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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

That's really sad, 1 in 4 millennials don't have parents that care? I think by their thin definition of "help" they would find that probably 9 out of 10 baby boomers received "help". I had help from my in-laws when my wife and I were putting together a down payment on our first house, I helped my eldest daughter come up with the first security deposit for her first apartment after college. My middle and younger daughters have both been "helped" by the ACA because I can keep them on my company health insurance plan.

Pretty poor excuse for journalism in my opinion.

EDIT: see my response for toomuchtodo for my actual perspective here, once again I've been schooled in how written communication is so different than face to face conversations. Added to my favorites list as a reminder to contextualize, contextualize, contextualize ...

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Hey Chuck! Millennial here (just turned 34).

My father and mother were divorced ~18-19 years ago (one of the most financially devastating events that can occur in your life) due to my mother's alcoholism. It took him years to break even, and at 64, he has less saved for retirement then I do. He continues to work a full time job as long as he can to save for retirement (he believes he'll make it through retirement on his own, while I'm sure I will have to support him at some point; I am fine with this). My mother is disabled, legit disabled, but not from her many years of alcoholism; her lower spinal column has been reconstructed due to a degenerative bone disorder and she has MS. The Social Security Administration deems her as not disabled, as she can still stand for ~3-5 minutes at a time. I support her entirely until she can collect social security at 62 in three years. (EDIT: Before the ACA, she was much worse off; her medications were costing me upwards of $1000/month, causing me an incredible amount of stress between my wife and I [my moral compass does not permit me to deny my mother necessary healthcare], and I was seriously contemplating transporting her pharmaceuticals across the Canadian border to lower the monthly financial outlay). My younger brother refused to help me with any of her financial expenses; we have not spoken in over 2 years.

Don't be so quick to discount parents didn't help because they didn't want to. In most cases, I'm confident the problem is they simply can't. I know I'm not alone in speaking to others about this. People out there are suffering, badly.

EDIT: This is far more than I'd ever really care to share in a public forum, but people need to know what is going on behind the curtain causing people to take the actions that they do. Do you want to know what True Grit is? I will teach you.

EDIT 2: (ffs HN throttling)

Chuck: I hope you didn't take my comment as calling you out. Nothing could be further from the truth! Personally, I'm seeing a lot of people in bad shape financially and personally, and its not being reported on, or when it is reported on, people don't believe it.

So I'm here to give a first hand PIREP of the situation. And it is fucking bad.

Ok, wow.

My initial take on this article was "This is a crappy piece of journalism which takes some arbitrary facts and tries to use it to criticize millennials." My observation is that generally crappy journalism can be easily exposed and lampooned by inverting the headline's wording which doesn't change its meaning but flips its implication. So "3 out of 4 millennials get helped by parents" flipped is "1 out 4 parents of millennials don't help them." The first might be interpreted that millennials are slackers and the other might be that baby boomers are lousy parents. Both implications are unwarranted and wrong. And that is the hallmark of crappy journalism. There is no interpretation of this headline which conveys useful information.

As a parent, and having been around thousands of parents and read many surveys of parents, there is a common theme. The majority of the time they want to help their kids in any way they can. It is instinctual. Further, any assistance parents give their grown children can be interpreted as "financial" assistance, from babysitting the grand children to giving them the old sofa that has been in the basement for the last 10 years. And that in no way reflects on the character of the children, aka the millennials, in this piece.

That said, I never intended to imply that parents who could not help their children should be criticized. My use of the inversion device would have the headline imply that, and I would disagree with a story based on that just as much as I do the current one.

> "3 out of 4 millennials get helped by parents" flipped is "1 out 4 parents of millennials don't help them."

"Don't help them" != "don't care" so that's not inversion. You added that negative implication. Maybe you didn't mean to. I'll take you at your word on that, but attempts to deflect the reaction back to the OP seem disingenuous.

I am not attempting to deflect reaction, it is real and it is heartfelt and I understand how people reached the conclusion that I was insulting parents who did not provide financial support to their children.

I wrote it poorly and had I been talking face to face with someone one I hope I would have seen them getting angry and immediately sought out the disagreement between what I thought I was saying and what was being heard. Here its a bit more difficult and it once again reminded me of that.

