An Open Letter to Parents who Financially Support Adult Children

I write to you not from a place of judgment, but instead I address you based on an immense body of work that has brought me great clarity. The financial support you are offering your adult children is toxic. You are hurting them, you are hurting yourself, and until you realize it’s not money that they need, everyone involved will feel the pain.

Think back to when you taught your child to ride her bicycle without training wheels. Who was more scared? The idea of letting go of a toddler rocketing across concrete with little protection is terrifying. If you let go, she will fall — she will bleed. If you don’t, she will never learn to ride the most elementary transportation device since the invention of feet. Once you let go, and she falls and bleeds, she will quickly learn that balance and control equal the absence of pain. At that moment, everyone moves on with their life
Assuming your now twenty- or thirty-something can ride their bike without training wheels, what was the primary element in their initial bike-riding achievement? It was your willingness to remove yourself from the situation, with the disturbing knowledge your absence would result in pain.
If you are still supporting your adult child, your absence will lead to their success — not your financial support. You have to remove yourself from the situation.

As you look at your adult child’s life, what is missing? Your child lacks skills on budgeting, resourcefulness and, potentially, restraint.
To be fair, if your child’s problems stem from student loans, then their lack of independence actually makes sense. However, you must be willing to acknowledge the amount of debt our children hold is directly correlated to our willingness and ability to pre-fund those college expenses, as well as our willingness to encourage our children to blindly accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, with absolutely no plan to pay it off.
There’s a giant chasm that exists between not being able to pre-fund an education and encouraging your children to pursue what their 18-year-old minds think is an ideal education. That gap can be bridged with uncomfortable conversations and restraint. Ignoring the chasm will result in everyone involved falling in.
In most cases that I’ve seen of parents supporting adult children, the child isn’t allowed to fail because the parent either doesn’t want their child to experience temporary discomfort or the parent doesn’t want to admit that they, as parents, have failed. Regular payments start to feel like penance. When your child lacks the skills to limit their expenses based on their income, that’s as much your failure as it is theirs. Guilt sets in. Checks are written. Nothing is solved.
I don’t want my children to fail, but I look forward to their failures. They build character, resourcefulness and guile. It’s only when I try and mask their failures that their failures become my failure.
The entire discussion around cutting off an adult child can certainly ring of callousness. But your continued support of your adult children will ruin your financial life, and it will ruin their financial life. There are no winners. You believe you are sacrificing for another, but you aren’t. You are the captain of a sinking ship.
One of the primary arguments used to justify this dangerous financial decision is the argument of relativity. You decide to help someone financially because you’re in a relatively better financial situation than they are. It’s a lose-lose situation. You make them more dependent on you as you head toward retirement. That math doesn’t work.
I’d be remiss to not acknowledge scenarios in which financial support is not only warranted, but necessary. Yet, these situations are the exceptions, not the rule.
The way out of your conundrum will be messier than you want. If you can’t articulate to your child why your support is a problem, then that’s where you begin, by better understanding the impact of your entangled financial relationship. If your retirement plan is underfunded, you will work deep into your 70s so that your adult child can avoid understanding how money works.
Remember, your support of them isn’t about the sacrifice of your money. It’s much the opposite. This is about sacrificing your feelings and letting failure be the teacher.