Most Americans Say Parents Do Too Much for Their Young Adult Children

> most Americans (64%) think young adults should reach [financial independence] by the time they are 22 years old... Census Bureau data finds that, in 2018, 24% of young adults were financially independent by age 22 or younger, compared with 32% in 1980

This divergence is symptomatic of a broken society. It's easier to divide a bigger pie. The pie was bigger in 1980 and now we are dividing up the crumbs, so it's harder to get enough.

Parents helping their children longer in life is really the only solution. It's basically like, those who achieved financial independence in 1980 did so by taking from future generations, their own children, and are now being chastised for giving some of it back.

It's nonsensical to admonish parents for helping their children overcome the burdens society has placed on future generations by having already taken too much from the planet.

Let's just look at the burdens:

  College education costs are soaring
  Housing costs are soaring
  Healthcare costs are soaring
  Jobs are diminishing
  Salaries are flat

Of course parents have to help their children longer.

At the age of 28, I still receive help from my mother. She buys me food periodically and has given me well over $1500 this year to help survive.

That being said, I grew up in an abusive household, followed up by one that was incredibly unstable. I was incarcerated from most 16-21, with very little time out in the real world during that time.

Another person responding to this mentioned that parents "either pay for it now or later."

I find that to be incredibly true. I think that my mother helps me so much now because she sees how much I've struggled and how some of that struggle is inevitably due to her choices. I don't blame her, but(and this may sound incredibly entitled to some)I don't think she has too much of a right to throw me to the wolves so to speak. I can't remember a time I've been stable outside of the past 2-3 years and even now, I'm actively using IV opiates. A large chunk of my life seemed very much outside of my hands at a younger age and I don't necessarily know how much more I could've done for myself other than get to the point I'm at now.

I think a lot of people are messed up and need a lot of help. I think that if you make the decision to bring someone into this world, you don't stop being responsible for them after an arbitrary amount of rotations around the sun.

I'm pretty sure 90% of my friends and peers in the 21 - 25 cohort receive financial help from their parents. This is due to the fact that they're either still in school, which is increasingly expensive, or that they can't find full-time jobs in their chosen fields, or that they've chosen to live at home to save money.

The past 30 years have been marked by the Great Recession, rising inequality and stagnant wages. What a surprise that the current young adult generation needs more financial help than their forebears!

As a parent of a 24 year old, it's easy for me to see how it can be hard to determine when it's time for your child to become financially independent.

Our decision making was made easy by a child who happily entered our least expensive state school, didn't mind living with us during school, and interned while in college straight into a stable job/career the day after graduation.

In rocketry terms, we had a good main engine burn to put him in GTO, now he's the ignited second stage, and we had a nominal launch.

Subtract any of the above (ideal) values, and I can see how a parent/child group can devolve into a possibly unhealthy situation.

Even with a plan for independence, the vagaries of life can easily lead the parties to want to alter the deal in light of adverse events.

As the parent of a four-year-old, I'm especially aware of what's happening among parents and children. And as a 50-year old, I've seen several generations grow up. What this situation involves is: pay now, or pay later. Doing everything you can and giving your child 100% when they're young and growing and learning is the time to teach them to be independent and confident. Not when they're 20+ years old. It's too late; you missed the train. And what parents say they do vs. what they do in reality is quite different. I watch it at playgrounds, kids' events, and each time I go with my daughter to a place with a lot of kids and their parents. The parents likely are looking at their phones or talking to one another, taking a "break" from parenting. I see parents bring their little kids to playgrounds, and they'll stay in their cars, and let the kids go run around with the playground and want me to push them in the swings and play with them, because their parents are in the car on their phone, smoking weed, listening to music, or just "taking a break." I see it all the time. And if that's the encouragement and attention they're giving them in public, it's likely even less back at home. But when they grow up to be helpless and have no coping skills and all the rest of the many characteristics that need to be instilled into a human to be a successfull adult, they scratch their heads and ask "what went wrong?" And usually try ot find fault with society, government, or some external factor that's responsible. They blew it.

Most Americans don't know what humans need to thrive, believe in Independence over interdependence, and think denying children their needs is what's necessary.

My mother in law thinks we're raising a self-centered child because we immediately meet their needs. She's ignorant of trauma and the effects her parenting style had on my partner. She's only now learning about body autonomy. We had to ask her not to make our child the butt of jokes, especially those that play on our kid's lack of understanding or difficulty communicating clearly.

Our child only just turned one. I'm pretty sure the grandma who insists on investing in Bitcoin despite its environmental impact to further her own wealth is projecting a lot of nonsense.

That's what happens when someone raises a child to deny reality and believe in their own projected judgments: you get a confused old person who is unintentionally advising others to harm children by denying their needs.

There is nothing new to me about how she thinks. It's the norm for almost all the adults I grew up around.

I mean, I wasn't financially independent from my family until I was 25. Living with my parents for free and using the savings to afford college was the only reason why I was able to get a college education and become a developer.

I think the idea of kicking people out the moment they hit 18 isn't realistic anymore. Wages are not even high enough to be self-sufficient, let alone afford college without taking out exorbitant loans. Most of my college experience was spending hours past-class completing projects and doing extensive homework, so fitting in a job along with taking care of my disabled parents and trying to manage depression would've been a herculean effort. I already had to sacrifice quite a bit of my personal health in order to gamble on my college education leading to a good career.

Am I the only one to notice the questions in the graph don't have a logical correlation? If you translate them, most older adults think most younger adults should be independant, while most younger adults aren't.

This is just the complicated version of "youths are lazy". I find it intellectually dishonest to put the two questions in the same graph, as if one generations expectations should logically influence or be informed by the other's actions.

Middle-class parents are desperately trying to obtain a middle-class life for their kids, in the face of a shrinking middle class. Many of them will fail. They'll blame themselves, or their kids.

Some of the kids are on the track from career to job to gig to homelessness. Or jail.

Maybe those same people shouldn’t have voted for politicians who gutted public education and unions and made it impossible to build housing near any desirable jobs.

I actually think most twenty-somethings should live with their parents as I believe that is a particularly perilous age range.

In other news, old man shakes fist at cloud!

Americans have a very weak sense of family. We think our children should be independent the moment they turn 18 and then put our parents in homes instead of taking care of them ourselves.

If you're in your mid-20s and still get help from your parents then you really need to figure out what's going wrong. A parent's responsibility is to give a child the tools to succeed on their own as soon as possible. But most people are lousy parents who think their method doesn't suck and those flaws survive from generation to generation.