Young people let mommy pick their apartments, to psychologists chagrin

It’s notoriously hard to find an apartment in NYC. So increasingly, young people who already rely on their well-heeled parents for everything else are letting mommy select their starter homes.

As parents increasingly foot the bill for their millennial children, they are taking the extra step of selecting the house themselves, according to the New York Times.

“Parents are very involved in their children’s lives,” Adie Kriegstein, a saleswoman for CORE Real Estate with clients who have hunted and haggled on behalf of their offspring, told the Times. “So, of course they think they know what the child needs.”

Parents and their real estate brokers say that while young people may be missing out on rites of passage, many simply don’t have the experience to find and purchase an apartment — especially in high-stakes NYC.

“The whole process of buying an apartment in New York City, it’s overwhelming for them,” Sherry Karas, who picked out and paid for apartments for their daughter and son in Manhattan.

But while it may speed things up and avoid the pain of pricey mistakes, psycological experts tsk-tsked at the idea of helping children through every experience.

“To leapfrog over the entry-level experiences of life deprives you of something,” said Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University and the author of “Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence.” [NYT] —Christopher Cameron