Gen Z is taking their parents to the office So they can talk to the HR for them

Going to work with your parents as a kid felt a bit like cosplaying as a grown-up in a corporate world—walking into an office, a shop, or a classroom and imagining what it would be like to finally become “an adult.” Yet despite the fact that many still speak to Gen Z as if they were children, their thirties are approaching. This means that most people born between 1997 and 2012 are now fully entering the job market (or are getting very close to it). Admittedly, it’s a rather disastrous job market, between ongoing recessions, a potential financial collapse looming, and active trade wars. And yet there is something that seems far more frightening than global instability. According to a report by Resume Templates, nearly half of Gen Z brings their mom to work to speak with their boss.

Gen Z faces the workplace with their parents

The survey, conducted in July 2025 on a sample of 831 young U.S. adults employed full-time and aged between 18 and 28, aimed to measure how involved parents are in their children’s professional lives. The report shows that family support no longer stops at revising a résumé or sharing a piece of advice before an interview—many young workers now delegate entire stages of the hiring process to their parents, from emailing recruiters to handling initial conversations with HR.

In some cases, mom and dad physically show up to interviews, answer hiring managers’ questions, introduce themselves, or even negotiate salary and benefits. According to the report, more than 77% of participants brought a parent to a job interview at least once, over 40% had them sit in during the meeting, while roughly one third had a parent ask questions or handle parts of the negotiation. A behavior that, just a few years ago, would have sounded like a classic boomer joke—yet today represents a daily reality for many U.S. companies.

For a significant portion of Gen Z, parents remain active interlocutors even after being hired. 86% have their parents review their performance evaluations, 79% involve them in communications with their manager, and about half rely on them for delicate conversations such as requesting time off, discussing a raise, or handling internal conflicts. In some cases, parents even speak to the manager more often than their own children do.

The most “mammone” generation ever?

This dynamic doesn’t stem from whimsy, but from a set of conditions that shaped Gen Z long before their entry into the workforce. It’s true that this is a generation raised under constant supervision, with parents (often Gen X) who oversaw every activity and corrected every minor deviation, convinced that protection was the highest form of love. It’s difficult now to expect that this same pattern of hyper-presence will magically disappear the moment adulthood officially begins.

According to Julia Toothacre, Chief Career Strategist at Resume Templates, family support can be a valuable resource as long as it stays behind the scenes. But once it takes center stage—when mom or dad negotiates a raise or resolves a conflict—the risk is twofold: on one side, it prevents young workers from gaining the experiences needed to develop autonomy; on the other, it pushes managers and colleagues to interpret these behaviors as a lack of maturity.

The consequences of the pandemic on Gen Z

But reducing it all to “Gen Z just can’t handle things alone” would be an oversimplification. Also because, historically, we’ve never seen an army of parents show up at the office as if they were co-employees. And yet, when you look closely, the phenomenon has precise roots. Gen Z is the only modern generation that abruptly skipped an entire sequence of formative milestones. Between lockdowns, school closures, cancelled internships, and university years spent on Zoom, they lost exactly that stretch of time—from 16 to 23—in which people usually learn to make mistakes alone, argue alone, grow alone.

Faced with a job market that demands everything and offers very little, the family becomes a kind of emotional safety belt. Not because Gen Z is “fragile,” but because they were launched into a more unstable environment than any previous generation, with fewer guarantees, fewer horizons, and far less time to build the tools needed to navigate it. That said, not everything is an excuse, and at some point Gen Z will also have to feel obliged to grow up, become independent, and truly detach from their parents’ affection. Otherwise, we might reach a point where even their wedding night will require the emotional support of mom and dad.