Millennials as narcissists, parents to blame?

Take, for instance, the defining apocryphal millennial trend story: Kids are bringing their parents to job interviews. This urban legend of emerging-adult ineptitude appears to have been

born in a September 2013 _Wall Street Journal_ article, "Should You Bring Mom and Dad to the Office?" The story held a shocking statistic: A 2012 study of college graduates by

human resources company Adecco found that 8 percent of respondents "had a parent accompany them to a job interview," and 3 percent "had the parent sit in." Jesse Singal

had never heard of his peers doing this. "Anyone who has been to a job interview knows that it would be really, really weird to take your parent," says the 32-year-old journalist,

who investigated Adecco's report for the _Columbia Journalism Review_. What Singal found when he looked closely was a far cry from the Mommy & Me narrative perpetuated in sound

bites. For one thing, media outlets took liberties with the vague definition of "accompanying." Since accompanying parents and parents who sat in on interviews were counted

separately in the survey, Singal concluded that the former likely refers to a parent "giving a kid a ride or maybe sitting outside the interview for support. So the truth is something

like 'Fewer than 1 in 10 millennials are getting a ride to their interviews from their parents.' This isn't that headline-worthy, especially given how many millennials

don't have cars and are living at home." Oh, yeah: That's the other narrative of millennial helplessness — we're all broke. While the raw economic data can make it sound

as if we are all suffering under Cormac McCarthy–esque post-apocalyptic conditions, the full story is more complicated. As Jordan Weissmann noted in _Slate_ last August, "young adult

incomes are basically right inside the range they've been in past decades." A man age 25 to 34 earned 18.5 percent less in 2013 than his counterpart did in 1980, after inflation,

but a young woman earned 40.5 percent more than her 1980 counterpart. In general, the divide between the young haves and have-nots parallels rising inequality in society at large. The Center

for Economic and Policy Research found that the lowest three-fifths of the young adult population were in the direst straits: In 1989, the average net worth of those ages 18 to 34 was

$3,300; in 2013, the group averaged $7,700 — in net debt. Surging student loans accounted for more than two-thirds of that shift. Are millennials really more broke than our parents were?

"It depends on which millennials and boomers we are talking about," says Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center. Young adults with college degrees "are, on average, better off

than college-educated boomers were when they were young," while those with no education beyond high school "are markedly worse off" than boomer counterparts. Perhaps as

penance for creating the economic circumstances that doom their offspring, boomer parents have crafted a new role for themselves: part protector, part best friend; more wise-but-cool camp

counselor than reserved paterfamilias. They're buddies with us on Instagram! They track our mood swings on Twitter! They post the monkey-covering-his-eyes-with-his-hands emoji when we

tell an embarrassing story on Facebook! But the only reason boomers and Gen Xers weren't Facebook friends with their parents in college was because Facebook hadn't been invented

yet (by a millennial). Children and parents "connecting" on social media isn't evidence of a unique emotional bond between generations; it's just a sign of the

pervasiveness of social media. And by the way, boomers — you're not getting a window into your daughter's secret world by following her on Instagram. For one thing, she understands

privacy settings, and you don't. If you haven't been filtered out of seeing certain Facebook posts (or quietly unfriended), says Internet security expert Marian Merritt, you might

be viewing a "dummy" account made just for your prying eyes. (Merritt's tip: "If you don't see their school friends [in the account's friend list], you know

it's the vanilla parent account.") It's also likely that by now your digital-native offspring have learned to avoid putting incriminating information online. Jeffrey Child, an

associate professor of communications at Kent State University in Ohio, has researched millennial social media habits and says that most young adults now take a proactive approach to

privacy — keeping accounts free of questionable content in the first place (and scrubbing their profiles when such content pops up from an outside source, like a friend). "This occurs

among millennials because there has been so much attention placed on people who have gotten fired or into trouble for illegal and/or inappropriate posts," says Child. In other words,

your kids' online lives are pre-sanitized. We know you can see us. Could this digital shrewdness bleed into other areas, as well? Consider the number of millennials living at home with

their parents. Despite alarmist headlines, the numbers are not unprecedented. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, says Fry, the percentage of young adults not heading their own

households "steeply increased" from a late 20th-century plateau. Jump back to 1940, however, and young Americans reeling from the Great Depression were even less likely to launch.

Does that make the Greatest Generation even bigger babies? Of course not — they were just faced with similarly demanding financial challenges. Put another way, Brandon and Ashley aren't

living in their old bedrooms for the free laundry and Xbox; it's practical frugality. Rents have risen faster than our incomes. Rents have risen faster than millennials' incomes,

and they are faced with demanding financial challenges. Zohar Lazar Most media bugaboos of millennial misbehavior are similarly empty, Singal says. "When I read about how millennial

workers can't be bothered to put down the phone and stop texting, I always have the same response: Fire them! The idea that employers are helpless to discipline these lazy, social

media–obsessed millennials and must instead adapt to our idiotically self-absorbed lifestyles just flies in the face of everything everyone knows about this economy." In other words,

millennials are young. Not as young as Generation Z, whose happiness and well-being will soon consume our thoughts, but pretty far down there. We have decades to develop missing life skills,

build and lose fortunes, and screw up our own kids' lives. On balance, we probably aren't that different from you. We just have more neurotic parents. _— Caity Weaver_ _Sally

Koslow is the author of five books, including _Slouching Toward Adulthood_; Caity Weaver is a writer and editor at _GQ_._