My own parents had a clear fix on the question. Once kids were out of college they were, by definition, no longer kids; they were on their own. Especially if they were married-and whether or not they had finished college. Luckily my brother and I had no medical or other personal emergencies to test their boundaries.
I do know that when I married-in graduate school–my husband’s parents paid our apartment rent for a year (different boundaries). My disapproval was so intense that we said “No thanks” to any parental assistance for our remaining years of school. Thoreau-like, we made our wants few and worked inventively to supply them-meat-stretcher casseroles (meat budget for two was 50 cents per day). Homemade plywood and brick-and-board furniture, cut-paper Christmas ornaments. It was bracing, character-building. Actually, it was fun. It was also, we were fully aware, short term-just until we got our degrees, got our jobs, entered the middle-class lifestyle to which we were born.
Now my two sons are out of school (a J.D. and an M.S.–corporate litigator and city planner) and on their own. They are hardworking, responsible young men. They don’t expect support; they rarely ask or even hint. But they also live on the financial edge and put my pecuniary-aid limits to the test.
The lawyer married a law-school classmate right after they took the bar exam. I provided a $3,000 no-interest, no-time-limit loan for the honeymoon to Italy. He managed to repay $600 in his first year of employment; nothing in the two years since. Should I say “forget it” and make a gift of the rest?
I weigh the situation. High-income two-lawyer couple. Though both worked as much as they could to support their law-school costs, and though both received some parental help with room and board and other costs, they came out of law school with a student-loan debt that, even after three years of repayment installments, still exceeds $25,000. They have car payments. Their high income subjects them to high taxes, so they have bought a house to take advantage of mortgage deductibility. Even a modest house costs lots in the city-where they have to live because her public-service job has a residency requirement. I made a substantial gift toward the down payment. So now there are home costs. And first baby has arrived-more expenses. Professional jobs require looking the part, and expensive networking- clubs, restaurants, weddings and other ceremonial occasions. The trappings–and traps–of affluence. I haven’t the heart to remind my son again of the honeymoon debt.
But I’ve made a boundary. The honeymoon was an optional luxury. The loan, though we don’t mention it, stays on the books.
The second son, the one who had the auto accident, emerged from school debt-free, having worked hard as a university residential-life employee to support his education. But now that he’s out and working as a planner in a small city, he earns only one third as much as his brother. His salary barely qualifies him for the middle class. He has begun an advanced calculus course at the state university to upgrade his skills; the $500 tuition represents an appreciable percentage of his entire salary. He worries about the $10 medical copayments for each of 12 physical-therapy sessions to relieve pain from two herniated discs. His crashed car with no collision insurance represents an economic disaster.
I define a boundary again–generous check for Christmas toward a “new” used car but not enough to pay the entire cost of a car. I give no shirts, sweaters or other customary gifts so that the check becomes a “present,” not a handout.
New occasions will arise to make me check the fine lines. Fresh combinations of circumstances always arrive in our lives. But this is where I am now. I will respond to uninsured medical emergencies. I slant toward gifts that can be rationalized as “investments”–the home down payment; birthday checks stipulated for savings funds, and, especially, assistance for continuing education. I will not incline to make a gift outright for optional luxuries like European honeymoons.
“Poor babies!” I can hear the truly needy-the currently unemployed or unemployable, the underpaid underclass struggling to get by each day-mock my middle-class mother’s angst. “Spoiled middle-class kids with spoiling middle,class parent!”
But whether to give or not to give remains an issue to me–child of the Depression, child of rigid make-your-own-way parenting. It is the middle-class mini-version of the national debate on welfare. Do handouts weaken moral fiber, or is it simple humaneness for the have-mores to help out the have-lesses?
My own modest surpluses come from frugality-penny-pinching, if truth be told-the cautious habit implanted by the thrifty tough love and anxieties of my parents. Was their absolutist way the right way? Is it kinder in the long run to encourage self-sufficiency, toughing it out in hard times, learning to make do or do without? Or is it kinder to help when needed? And what defines need-purely physical survival or some much more complex set of psychic comforts? My kids seem to work harder than we did and with less result; paying for the basics seems harder. Yet their shopping list of “basics” seems longer than ours was, their gratifications less deferred. Where does true necessity end and self-indulgent luxury begin? If they are materialistically spoiled, should their spoilers, those of us who “wanted better for our kids,” help support their habit?
On my map of giving, I struggle with these questions, surveying and resurveying the drawn lines.
