6 ms·

Why is this an issue? I'm in the GenX generation, and I know a lot of people that got help from their parents with college, cars, and even first homes.

pcurve 8y ago
Me too. Am Gen x in 40s. They paid for my $100k college education and I'm eternally grateful, and forever indebted. Nothing is free. Unless you're a low life, you will always feel indebted to them and make up for it through other means.
- pmalynin 8y ago
  I'm a 22 year old immigrant to Canada. Moved there when I was 13. Starting grade 10 I started working, I paid my phone bill, transportation and most other expenses (except of course food and room) I have worked my way through university, bought a car, and will graduate with $20k in student loans that will vanish once I get my sign-on bonus in two months while making more that 2x of my whole household combined. It's very much possible to move up the social ladder in my eyes. Am I a low life? What should I feel indebted about. I'm grateful for their support of my life path, but most people don't have the privilege of living cozy lives.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    When you express it this way you come across sounding like an ungrateful little jerk.
    - pmalynin 8y ago
      You're assuming I don't do anything around the house, don't buy any food, or help my family because a person can only help their family because of indebtedness. I pay $500 every month for my father healthcare, even though I haven't seen him in over 10 years now. This is for the person that I clearly remember beating me as a child. So lets not start about being ungrateful, you know nothing about my life. Your supposition probably says more about yourself than me. But thanks for the ad hominem.
      - astrodust 8y ago
        This context entirely changes the tone of your comment. I'm sorry you had to go through that. The problem is there's far too many entitled people who haven't endured hardship, who have received nothing but support, and describe their situation exactly as you have, that insist they owe your parents nothing. I was trying to convey how your comment sounded, not who you are.
      - jayalpha 8y ago
        "I pay $500 every month for my father healthcare, even though I haven't seen him in over 10 years now." Would you mind explaining: 1. Do you have to pay this? (By law, in some countries you have) 2. Do you pay voluntarily?
        pmalynin 8y ago
        Not that I want to discuss family matters on here... He remained behind because my mother remarried when I was 10, lost his job because of the war and increasingly worsening economic conditions and inflation. If I wasn't paying voluntarily it is very likely he would be begging on the streets without an apartment and anyone to take care of him. I do no want that on my hands. So no and yes.
        true_religion 8y ago
        He is in Canada---that's not one of those countries.
    - illvm 8y ago
      The child didn't choose to be in existence. Being born shouldn't equate to some sort of servitude until your parents pass. In many countries, the parents are legally obligated to provide those things until the child comes of age. You have no information about the parents or the child to make any reasonable assertion on whether or not someone should show gratitude. For example, the parents could have provided an abusive home, and scraps of food.
    - sctb 8y ago
      Personal attacks are not OK on this site. You've done this before; could you please review the guidelines and stop? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - astrodust 8y ago
        I phrased it badly, as I was trying to express how that came across.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  Wait, I’m that age range too. Where on earth did you go 20 years ago that cost $100k?? That sounds like today’s price tag. I went to a state school that cost a couple of grand per semester in the late 90’s.
  - pcurve 8y ago
    That was the running rate for pretty much all ivy. With room board food I think it was quite a bit over 100k.
door5 8y ago
It's an issue that not everyone has access to this support, and whether or not any individual person does is random and dictated by birth
smadge 8y ago
The article suggests that parental support is increasing. Furthermore it seems to be caused by rising rents and non-rising wages making it difficult for young people to support themselves like they largely did in the past.
Kluny 8y ago
Only in that those who aren't getting support are left behind, and feel like failures because they're not able to match the success of their peers, not knowing that they're working with significantly less resources. Also could lead to a lack of sympathy on the part of those who are getting extra help, thinking that those who can't keep up with them are either lazy or less capable, when in fact they are starting from a place of privilege. Causes resentment and division, basically.
- edmundsauto 8y ago
  Is it possible to resolve this? Parents are going to want to help their children over others; people without that help will feel resentful. Seems like a consequence of human nature, and changing the tax incentives won't ameliorate what is essentially an emotional problem. (The issue isn't parents helping their kids, the issue is the reaction to it)
  - trowawee 8y ago
    I think there are a lot of policy changes that could make massive strides towards resolving this. A significantly higher marginal tax rate and a wealth tax would reduce the amount of wealth available to gift. Lowering the amount of money that can be gifted legally would reduce the amount of support that could be offered. Free education and healthcare (and potentially a UBI), forgiving student loans, and some combination of rent control and improved zoning laws (and possibly vacancy taxes) would ameliorate most of the problem areas that people get help with and that cause this resentment. I disagree that this is essentially an emotional problem. This is essentially an inequality problem; the inequality (unsurprisingly) breeds resentment, and trying to fix the resentment without fixing the inequality is just slapping a bandage over a sucking chest wound.
    - edmundsauto 8y ago
      What do you think would be the unintended consequences of the policy changes you mentioned? It seems possible that reducing inequality could have some side effects that might make everyone worse off -- less equality because everyone makes significantly less.
danpalmer 8y ago
It contributes to a lack of social mobility, which is correlated with some negative things. It's likely a cause of reduced happiness in populations, among other things.
- stevenmays 8y ago
  It doesn't contribute to a lack of social mobility. It is a perceived result of a lack of social mobility. And if your parents are in an income bracket, you are probably going to be in that income bracket. The only thing a high number of people getting help from their parents indicates is they might end up worse off than their parents, in income. But you'd need to wait until they've reached their peak earning years to know for sure.
  - krschultz 8y ago
