs to fix it. Often the corps member has no idea their parent has called at all, and when they find out, Scroggins says, they realize how immature it makes them look.

TFA's general counsel, Tracy-Elizabeth Clay, has fielded calls from parents asking to sit in on new-hire orientation calls their adult children could easily handle themselves. What employers consistently tell Lythcott-Haims is that they aren't evaluating the parent. They're trying to find out whether the young person in front of them can handle a problem without dialing home. Colleges, she notes, have largely accommodated parental involvement. Employers, for the most part, have not, and that gap is where the habit of being there finally runs out of road.

The next time your adult child calls with a workplace frustration, resist the urge to pick up the phone on their behalf, no matter how unfair the situation sounds from their side of the story. Ask what they're planning to do about it before you offer your own plan. If they ask you to sit in on a call or write something that is really their job to handle, say no and tell them why. Remember that a boss or client is quietly forming an opinion of your child every time you step in, so let your support take the form of listening and asking good questions rather than picking up any part of the task yourself.