Helping an adult child with rent after a layoff can feel completely different from paying their cellphone bill for the tenth year in a row, but both increasingly fall under the umbrella of parental financial support. A Pew Research Center study found that 59% of parents with children ages 18 to 34 had provided financial help to a child in that age range during the previous year.
The difficult question isn’t whether parents should ever help, because temporary assistance can provide an enormously valuable safety net during college, unemployment, illness, or today’s expensive transition into independent adulthood. The harder question is whether financially supporting adult children has begun undermining the parents’ own financial security. Once retirement contributions, emergency savings, or necessary expenses are being sacrificed, generosity can create a second financial problem instead of solving the first.
