my boss’s parenting choices are driving me nuts

A reader writes:

I’m absolutely prepared for you to tell me there is nothing I can do about this at all besides ignore it, but I REALLY need to change my thinking around my boss’s parenting choices, which I find bizarre and am frankly tired of hearing about.

My boss’s adult daughter and 13-year-old grandchild live with her. The daughter doesn’t work but often needs my boss to babysit. Fine, this is her business. But when she leaves work to do it, she gives us a convoluted and overly detailed explanation of why, every time. This has the effect of making it seem much more annoying than it would be otherwise, especially if we’re in the middle of a deliverable or project.

For example, the daughter has to go to the store and the grandchild doesn’t want to go. My boss will have to go home and sit with the grandchild until the mom gets back. The child is never allowed to be alone, not even to walk to the mailbox. The daughter is excessively paranoid about human traffickers and kidnappings. (There is no known history of human trafficking in our area, certainly not of children from middle-class homes, and I haven’t heard of any spates of abductions either.) All this detail has made other coworkers roll their eyes behind my boss’s back and make cracks about how spoiled and entitled the daughter and grandchild are. One of my coworkers said recently, “If someone kidnapped that kid, they’d bring them back.” Which is obviously not okay! But JUST STOP TELLING US ALL THIS, OMG.

The thing I can’t get over is that this child has a smartphone and unlimited, unfettered access to the entire internet, in spite of this paranoia about them being trafficked out of their suburban house while their mom runs to Target for 20 minutes. My boss has told and shown me things the kid has gotten up on social media or people’s profiles they’ve talked to, and I’ve been alarmed. No one is monitoring this child’s internet usage; sometimes they will show things to my boss voluntarily but that is it. Some of the profiles they’re interacting with are clearly adults not even pretending to be children. The child assures their family that this is just children using filters to appear older. No, it is not! I may be an elder millennial but I can tell the difference. I’ve tried gently pointing this out to no avail. I don’t have children myself, but none of my friends or family who do give their children a smartphone and then just hope for the best. Especially coupled with the absolute paranoia about the child never being alone or even allowed to attend a birthday party or sleepover without either my boss or the boss’s daughter, this is just insane to me. I fully know it’s not my business, but with so much of it coming into the workplace, what is my obligation to really be clear that this is potentially unsafe?

And also, should I push back on the snark from coworkers? I’m a team leader and while I don’t technically outrank anyone else in my department of eight, I feel more of a burden to not participate in this kind of venting. Believe me, I understand it, but I know it’s not okay. Or should I just practice deep breathing and not let this drive me slowly insane?

Well … I get why your coworkers are annoyed and making snarky remarks — AND YOUR BOSS IS NOT HELPING THAT SITUATION — but talking crap about a 13-year-old is not great. You’re right that at a minimum you shouldn’t join in when they’re doing that … and as a team leader, yeah, you do have some additional obligation to say, “Hey, I get why this annoying, but we don’t know the whole situation and we shouldn’t be snarking on a kid.”

Speaking of not knowing the whole situation, would it help to allow that there could be details you don’t know that would make the protectiveness make more sense? There are kids who need safety plans where they’re not left alone (for example, because of self-harm behaviors). If that’s the case, the parent ideally would have a plan beyond “ask my own parent come home from work to stay here,” but the situation might be more complicated than you can see from where you’re standing. (It’s also possible that your boss doesn’t feel like divulging that so is citing “kidnapping” without realizing how exasperated it’s making people.)

That said, any chance you’re in a position where you could point out to your boss that giving the team all these details is starting to frustrate and demoralize people? One possibility is to come at it as a team lead and frame it as, “Obviously your schedule is your own business, but my sense is people are getting frustrated that you leave during the day whenever Jane needs to go out, when they don’t feel they could do the same. I think it would go a long way toward mitigating that if you didn’t tell people that that’s what you’re leaving to do — I think it’s rubbing salt in the wound a bit every time they hear it. I’m not suggesting you change what you’re doing, just how much information you give people about it.”

You may or may not have the kind of relationship where you can say that. If you don’t, you don’t — it’s not your responsibility to solve this for your boss. But if you do, it’s worth considering.

As for pointing out that the real danger is the unsupervised internet access … you don’t have to, but ethically I do think you should raise it once. If your boss remains unconvinced, you don’t need to make it your mission to get through to her, but since she’s sharing this stuff with you, you’re well positioned to say, “I’m worried by some of things you’ve told me about Matilda’s internet usage. It sounds like she’s interacting with adults, which is a high risk factor for being exploited. Can I send you a couple of articles about why that can be dangerous and ways you can protect her?” (And then consider sending her this and this. Warning, the first one is disturbing.)

You can also have a natural reaction in the moment when your boss shares information with you. For example, if she tells you something that makes it obvious Matilda is interacting with a strange adult, let yourself look shocked and say, “That’s really not safe for her. It’s how adults end up exploiting kids. Please don’t let her do that.” (I do worry about making a potentially already overprotective parent even more so, but talking to strange adults online is such a significant risk factor that it’s worth raising, the same way you’d speak up if someone’s kid was playing in traffic.)

If your boss and her daughter persist in focusing all their worries on kidnapping and trafficking and ignore info that you’re putting right in front of them about a much more likely danger that’s right in their house … well, your ability to make them act is inherently limited. But when your boss brings it up, you don’t need to stay politely silent either.

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