February 6, 2025
SEOUL – Hur, a team manager at a major conglomerate in South Korea, recalled a recent phone call that she received after an end-of-year team dinner that “baffled” her — an angry call made not from her co-worker, but from the co-worker’s mother.
“Over the phone, the mother scolded me for creating a heavy drinking environment, claiming that my colleague doesn’t do well with alcoholic drinks,” said Hur. “She also demanded me to let my colleague take a day off so that they can recover from their hangover.”
Hur isn’t the only person in Korea who has noted receiving such calls from the parents of young adults.
Lee, a university professor, also said that he had received several calls from students’ parents, requesting Lee to move his lectures to a lower floor to “help their child get to class easier” or to expand the maximum student quota for his courses to make sure their child “gets to take the necessary courses.”
“It hasn’t happened to me yet, but a fellow professor in my department also told me that he received a call from one student’s parent demanding him to raise the student’s grades,” Lee mentioned.
Lee added, “It’s not unusual for me or the other professors to receive such requests from the students themselves, but there has been a recent unusual increase in the number of parents making the requests on the student’s behalf. University students are students, but they are also adults. Shouldn’t they be perfectly capable of making such requests or demands on their own?”
What are helicopter parents?
Beyond these cases, the phenomenon of “overparenting” has become a prominent topic of discussion in Korea. Professors and corporate human resources managers alike have reported encounters with so-called “helicopter parents.”
The term helicopter parents, defined as parents who hover over their children like a helicopter and take an overprotective or excessive interest in their children’s lives, was popularized in the 1990s to refer to “overparenting” parents of adolescents.
Helicopter parents have evolved to a new form in Korea, where parents are beginning to overly involve themselves in their adult children’s lives in the workplace or universities.
According to an Opensurvey poll surveyed 40 human resources managers employed in Korea’s top 100 companies by market capitalization in December 2024, 35 percent responded that they personally received or witnessed a colleague receiving a call or text from someone claiming to be an employee’s parent. When asked what kind of requests had been made, 79 percent answered that they were questions regarding company affairs while requests being made on the child’s behalf as well as complaints were witnessed by 29 percent and 14 percent of respondents, respectively.
In October 2023, a photo of a notice displayed during a lecture to university students went viral on the internet, reading, “Please direct inquiries regarding academic matters personally, not through your parents. Believe in your own abilities.”
Low birth rates, deterring economy
Experts analyze that the recent rise in helicopter parents is related to social changes, such as declining birth rates and children’s delayed independence from parents due to the deterring economy.
“These days, we see more families with one or two children at most, which gives parents more economic and emotional space to invest their time and energy into them,” sociology professor Huh Chang-deog from Yeungnam University told The Korea Herald. “The sharp decline in birth rates has led parents to focus their attention on a single child, and the prolonged period of low economic growth has led to more children with less financial stability than their parents. As a result, continued parental care for adult children has become a socio-cultural phenomenon in Korea, leading to more helicopter parents.”
Recent polls have shown that the number of parents considering their children’s academic achievements and careers as their own successes in life has also increased.
According to a 2023 survey conducted by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which investigated Korean perceptions toward family and household management, 58.9 percent of parents answered that their children’s success was equivalent to their own. This was an increase compared to numbers from the same survey taken in 2020, which stood at 46.9 percent at the time.
Psychology professor Kwak Keum-joo from Seoul National University also pointed toward Korean familism values that prioritize family over an individual and emphasize obedience to parental wishes, often “preventing parental involvement from being perceived as a problem.”
“Korean parents are used to having a say in most decisions concerning their children, especially when it comes to decisions concerning their children’s future like preparing for university entry,” said Kwak. “This unique parental role in Korean society, combined with the increasing delay in young adults achieving independence, can be said to have intensified the phenomenon of overparenting.”