Struggling with Gen Z? Blame the Parents!
Companies are dealing with the consequences of two decades of over-parenting
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In this week’s newsletter:
Struggling with Gen Z? Blame the parents!
The perils and the pleasure of multi-generational living
Deliotte Global Millennial/Gen Z 2023 survey- KEY FINDINGS
And why are young people more likely to believe in the afterlife
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Struggling with Gen Z? Blame the Parents!
A mother and her teenage son sit patiently in a doctor’s waiting room, waiting to be seen for a suspected case of tonsillitis. Jane, the mother, however, has more pressing things on her mind. She leans into her bag, pulls out a pen and paper and instructs her son, Jack, to write the following: ‘To whom it may concern, this proves an example of my current writing style. Thank you for your attention. Sincerely.’ When Jane looked at the loose scribble, she knew Jack did not have great handwriting but hoped that it could be easily forged. She took a picture with her phone and fired it off with an accompanying note, ‘Good luck’.
For most of her life, Jane Buckingham had been telling corporate America what young people wanted. At just 17, while a senior at the exclusive Horace Mann school in New York, she had penned Teens Speak Out, a generational tract which proved to be the beginning of a career as a consultant extraordinaire specialising in youth culture and future trends. She was the brand and her life was the content, the source material she drew upon for her Modern Girl’s Guide to Sticky Situations and Modern Girl’s Guide to Motherhood series. She became a master of dishing out well-meaning platitudes on working and motherhood; ‘I try to lead by example. I try to show that as a woman you can be strong, and professional, ethical, and tough but also be human and pick up your kids most days’. ‘Confident parents make confident children’ she would say.
Married to business coach and best-selling author, Marcus Buckingham, together they had proved a formidable team in helping America’s boardrooms understand the new generation entering the workplace. In 2012 they penned a joint article for Time magazine explaining the character of the millennial generation and why their over-indulgent parents ultimately were to blame: ‘They made it to the end of the soccer season – fantastic, everyone gets a trophy! They took a test – how amazing! When they finally join the workforce, it’s no wonder members of Gen Y expect a promotion just for being on time to work for six weeks straight.' If you wanted to understand why kids were the way they were, blame the parents argued the Buckinghams.
Jane’s preened and professionalised glamour suited TV. In 2015, she was brought in to front ABC’s new reality show Job or No Job where she would counsel unemployed youth, deploying The Apprentice style straight-talkin’. In an interview promoting the show, Buckingham gave a flavour of what to expect: ’you’ll see some people acting so entitled that you want to slap them, you’ll see candidates getting jobs that they shouldn’t, others getting jobs that they should, and still others getting passed over for jobs that they really deserved.’
In 2019 Jane Buckingham, so long a leading advisor to companies and parents, served prison time for her part in the US College Admissions Scandal. Buckingham was found guilty of hiring the notorious ’admissions advisor’ William Singer to secure a place for her son at the University of Southern California. Singer agreed to arrange for someone to sit the ACT standardised test on behalf of her eighteen-year-old son, Jack. All Buckingham had to do in return was ‘donate’ $50k to his Key Worldwide Foundation and send Singer a sample of her son’s handwriting, which she had hastily obtained in a doctor’s waiting room.
The man who sat the test was Mark Riddell, a 36-year-old biological sciences graduate from Harvard who would take the exams in hotels and later bribe the administrators at test centres to accept the fake tests. Jack achieved a near perfect score and was offered a place at the University of Southern California. Even Jane Buckingham had enough self-awareness to recognise the absurdity of the situation: “I know this is craziness, I know it is,” she confided to one of Singer’s staff, “I need you to get [Jack] into USC, and then I need you to cure cancer and [make peace] in the Middle East.” Jack was never allowed to take his place at USC; the scandal broke well before he was able to pack his bags.
Back in 2019 when the story broke, the College Admissions Scandal was rightly greeted by embarrassment and anger. It represented an abuse of power by the white, wealthy and privileged, but as well as being the story of the corruption of the college admissions process, it also represents the apotheosis of decades of helicopter parenting. The pathological desire to get your kids into a respectable college compelled parents to go to ridiculous lengths, and for someone like Jane Buckingham, to put her reputation, business and liberty on the line. ‘I committed this crime for myself’ Buckingham later said, ‘not because I wanted my son to go to any particular school but because I needed to make myself feel like a better mother.’
William Singer preyed on California’s rich, status-obsessed parents, exploiting a vulnerability that Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult, and former freshman dean of Stanford, knows all too well. While she was admissions tutor, Lythcott-Haims noticed the increased presence of parents on college campus who were making decisions for their college-age children: ‘I began to worry that college ‘kids’ (as college students had become known) were somehow not quite fully formed as humans. They seemed to be scanning the sidelines for Mom or Dad. Under-constructed. Existentially impotent.’ This led her to pose a very basic question: how much freedom does a developing adult need? Spoiler: A LOT. The Ted Talk of her findings have been watched over seven million times.