    It definitely contributes to a lack of social mobility. If you are competing with others for zero-sum access to the upper reaches of society and they get substantial assistance from their parents then you don't have as much of a fair chance. The question becomes - how much of a factor does it play? I would think less than the intangible but non material benefits of having higher income parents (your upbringing, the lessons learned from your parents, their professional connections, a safety net that lets you take risk) but more than I would like to have admitted to myself a decade ago.
    - danpalmer 8y ago
      Exactly. My parents just paid for my sister to go and be a host at Camp America, with the explicit intention of it looking good on her CV. I think it's good she's doing it, and for them it's not a lot of money (as it's a paid role, just not paid enough), but it's not something that everyone can afford to do. There has been a lot of criticism of unpaid internships for the same thing, notably in journalism in the UK. This is an industry entirely driven by unpaid internships, or jobs that pay well below what it costs to attend them in central London. As a result, journalism in the UK is a pretty middle-class dominated industry, which itself helps to perpetuate the cycle of low social mobility.
dcole2929 8y ago
It's only a problem in that before this was an accepted and expected practice and now people in this situation are looked down upon for needing help. I say it all the time, Americans have not acknowledged that the rules have changed and the conditions that led to prosperity for the previous generation no longer exist in the same quality and quantity for today's young people.
- folkhack 8y ago
  > I say it all the time, Americans have not acknowledged that the rules have changed and the conditions that led to prosperity for the previous generation no longer exist in the same quality and quantity for today's young people. Yep - and I wish this was more of the conversation ... I'm really playing a completely different game than my late father. The ONLY reason I realize it vs my peers is because both of my parents died by/in my mid-20s and left me nothing going into adulthood. In contrast, I would anecdotally say >60% of my peers are still receiving parental help with everything from childcare, to down payments on houses, etc - even well into their 30's... regardless of income.
xutopia 8y ago
It's an issue because when your parents were young they didn't need a handout to survive. Nowadays the young are unable to offer themselves the same lifestyle their parents had and that's partly because housing cost is through the roof(pun intended) and partly because our wage has not followed with inflation.
- greedo 8y ago
  I think that's doubtful. My mom needed help from my grandparents after her divorce. It would have been really tough to survive as a mother of four living on just child support. The idea that the world was easier in the 70's/80's isn't true in any way.
RobLach 8y ago
Yes, but if everyone you knew wasn’t rich that wouldn’t be the case. For the average person that all sounds ridiculous. If there is more systemic downward pressure then average people wonder how are all these people surviving if they’re claiming to be self-sufficient, and this article aims to reveal that lie.
jihoon796 8y ago
The biggest issue is resentment, although I've personally gotten over it for the most part. The key phrase of the article being "secret" - it took me until junior year of college to realize that the reason a lot of my classmates could eat out wherever they wanted and buy whatever clothes they wanted was due to their parents funding their lifestyle. In comparison, I struggled a lot in college financially (even on a full ride scholarship), as well as fitting in with my peers both academically and culturally. When I had asked my friends how they were able to afford everything, they always told me that they had "money saved up", which I legitimately believed and never really questioned. It really wasn't until I started working and my friends would reminisce about college that I realized that the "money saved up" was really their parents money. Then some of my friends started buying homes: they had "money saved up" and "invested wisely", they claimed, but this time I was wiser because we were working the same job at the same company, and I knew that they spent more money than me. When I started my own company, some of my friends in the tech community said something along the lines of, "how much money are your parents gonna invest?" - which is the same kind of assumed privilege that left me feeling so bitter before. I've definitely grown out it since then and have taken steps to stop comparing myself to others as much, but it's human nature to do so and I think my story will ring true with a lot of people with similar backgrounds. Ultimately, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but I did spend a lot of time saying no to a lot of things (as a result of not having time and/or money) and feeling inadequate as a result. And before anyone says I should "make better friends" - I think our own personal narratives are always biased to sound more self-sufficient than we actually are, so no, I don't blame anyone either.
- anon4lol 8y ago
  I had the opposite experience. My father got laid off the year before I was to enter college. Because of the way financial aid worked at the time, it looked back at three years of parental income. He was cashing out his retirement to keep paying the mortgage and buy groceries, but on paper we were too "rich" to qualify for any financial aid. I worked a full time job and enrolled at a community college at night. I paid my own way and worked hard. I never said no to anything and would travel to remote sites if they needed someone to go. I never took out a school loan. I moved cities for an awesome job and moved in with my best friend from high school. He was on his second year in an engineering program at a major university. I was working full time and going to community college classes at night, while he worked part time and was living on financial aid and loans. I was incredibly jealous. He would go out drinking every night, always had cash to do whatever he wanted, had a nice car, took amazing vacations and I can't tell you how many times I would wake up and see a different girl who spent the night. Later on, when I looked at my peers who were buying houses and nice cars, I had assumed they were doing better than me, had better jobs, or had help. Nope. They were up to their eyeballs in debt. Some lost jobs and lost everything. My best friend ended up moving away after a suicide attempt and never heard what happened to him. Lastly, I decided to go back to school for a second degree in electrical engineering. Not because I needed, but because I wanted the challenge. I had to retake some lower level courses that didn't transfer. Overhearing young adults complain about not having time to do anything, school is so hard, and then talking about the party where they smoked pot all night is just cringe-worthy. You shouldn't feel inadequate at all. I certainly don't.
sparrc 8y ago
It's increasingly the case that your success in life depends on how rich your parents are. Previous generations had less help from parents. I don't think that's because parents wanted to help less, it's because the kids didn't need the help. ie, people in the past were more able to find success on their own, without any parental assistance, which is a better system for people who grow up poor.