To your specific criticism, you are correct that I added the connotation. When I read the original title I also added the connotation that "have received financial help" was "are slackers". And I disagreed with that strongly as well. You can receive help from your parents and not be a slacker.

And I recognize that for some portion of the people reading here they read my headline inversion literally rather than as a critique because of the lack of context. If I were to rewrite it, it would have started with

"I disagree strongly with the implication of the headline, you might as well write 1 in 4 parents don't help their millennial children and I would disagree with that too."

And then we could talk about the poorly defined notion of "help" and the question of privilege and whether or not that is an objective thing or a subjective one, and if its objective how do we define it.

To be fair, I think his main point was that the article was trashy for suggesting that millenials receiving help was unusual (and not to bash the parents of the 1 in 4).

If that's the case, mea culpa. I'm simply here to provide perspective.

Good luck on the SSA disability. We just went through that process, for my Significant Other. It took 3 tries, but when it went in front of a judge, it was finally granted. In her case, it is Fibromyalgia, Chrons, and the start of RA.

And from others I've talked to, unless you are in a wheelchair (and maybe not even then), they will automatically deny you multiple times, until a hearing is scheduled. From what I understand, it acts as a filter for people that can "technically" go back to work (even if they are in extreme pain, if someone doesn't have others to support them, many applicants don't have a choice but to work when they really shouldn't).

Wow man, exact same situation for me (though it was my dad instead of my mom). I've had 0 help since college, and I paid for 1/2 of college while assuming all of the debt.

But I also wouldn't expect any help after college - I'm an adult now, and need to handle it myself.

Seek out support from friends and family you trust, even if its simply emotional support. I had no one to turn to, so even though I've carried on each day, I'm slowly turning into a nihilist. Don't be like me.

What do you mean by True Grit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2316174/Does-true-gr...

> That's really sad, 1 in 4 millennials don't have parents that care?

My parents were inner city teachers...they couldn't really afford to help out with undergrad/grad school/later in life. The lack of perspective you're showing is one of the reasons why I don't enjoy hanging out with the tech crowd.

Lack of perspective may just be lack of experience. Sharing yours helps people broaden theirs, so thanks for doing that!

I received no financial help post-college from my family because I didn't need it. My starting salary was twice what my dad made at the time and my sister had just begun college. I had saved up money myself from working during college to pay for my first month's rent. It's not that they didn't care, it's that I didn't need it and was off to a far better start.

Same here. My parents have given of their time (occasional babysitting), but haven't needed to give financially. The only thing in that report that I've received was a period of a few months of living with my parents after college before getting my own apartment. I worked during college to pay for the portion of that cost that wasn't paid for by scholarships, so I had no debt after college. It's not that they didn't want to help financially, it's that it wasn't needed. My wife is in the same situation with her parents. They support with their time, but financial support isn't needed.

Could I have done more, had an easier time starting out on my own, or gone on vacations with financial support from my parents? Probably, but I don't think that's necessary. My parents taught me what I needed to succeed on my own and that's what I see as important.

Ditto. I had a job lined up before graduation, and ended up living with my parents for 2 months before I started work. My parents were better off than yours, but I started pretty well myself. I had the money for the suits I interviewed in, a couple months of rent, some starter furniture, and my living expenses during that time.

Of course "post-college" is a key phrase. I wouldn't have been where I was if my parents hadn't paid almost all of my college expenses and bought me a car a couple years in. My mother had similar help during her college years, but my father didn't, and the two of them provided a similar boost to my 2 siblings, as well.

> 1 in 4 millennials don't have parents that care

Wow. Is that really how you see it? Most parents care, they don't all have the same amount of money.

That said, I knew one parent that would demand student loan money from her kid during college.

in my generation we grew expecting to bust our tails and make it in the world. Perhaps coming only a generation or two removed from the Great Depression put a different spin on things.

Even though my parents were doing very well there wasn't this concept of loading children down with gifts and such they clamored for because it can lead to disappointment later on or worse dependence.

When push came to shove I know more than a few who did a stint in the service to shore up finances, teach responsibility, and save up for college. Perhaps its a regional thing, but we never though of deserving more than the chance to try and succeed but recent generations come across as wanting it all now

> in my generation we grew expecting to bust our tails and make it in the world

I respect the attitude, but realize that times are different now. It's just not possible in a lot of situations to do this.