It was something that I too noticed as a university lecturer. Open days were full not of enthusiastic bright young things but nostalgic, over-keen parents often outnumbering their kids 2:1. I remember my head of department asking me to give the lecture for prospective students. When I asked why such a task fell to me; he replied: ‘because you can talk about the 1980s; the parents remember it, they will love it, and they are paying.’ I went to uni in 1999; I can’t remember my open day. I went up on my own, got very drunk and was later informed that’s where I was going.
But it’s not just in education where the over-parenting trend is evident; so too in financial and administrative support. In 2019, The New York Times ran a poll targeting parents with children aged between 18–28. It discovered that three-quarters of parents had arranged appointments such as doctors or hair appointments for their kids; or reminded them about deadlines; one in six parents with college-age kids had performed the role of human alarm clock; and one in twelve had contacted a college professor on their child’s behalf.
The problem of parental interference has naturally seeped into the workplace with companies report increasing contact with the parents of their employees. Back in 2017, a study by the University of Michigan found that two-fifths of American businesses had had contact with parents over initial application enquiries; almost one-third had experience of parents submitting their children's resumes; and one in seven had received complaints from parents after their kids were not hired. In extreme cases, they had found parents helping out with work assignments and employees demanding to bring their parents into contract negotiations and disciplinary procedures.
So what can companies do to confront the parent trap? Firstly, accept that the new recruits coming through the door are very different from themselves; from the new recruits of ten years ago; and even the new employees of five years ago (Covid was an infantilising process). Secondly, welcome and embrace the parental influence. The former CEO of Pepsi, Indra Nooyi, used to write personal letters to the parents of her staff thanking them for the ‘gift’ of their children. She once even phoned the mother of a potential candidate to encourage her son to take a job. He did. This may seem incredible but Nooyi’s policy makes solid business sense; today’s Gen Z are used to involving their parents in decisions and challenges, even deferring to them. It used to be that the boss had to make sure the wife was on side, now it’s the parents who need to be won over.
It’s All Relative Podcast: The Creator Economy
It may be the most desired profession right now but only 4% of influencers earn more than $100k a year... that means a lot of frustrated wannabes in an era when it is becoming ever more difficult to gain a following, creator burnout is real and platforms are proliferating. This week I sat down with a genuine content king and founder of Barcroft Media, Sam Barcroft, to discuss the future of the creator economy; Is TikTok bad for creators? Why niche is the way forward, why the metaverse is meh... and why Sam is in favour of a state regulated internet. This is essential listening for creators, for parents with Gen Z kids and basically any one who is interested in the future of the internet.
This was one of my favourite ever episodes we’ve recorded so do give it a listen. You can follow Sam here and follow his Creatorville blog here.
What I’ve been reading:
What is a Meme Team? We know that traditional news outlets have long struggled to engage with younger viewers (av. age of a BBC 1 viewer is 61) but the LA Times is trying to combat that by creating a team of artists and curators to drive new innovative news story-telling. I had dinner with the News Movement’s Kamal Ahmed this week and they too are trying chase after Gen Z…… but with millennial outlets such as Vice and Buzzfeed going down recently, the task has never been harder.
Influencers turn to AI; expect to see more of this. And it won’t just be influencers….. I have already heard of young teenagers creating their own AI chat bots as friends (and a cure for loneliness)…. Charlie Brooker really did read the 21st century right didn’t he?!
Deloitte’s annual global Gen Z and Millennial Survey is out. Headline news: More than three-quarters of UK Gen Zs (77%) and millennials (71%) would consider looking for a new job if their employer asked them to go into their workplace full-time. Cost of living remains the top concern for UK Gen Zs and millennial with more than half of respondents saying they live from pay-day to pay-day. Their economic concerns are also impacting their ability to plan for their future on a more personal level, with many saying it will become harder or impossible to buy a home (67% of UK Gen Zs and 62% of UK millennials) or start a family (56% of Gen Zs and 45% of millennials.)
Feast for the Senses:
LISTENING: My mum has just left our home after living with us for a couple of years…. so I know INTIMATELY the pleasure and the pain of multi-generational living ( I’ve also written about it too) so could relate to Laurie Taylor and others sharing their experiences on Radio 4’s Home Life.
WATCHING: Queer Eye Season 7: countering the crisis in masculinity episode by episode!
READING: I Heard What You Said: A Black Teacher, A White System, A Revolution in Education by Jeffrey Boakye - an insightful, sometimes shocking and incredibly thoughtful analysis of the realities of being a black teacher in the British education system. Jeffrey will be a podcast guest on It’s All Relative - drops mid-June.
VISITING: Fortunate enough to be attending the Wall Street Journal CEO Summit next week where the brilliant Zak Dychtwald will be speaking (as well as some relative unknowns: Andrew Bailey, Prof. Scott Galloway and Elon Musk).
And finally…..
Why are young people more likely to believe in life after death?! Is it a life-stage thing (we are more accepting of death as we age) or has growing individualism over the last fifty years meant that we are now more likely to believe that we live forever?! I suspect the latter.
++From the end of May I shall be writing a monthly column in City AM. The first column out next week will address a work-place phenomenon hugely popular amongst Gen Z (that their bosses NEED to know about). ++
Thanks for reading
Eliza