Ask HN: Do you help your parents when they ask you for tech support?

I always help my parents because they bought me my first computer and taught me how to use it and paid the Internet bill for years just for me to learn how to use a computer. And they hardly complained when we had to dial long distance to get on AOL. I don't think I could ever repay that, so I always help no questions asked.

Broadening the question from "parents" to "family members", I treat it like any other request for help. If I owe them a favor, I'll do it no questions asked. Otherwise if I can help and I have time to help and it's not out of my way to help, I'll do it. I'm not going to drive 45 minutes out of my way to spend my Saturday helping my wife's second cousin with their printer unless I owe them a favor, but if they bring it to me at a family event I'm already attending I will give it a try.

To a degree that is proportional to their ability to make use of it. If the the request is "do it for me" its not likely to happen more than once. If it is show me how to ... and they learn this is good. A elderly relative not to be named was embarrassed to have a flip phone while their cronies had smartphones. Three or 4 incidents of failed calls blamed on my choice of phone rather than their ability had them back on the flip phone. Everyone was happier and the calls went through.

This was true of my small business consulting days years ago. If the business (owner, management, workers) want the change and could ( in my opinion) maintain it then then I bid on it otherwise not.

Those companies I am still aware of that said "do it for me" have had multiple service provider because of burnout or boredom of the service provider. They were developers or configured specialty applications. They were not interested in doing the companies daily backups.

The ones that learned kept coming back for more projects that were helping them move forward and kept me interested.

Sure. Their tech "problems" are not even serious, so it usually takes me a few minutes to solve them.

Yes.

I have managed to switch both my mother and my father over to macOS, which significantly cuts down the amount of time I need to spend on helping them out with their computers.

I helped to teach my dad how to program, so that his IT problems would be more interesting