From grad to full-grown: How grads and parents can work together to land that first job

[Ed. note: This belongs to our series of posts featuring tips for recent grads from LinkedIn users. Patricia Pasick is a family psychologist and expert on families in transition. She authored Almost Grown (W. W. Norton, 1998), and writes frequently on young adults and families. Here are some of her tips for newly graduating students, and their parents.]

Tips for graduates:

1. Swallow your well-earned pride and ask parents and relatives to share their networks. It doesn't mean you haven't left the nest. Interviews are landed through connections.

2. Set boundaries. Don't let your folks go hugely to bat for you, or enable you to skip interviews.

3. Enter the family business, or work for a parent? Only if it meets your career goals and only if you report to someone else. It’s tricky. Read some books on family businesses.

4. Need start-up cash or insurance? Ask for monetary graduation gifts. Beyond six months after graduation, make business-like loan agreements with your parents, and share your budget.

5. College loans! Don’t trap yourself by taking the first job, just to make payments. The loans were for you to seriously enter the job market, not just work to pay them off.

Tips for parents:

1. Expect a transition period of a month or so. Procrastination doesn’t mean necessarily mean being stuck.

2. Your best lines:” What can I do to support you right now?” or “Do you want some contacts?”

3. Your greatest gift: expressed confidence in your graduate, even if you have doubts.

4. Please don’t nag or criticize (“Haven’t you filled that out yet?”). Instead, offer a story about how you once helped yourself with feeling discouraged, or stuck.

5. Don’t rescue beyond your means, or help financially without agreed-upon terms.

6. No lessons. The world has changed.