Parents usually want nothing more than to help make their kids' lives better.
But sometimes, according to personal finance personality Dave Ramsey, a parent can end up doing some harm in the process of trying to help.
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Ramsey believes a parent's instinct to protect their children can sometimes mean they won't understand the consequences of poor decision making, which can be unhealthy.
"When parents protect their child from pain and do not let them experience the consequences of their bad decisions, they set them up to repeat the same mistakes over and over again," Ramsey wrote on the Ramsey Solutions website. "Psychologists call this 'enabling.' Teachers call this 'helicopter parenting.' Whatever it’s called, the data is now in that suggests this approach is a big parenting failure."
Ramsey pointed to a Savings.com survey that says 45% of American parents with adult children still support at least one of them financially.
The average monthly total of this support is more than $1,400, according to the survey findings.
"Lest you think I am simply a heartless, out-of-touch boomer, let’s make some clarifications," Ramsey said. "I do believe it is healthy and loving for parents to provide a safety net for an adult child (weird phrase) who has hit some kind of hard times. Illness, divorce and other calamities could give parents an opportunity to temporarily provide support and maybe even a place to live."
"This is a safety net, and this act of love is not a problem, nor has it ever been," he continued. "The problem occurs when these full-grown adults continue on the take indefinitely. This is when the safety net becomes a hammock."
Ramsey talks about how a sense of dignity comes from hard work.
"The act of working hard, having grit and persevering through daily life builds powerful, confident men and women," he wrote. "When we rob our children of the wonderful results of strain, effort, and personal agency, we not only keep them from being their best selves, but we also start to shift society to a bunch of soft, whining, entitled brats in grown-up bodies."
The radio host and author said he is a fan of millenials and Gen Z.
"I have several hundred of the good kind working on our team at Ramsey Solutions, and they are passionate, hardworking, and mission-driven," Ramsey wrote. "The good ones are more philosophical and care more deeply than preceding generations, as a rule. We love them."
"However, the individual members of those generations who are useless to their employer, their spouse, and are of no service to society, are born of helicopter, enabling parents who made sure they got a trophy for breathing air instead of actually winning," he added.
Ramsey emphasized more about dignity, hard work and service to others.
"Parents, you are not loving your baby eagles well when you provide a hammock rather than a safety net," he wrote. "When you clip their wings, they lose their dignity. We should not remove consequences. We should intentionally engage in hard things and acts of noble service at personal loss. We should get tired from hard work."
"Calluses on our hands and our character, earned through stress and strain, are the trophies of service to others," he continued. "Others-centered rather than self-centered people have the best lives."
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