When Should A Parent Stop Paying For a Child?
I came across a Wall Street Journal article today about parents picking up expenses for adult children. They asked experts about the expenses parents pick up for their kids in their late teens and early 20’s - which ones should be cut off, and which ones they should continue to pay due to the unprecedented times we live in.
I’ve always felt strongly about parents not picking up a child’s expenses once they reach a certain age, or a certain stage of life. Certainly each child and parent’s situation is different. In this line of work, I have seen grown adults (I’m talking mid twenties to thirties) have their parents purchase them a home. I’ve seen grown adults still ask for counsel from their parents on literally every aspect of their lives.
Most of the experts say that clients who don’t have unlimited resources should NOT be paying for an adult child’s expenses such as cell phone bill, Netflix, gym memberships, car insurance, etc. They should be putting that money to retirement if they are not already retired. If you can keep a family cell phone plan and get a better deal, so be it, but make sure the adult child pays their portion.
The only exceptions to this would be is if the child is a full-time student, they say. If they don’t have the time to earn enough money to pay things such as rent and basic expenses, it’s OK to help them out. But those items should be filtered out once they graduate and are old enough to find work and pay for the items themselves.
They also have a good point in that we are essentially a cashless society. Everything we do is on a credit or debit card, or otherwise charged to an account, such as Amazon purchases, and sometimes parents don’t pay attention.
I have kids that are 10 and 14. I have given them both debit cards that I can load, and have no overdrafts, meaning, they can’t spend or charge or get penalized for spending what is not in the account. It’s a good way for them to start learning to budget. There’s a big ticket ($80) item my son wants to buy, so he has the ability to set a goal and tuck money into “savings” to achieve this goal. My 14 also is employed by my office. All that filing I don’t want to do? He gets paid to do it. It is a win-win for me. I don’t have to do it, and he can make money doing it.
I grew up in Gen X. I had a job starting when I was 12 or 13 babysitting. I did corn detasseling (which at the time was about $15 a hour and amazing money compared to the minimum wage which I’m sure was just under $4.00 an hour. I worked consistently my entire life. I had at least one job in high school. In college, I had at least two jobs consistently, all the time, and still managed to graduate with a double major and good grades. In law school, I worked a full-time job and went to school at night. Now, most kids don’t even work.
The importance of having a job as a teenager shouldn’t be overlooked. The importance of a child learning responsibility, how to deal with people, bosses, co-workers and job schedules is so important. We’ve lost sight of this in the past decade or two, especially with technology and the ability to not have to have personal, face-to-face contact with anyone on a regular basis.
