Why do Greek parents not allow their grown children to take care of themselves?

So let me tell you an anecdote.

I have a relative in Greece of roughly my age, who was studying at university away from home, 20-odd years ago. (Since “home” is a town of 7000 people with only a nursing school, that’s not hard to imagine.)

Said relative at some stage took a job distributing junk mail. Not an uncommon thing, you’d think, for a uni student wanting to earn a bit of pocket money.

Said relative kept their part time job secret from their parents, and begged me not to tell.

It would have been humiliating to them, if it had got out: it would have implied that they were incapable of supporting their child.

It is, as John Carrick says, a cultural thing. There are different notions between Greek and “Western” society on how important the family is vs the individual, how important it is for an individual to be independent vs interdependent, and how important the family’s face is.