In 2009, two years after enlisting in the military, I was nineteen years old stationed at what was then called McChord Air Force Base in Washington state. I earned about fourteen hundred dollars a month. Some friends and I received permission to move into a house off base. That was when I learned what renting costs on the first day: first month’s rent, last month’s rent, and a security deposit. To secure the rental, I emptied my bank account.
A few days later, the belt I had worn since high school broke. I could not afford another one, so I went two weeks without a belt and made up an excuse to my roommates about why I couldn’t join them to see the first “Avatar” film.
I grew up in foster homes, and my adoptive mother, who lived in a tiny rent-controlled apartment in California, was in no position to help. I recall the admiration I felt for the parents of one of my roommates at the time, who helped us purchase some used furniture for our living room.
Later, after I was honorably discharged, the GI Bill paid for my education.
That is the basic issue in the current argument over whether parents should help their adult children. Some young adults receive help with a rental deposit, childcare, education, or living expenses. Others receive nothing. Many people find this unfair.
This bothers me much less than the alternative. Parents, if they are able, should continue helping their children after they become adults. Those children should later, in turn, help their aging parents.
Consider where the money comes from. Suppose a young couple can’t afford childcare. One of three things might happen. Their parents help, or the couple goes without, or someone demands “free” childcare, which is not actually “free.”
A great deal of flawed economic thinking comes from treating institutions as if they were people. Many of us imagine that making the government pay for something is different from making our friends and neighbors pay for it. The philosophy professor Joseph Heath has suggested that journalists and pundits would clarify matters if they replaced the word “government” with “us all.” For example, “This war will cost us all two hundred million dollars a day,” or “This ‘free’ childcare plan will cost us all fifteen thousand dollars per child per year.”
The fairness objection deserves a serious answer.
The political theorist Shlomi Segall has suggested that if every unearned advantage must be eliminated, then it must eventually come for parents who read bedtime stories to their children, because this gives them a benefit other kids don’t receive.
Segall recognizes that his argument could justify sending officials into every home at bedtime to make sure no child is ever read to. He rejects that proposal because family intimacy is valuable enough to outweigh the unfair advantage. This applies, in my view, to helping one’s adult children, too.
I am not arguing against public support. Money has to come from somewhere. The disagreement is not really about whether young families should receive financial assistance, but whether that help should come from the family or from the state.
There is also an argument for giving money earlier. Most inheritances arrive when the recipient is in his or her fifties, when the money is less useful. A publicist in her late thirties, quoted in New York magazine’s The Cut, explained that she would rather receive one hundred thousand dollars now than one million dollars in twenty years.
She described a friend whose parents gave each child two thousand dollars a month while they were still alive, rather than leaving a large sum after death. She admitted that wanting the same arrangement felt embarrassing. It shouldn’t. Money does more good when it pays for daycare than when it pays for a swimming pool.
The writer Louise Perry adds another point. Parental help can come with conditions that encourage the transition into independent adulthood. Get married, and we will help you buy your first home. Parents have always used money and property to encourage their children toward the milestones of adult life. There is no reason to pretend otherwise.
Obligations are strongest where relationships are closest. Abstract claims about fairness are cheap. Specific duties to our loved ones are expensive.
Parents should not be ashamed to give their children an advantage. Giving children advantages is one of the purposes of a family. The duty does not end when a child turns eighteen, just as the child’s duty does not end when a parent grows old.
At nineteen, I had no family member who could offer financial support. Later, the GI Bill paid for my education, and I remain thankful. But I would not wish on anyone a life in which the only help available comes from an institution. A society in which every need must travel through the state is a society that has given up on any notion of family obligation.
The answer to unequal family support is not to shame the families that still provide it (though some light ribbing is obviously fine). The answer is to encourage more parents and children to remain bound to one another, across adulthood, old age, and every challenging year in between.
A version of this article was originally published by The Times under the title “What we can learn from ‘nepo babies’ — and their generous parents.”
Complaining of an unfair advantage from parents trying to make their kids lives better is another piece of the program to make everyone equally miserable.
By the same logic:
- I won't eat healthily because others aren't eating healthily.
- I won't exercise because others don't exercise.
- I won't make good decisions because others don't make good decisions.
- etc.
Do your best damn it, for yourself and your children. Don't block others, but you aren't obligated to stifle yourself because others fail to try.
Thanks for this clarity; there’s a generally good presumption in American culture that the only success is the earned one and that assistance from family somehow detracts from that. The nepotistic exceptions don’t prove a rule that family shouldn’t help; otherwise what’s the point of working so hard as a parent? It is character formation that is critical.