Since I don't know the generation you grew up in, I'm going to assume the 60s. Which means you would be getting started in the 80s.

In the 80s a "basket of goods" (CPI) was 3x cheaper. And that's assuming they haven't hacked the numbers to make that report seem a bit nicer. Meanwhile, wages have stagnated and college tuition has increased substantially. They are also dealing with obesity epidemic, never-ending war, and the impending doom of climate change.

So those kids are just not in as good a position to succeed.

>They are also dealing with obesity epidemic, never-ending war, and the impending doom of climate change.

I can picture it now. A cry echos from many basements in America: "MOM I CAN'T GET A JOB, CLIMATE CHANGE!"

I'm 27 and a high school drop out. I've supported myself since I was 18 and own my home. war, climate change, and obesity (I'm not a thin man) never prevented me from getting a job.

> I'm 27 and a high school drop out. I've supported myself since I was 18 and own my home.

Nice, that's not easy. And if it was 50% harder to do, you might have been able to do it anyway. But there is some threshold where you would not have been able to. It might be 200%, 500%, 1000%, but there's a line somewhere.

> war, climate change, and obesity

This was more to point out how different the world is now, not provide excuses for laziness.

I think America is in a state of flux in terms of society's perspective on the appropriate level of financial independence of young adults. For baby boomers it seemed like you hit 18 and were ''up and out'' and expected to make it on your own. If you didn't, you were looked down upon as lazy or a mooch. But looking back at history, that attitude is an extreme anomaly. I just finished reading a fantastic book about Winston Churchill's personal finances: ''No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money'' [http://fave.co/2gSQoYF]. Besides being like crack cocaine for any Churchill fan it is a fascinating look at the personal finances of successful families in Britain 1700(ish) through post WW2. Families were successful because of their ability to pass lasting, sustainable, income-producing wealth down the generations, where it seems to have been used, by the cleverest heirs, to pursue career opportunities that were closed to those without means. And of course this was considered totally normal and expected, and if you didn't receive assistance, you were at a relative disadvantage. It wouldn't surprise me if we are headed back to some sort of hybrid system like this where if in 50 years you live in a very expensive coastal city it becomes reasonable to assume that your family contributed the majority of the resources needed for your lifestyle. Housing prices in these areas in particular have become so expensive that it's hard to foresee another outcome.

Demographic change might be part of this. I told my wife (who is NOT American) that my plan was that our kid will be either paying us rent or out of the house after turning 18. She was horrified, coming from a culture where children kind of stick around their parent's homes well into adulthood. This behavior might be totally acceptable depending on the household.

What if your kid came to you and said they wanted to live at home for a few years after college to save up $? Presuming that you all get along and they are progressing towards mutually agreeable goals. Related to this is what kind of care you expect from children when you are very old and infirm (and to say you have no expectations seems unrealistic).

This. We are headed to a slow-growth society, in which existing wealth is much more important than new income (yeah, I like Piketty). It's not only in the US, also in Europe.

> That's really sad, 1 in 4 millennials don't have parents that care?

Maybe most of those have sufficient money and don't need any parental financial aid?

Agreed with the others here that your experience seems rather sheltered. You had luxuries that many, many others didn't have. It's incredibly unfair and borderline insulting of you to say that those parents "don't care".

Life isn't that simple, man..

Mine died before I finished my second year of college. Mother was a homemaker; father was a self-employed social worker. There was drug problems in the family. There wasn't much to divide between all of us. Grew up poor to begin with, and started working when I was 15. I'd work earlier if only I was allowed.

If parents can help - great, but I would not see this as anything but a real, amazing privilege to have. Honor it, and love you parents back.

For what it's worth, I interpreted your comment pretty much exactly as you intended it. And I could see myself stepping in it in the same way.

Reasons besides "didn't want to help":

1) Parents are deceased (mine have been dead for decades, for example, so they couldn't)

2) Estranged from parents (people I know have had little no/contact due to irreconcilable differences)

3) Parents are too poor to help

4) Adult child makes enough money to not need help

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