pcurve 8y ago

Me too. Am Gen x in 40s. They paid for my $100k college education and I'm eternally grateful, and forever indebted. Nothing is free. Unless you're a low life, you will always feel indebted to them and make up for it through other means.

pmalynin 8y ago
I'm a 22 year old immigrant to Canada. Moved there when I was 13. Starting grade 10 I started working, I paid my phone bill, transportation and most other expenses (except of course food and room) I have worked my way through university, bought a car, and will graduate with $20k in student loans that will vanish once I get my sign-on bonus in two months while making more that 2x of my whole household combined. It's very much possible to move up the social ladder in my eyes. Am I a low life? What should I feel indebted about. I'm grateful for their support of my life path, but most people don't have the privilege of living cozy lives.
- astrodust 8y ago
  When you express it this way you come across sounding like an ungrateful little jerk.
  - pmalynin 8y ago
    You're assuming I don't do anything around the house, don't buy any food, or help my family because a person can only help their family because of indebtedness. I pay $500 every month for my father healthcare, even though I haven't seen him in over 10 years now. This is for the person that I clearly remember beating me as a child. So lets not start about being ungrateful, you know nothing about my life. Your supposition probably says more about yourself than me. But thanks for the ad hominem.
    - astrodust 8y ago
      This context entirely changes the tone of your comment. I'm sorry you had to go through that. The problem is there's far too many entitled people who haven't endured hardship, who have received nothing but support, and describe their situation exactly as you have, that insist they owe your parents nothing. I was trying to convey how your comment sounded, not who you are.
    - jayalpha 8y ago
      "I pay $500 every month for my father healthcare, even though I haven't seen him in over 10 years now." Would you mind explaining: 1. Do you have to pay this? (By law, in some countries you have) 2. Do you pay voluntarily?
      - pmalynin 8y ago
        Not that I want to discuss family matters on here... He remained behind because my mother remarried when I was 10, lost his job because of the war and increasingly worsening economic conditions and inflation. If I wasn't paying voluntarily it is very likely he would be begging on the streets without an apartment and anyone to take care of him. I do no want that on my hands. So no and yes.
      - true_religion 8y ago
        He is in Canada---that's not one of those countries.
  - illvm 8y ago
    The child didn't choose to be in existence. Being born shouldn't equate to some sort of servitude until your parents pass. In many countries, the parents are legally obligated to provide those things until the child comes of age. You have no information about the parents or the child to make any reasonable assertion on whether or not someone should show gratitude. For example, the parents could have provided an abusive home, and scraps of food.
  - sctb 8y ago
    Personal attacks are not OK on this site. You've done this before; could you please review the guidelines and stop? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - astrodust 8y ago
      I phrased it badly, as I was trying to express how that came across.
ryandrake 8y ago
Wait, I’m that age range too. Where on earth did you go 20 years ago that cost $100k?? That sounds like today’s price tag. I went to a state school that cost a couple of grand per semester in the late 90’s.
- pcurve 8y ago
  That was the running rate for pretty much all ivy. With room board food I think it was quite a bit over 100k.

