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Watching your new grad spread their wings and enter the world of work can be nerve-wracking. But Jodi Kantor has important advice for parents: Resist the urge to meddle.
Right now, many parents feel "really anxious" about their young adult children's job prospects, says Kantor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of "How to Start: Discovering Your Life's Work."
It's a tough job market for young workers.As of June 2026, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 reached 5.7%, compared to 4.1% for all workers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Recent college grads are also facing higher underemployment: 42% are working jobs that don't utilize their skills or education, compared to 33.7% of college graduates as a whole.
Kantor, who has a college-aged daughter, says she understands parents' fear and frustration: "Some of them scraped and saved for college and managed to send their kids, and now their great kid who did the right internships and has wonderful grades can't get a job."
But some parents are "over-asserting themselves in the process" by badgering their adult child about their job search strategy or attempting to push them toward a seemingly more stable career field, Kantor says – and that's not going to set them up for success in the future.
When parents step in too often to solve problems — a tactic known as "snowplow parenting" — they can inadvertently stunt their child's capacity for resilience, according to Jennifer Wallace, author of "Never Enough" and "Mattering."
"The goal is not to guarantee that your child never struggles at work," Wallace told CNBC Make It in September. "It is to help raise a young person who knows that when struggle comes, they can meet it."
Instead, Kantor advises parents to take a step back and approach the situation with an "inquiring" mindset: Ask your young adult "about what they're experiencing and what they're seeing" in the job market, and "be cognizant of the way the atmosphere has changed" before jumping in with your thoughts or opinions.
The advice young adults need today
Parents need to understand that their career advice is both "invaluable and totally useless" right now, according to Kantor.
"It's invaluable, because time-tested wisdom is very important at a difficult moment, but it's irrelevant in the sense that everything's changed since we applied for jobs, and the rules, as we experience them, barely exist anymore," she continues.
Unless you've been on the job market recently, it's hard to understand "just how digital and sterile job applications have become," Kantor says: "When I talk about AI interviews at events, the younger half of the audience nods, and the older half of the audience gasps and goes, 'How could that even be a thing?'"
What you can teach your fledgling adult is how to build genuine connections, according to Kantor.
"Paradoxically, the more digital job applications become, the more important real relationships are," she says.
For instance, you could offer to help them draft or revise a cold email they're sending to a potential employer. Kantor's advice: It should be "short" and "warm but not overfamiliar."
And many tried-and-true career tips are still relevant today, such as sending a thank-you note after a job interview.
Amid a sea of AI-generated applications, those habits can be key "differentiators" for young applicants, Kantor says.
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