door5 8y ago

It's an issue that not everyone has access to this support, and whether or not any individual person does is random and dictated by birth

smadge 8y ago

The article suggests that parental support is increasing. Furthermore it seems to be caused by rising rents and non-rising wages making it difficult for young people to support themselves like they largely did in the past.

Kluny 8y ago

Only in that those who aren't getting support are left behind, and feel like failures because they're not able to match the success of their peers, not knowing that they're working with significantly less resources. Also could lead to a lack of sympathy on the part of those who are getting extra help, thinking that those who can't keep up with them are either lazy or less capable, when in fact they are starting from a place of privilege. Causes resentment and division, basically.

edmundsauto 8y ago
Is it possible to resolve this? Parents are going to want to help their children over others; people without that help will feel resentful. Seems like a consequence of human nature, and changing the tax incentives won't ameliorate what is essentially an emotional problem. (The issue isn't parents helping their kids, the issue is the reaction to it)
- trowawee 8y ago
  I think there are a lot of policy changes that could make massive strides towards resolving this. A significantly higher marginal tax rate and a wealth tax would reduce the amount of wealth available to gift. Lowering the amount of money that can be gifted legally would reduce the amount of support that could be offered. Free education and healthcare (and potentially a UBI), forgiving student loans, and some combination of rent control and improved zoning laws (and possibly vacancy taxes) would ameliorate most of the problem areas that people get help with and that cause this resentment. I disagree that this is essentially an emotional problem. This is essentially an inequality problem; the inequality (unsurprisingly) breeds resentment, and trying to fix the resentment without fixing the inequality is just slapping a bandage over a sucking chest wound.
  - edmundsauto 8y ago
    What do you think would be the unintended consequences of the policy changes you mentioned? It seems possible that reducing inequality could have some side effects that might make everyone worse off -- less equality because everyone makes significantly less.

danpalmer 8y ago

It contributes to a lack of social mobility, which is correlated with some negative things. It's likely a cause of reduced happiness in populations, among other things.

stevenmays 8y ago
It doesn't contribute to a lack of social mobility. It is a perceived result of a lack of social mobility. And if your parents are in an income bracket, you are probably going to be in that income bracket. The only thing a high number of people getting help from their parents indicates is they might end up worse off than their parents, in income. But you'd need to wait until they've reached their peak earning years to know for sure.
- krschultz 8y ago
  It definitely contributes to a lack of social mobility. If you are competing with others for zero-sum access to the upper reaches of society and they get substantial assistance from their parents then you don't have as much of a fair chance. The question becomes - how much of a factor does it play? I would think less than the intangible but non material benefits of having higher income parents (your upbringing, the lessons learned from your parents, their professional connections, a safety net that lets you take risk) but more than I would like to have admitted to myself a decade ago.
  - danpalmer 8y ago
    Exactly. My parents just paid for my sister to go and be a host at Camp America, with the explicit intention of it looking good on her CV. I think it's good she's doing it, and for them it's not a lot of money (as it's a paid role, just not paid enough), but it's not something that everyone can afford to do. There has been a lot of criticism of unpaid internships for the same thing, notably in journalism in the UK. This is an industry entirely driven by unpaid internships, or jobs that pay well below what it costs to attend them in central London. As a result, journalism in the UK is a pretty middle-class dominated industry, which itself helps to perpetuate the cycle of low social mobility.

dcole2929 8y ago

It's only a problem in that before this was an accepted and expected practice and now people in this situation are looked down upon for needing help. I say it all the time, Americans have not acknowledged that the rules have changed and the conditions that led to prosperity for the previous generation no longer exist in the same quality and quantity for today's young people.

folkhack 8y ago
> I say it all the time, Americans have not acknowledged that the rules have changed and the conditions that led to prosperity for the previous generation no longer exist in the same quality and quantity for today's young people. Yep - and I wish this was more of the conversation ... I'm really playing a completely different game than my late father. The ONLY reason I realize it vs my peers is because both of my parents died by/in my mid-20s and left me nothing going into adulthood. In contrast, I would anecdotally say >60% of my peers are still receiving parental help with everything from childcare, to down payments on houses, etc - even well into their 30's... regardless of income.

xutopia 8y ago

It's an issue because when your parents were young they didn't need a handout to survive. Nowadays the young are unable to offer themselves the same lifestyle their parents had and that's partly because housing cost is through the roof(pun intended) and partly because our wage has not followed with inflation.

greedo 8y ago
I think that's doubtful. My mom needed help from my grandparents after her divorce. It would have been really tough to survive as a mother of four living on just child support. The idea that the world was easier in the 70's/80's isn't true in any way.

RobLach 8y ago

Yes, but if everyone you knew wasn’t rich that wouldn’t be the case. For the average person that all sounds ridiculous. If there is more systemic downward pressure then average people wonder how are all these people surviving if they’re claiming to be self-sufficient, and this article aims to reveal that lie.

jihoon796 8y ago

The biggest issue is resentment, although I've personally gotten over it for the most part. The key phrase of the article being "secret" - it took me until junior year of college to realize that the reason a lot of my classmates could eat out wherever they wanted and buy whatever clothes they wanted was due to their parents funding their lifestyle. In comparison, I struggled a lot in college financially (even on a full ride scholarship), as well as fitting in with my peers both academically and culturally. When I had asked my friends how they were able to afford everything, they always told me that they had "money saved up", which I legitimately believed and never really questioned. It really wasn't until I started working and my friends would reminisce about college that I realized that the "money saved up" was really their parents money. Then some of my friends started buying homes: they had "money saved up" and "invested wisely", they claimed, but this time I was wiser because we were working the same job at the same company, and I knew that they spent more money than me. When I started my own company, some of my friends in the tech community said something along the lines of, "how much money are your parents gonna invest?" - which is the same kind of assumed privilege that left me feeling so bitter before. I've definitely grown out it since then and have taken steps to stop comparing myself to others as much, but it's human nature to do so and I think my story will ring true with a lot of people with similar backgrounds. Ultimately, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but I did spend a lot of time saying no to a lot of things (as a result of not having time and/or money) and feeling inadequate as a result. And before anyone says I should "make better friends" - I think our own personal narratives are always biased to sound more self-sufficient than we actually are, so no, I don't blame anyone either.

anon4lol 8y ago
I had the opposite experience. My father got laid off the year before I was to enter college. Because of the way financial aid worked at the time, it looked back at three years of parental income. He was cashing out his retirement to keep paying the mortgage and buy groceries, but on paper we were too "rich" to qualify for any financial aid. I worked a full time job and enrolled at a community college at night. I paid my own way and worked hard. I never said no to anything and would travel to remote sites if they needed someone to go. I never took out a school loan. I moved cities for an awesome job and moved in with my best friend from high school. He was on his second year in an engineering program at a major university. I was working full time and going to community college classes at night, while he worked part time and was living on financial aid and loans. I was incredibly jealous. He would go out drinking every night, always had cash to do whatever he wanted, had a nice car, took amazing vacations and I can't tell you how many times I would wake up and see a different girl who spent the night. Later on, when I looked at my peers who were buying houses and nice cars, I had assumed they were doing better than me, had better jobs, or had help. Nope. They were up to their eyeballs in debt. Some lost jobs and lost everything. My best friend ended up moving away after a suicide attempt and never heard what happened to him. Lastly, I decided to go back to school for a second degree in electrical engineering. Not because I needed, but because I wanted the challenge. I had to retake some lower level courses that didn't transfer. Overhearing young adults complain about not having time to do anything, school is so hard, and then talking about the party where they smoked pot all night is just cringe-worthy. You shouldn't feel inadequate at all. I certainly don't.

sparrc 8y ago

It's increasingly the case that your success in life depends on how rich your parents are. Previous generations had less help from parents. I don't think that's because parents wanted to help less, it's because the kids didn't need the help. ie, people in the past were more able to find success on their own, without any parental assistance, which is a better system for people who grow up poor.