That's really sad, 1 in 4 millennials don't have parents that care? I think by their thin definition of "help" they would find that probably 9 out of 10 baby boomers received "help". I had help from my in-laws when my wife and I were putting together a down payment on our first house, I helped my eldest daughter come up with the first security deposit for her first apartment after college. My middle and younger daughters have both been "helped" by the ACA because I can keep them on my company health insurance plan.
Pretty poor excuse for journalism in my opinion.
EDIT: see my response for toomuchtodo for my actual perspective here, once again I've been schooled in how written communication is so different than face to face conversations. Added to my favorites list as a reminder to contextualize, contextualize, contextualize ...
My father and mother were divorced ~18-19 years ago (one of the most financially devastating events that can occur in your life) due to my mother's alcoholism. It took him years to break even, and at 64, he has less saved for retirement then I do. He continues to work a full time job as long as he can to save for retirement (he believes he'll make it through retirement on his own, while I'm sure I will have to support him at some point; I am fine with this). My mother is disabled, legit disabled, but not from her many years of alcoholism; her lower spinal column has been reconstructed due to a degenerative bone disorder and she has MS. The Social Security Administration deems her as not disabled, as she can still stand for ~3-5 minutes at a time. I support her entirely until she can collect social security at 62 in three years. (EDIT: Before the ACA, she was much worse off; her medications were costing me upwards of $1000/month, causing me an incredible amount of stress between my wife and I [my moral compass does not permit me to deny my mother necessary healthcare], and I was seriously contemplating transporting her pharmaceuticals across the Canadian border to lower the monthly financial outlay). My younger brother refused to help me with any of her financial expenses; we have not spoken in over 2 years.
Don't be so quick to discount parents didn't help because they didn't want to. In most cases, I'm confident the problem is they simply can't. I know I'm not alone in speaking to others about this. People out there are suffering, badly.
EDIT: This is far more than I'd ever really care to share in a public forum, but people need to know what is going on behind the curtain causing people to take the actions that they do. Do you want to know what True Grit is? I will teach you.
EDIT 2: (ffs HN throttling)
Chuck: I hope you didn't take my comment as calling you out. Nothing could be further from the truth! Personally, I'm seeing a lot of people in bad shape financially and personally, and its not being reported on, or when it is reported on, people don't believe it.
So I'm here to give a first hand PIREP of the situation. And it is fucking bad.
My initial take on this article was "This is a crappy piece of journalism which takes some arbitrary facts and tries to use it to criticize millennials." My observation is that generally crappy journalism can be easily exposed and lampooned by inverting the headline's wording which doesn't change its meaning but flips its implication. So "3 out of 4 millennials get helped by parents" flipped is "1 out 4 parents of millennials don't help them." The first might be interpreted that millennials are slackers and the other might be that baby boomers are lousy parents. Both implications are unwarranted and wrong. And that is the hallmark of crappy journalism. There is no interpretation of this headline which conveys useful information.
As a parent, and having been around thousands of parents and read many surveys of parents, there is a common theme. The majority of the time they want to help their kids in any way they can. It is instinctual. Further, any assistance parents give their grown children can be interpreted as "financial" assistance, from babysitting the grand children to giving them the old sofa that has been in the basement for the last 10 years. And that in no way reflects on the character of the children, aka the millennials, in this piece.
That said, I never intended to imply that parents who could not help their children should be criticized. My use of the inversion device would have the headline imply that, and I would disagree with a story based on that just as much as I do the current one.
> "3 out of 4 millennials get helped by parents" flipped is "1 out 4 parents of millennials don't help them."
"Don't help them" != "don't care" so that's not inversion. You added that negative implication. Maybe you didn't mean to. I'll take you at your word on that, but attempts to deflect the reaction back to the OP seem disingenuous.
I am not attempting to deflect reaction, it is real and it is heartfelt and I understand how people reached the conclusion that I was insulting parents who did not provide financial support to their children.
I wrote it poorly and had I been talking face to face with someone one I hope I would have seen them getting angry and immediately sought out the disagreement between what I thought I was saying and what was being heard. Here its a bit more difficult and it once again reminded me of that.
To your specific criticism, you are correct that I added the connotation. When I read the original title I also added the connotation that "have received financial help" was "are slackers". And I disagreed with that strongly as well. You can receive help from your parents and not be a slacker.
And I recognize that for some portion of the people reading here they read my headline inversion literally rather than as a critique because of the lack of context. If I were to rewrite it, it would have started with
"I disagree strongly with the implication of the headline, you might as well write 1 in 4 parents don't help their millennial children and I would disagree with that too."
And then we could talk about the poorly defined notion of "help" and the question of privilege and whether or not that is an objective thing or a subjective one, and if its objective how do we define it.
To be fair, I think his main point was that the article was trashy for suggesting that millenials receiving help was unusual (and not to bash the parents of the 1 in 4).
Good luck on the SSA disability. We just went through that process, for my Significant Other. It took 3 tries, but when it went in front of a judge, it was finally granted. In her case, it is Fibromyalgia, Chrons, and the start of RA.
And from others I've talked to, unless you are in a wheelchair (and maybe not even then), they will automatically deny you multiple times, until a hearing is scheduled. From what I understand, it acts as a filter for people that can "technically" go back to work (even if they are in extreme pain, if someone doesn't have others to support them, many applicants don't have a choice but to work when they really shouldn't).
Wow man, exact same situation for me (though it was my dad instead of my mom). I've had 0 help since college, and I paid for 1/2 of college while assuming all of the debt.
But I also wouldn't expect any help after college - I'm an adult now, and need to handle it myself.
Seek out support from friends and family you trust, even if its simply emotional support. I had no one to turn to, so even though I've carried on each day, I'm slowly turning into a nihilist. Don't be like me.
> That's really sad, 1 in 4 millennials don't have parents that care?
My parents were inner city teachers...they couldn't really afford to help out with undergrad/grad school/later in life. The lack of perspective you're showing is one of the reasons why I don't enjoy hanging out with the tech crowd.
I received no financial help post-college from my family because I didn't need it. My starting salary was twice what my dad made at the time and my sister had just begun college. I had saved up money myself from working during college to pay for my first month's rent. It's not that they didn't care, it's that I didn't need it and was off to a far better start.
Same here. My parents have given of their time (occasional babysitting), but haven't needed to give financially. The only thing in that report that I've received was a period of a few months of living with my parents after college before getting my own apartment. I worked during college to pay for the portion of that cost that wasn't paid for by scholarships, so I had no debt after college. It's not that they didn't want to help financially, it's that it wasn't needed. My wife is in the same situation with her parents. They support with their time, but financial support isn't needed.
Could I have done more, had an easier time starting out on my own, or gone on vacations with financial support from my parents? Probably, but I don't think that's necessary. My parents taught me what I needed to succeed on my own and that's what I see as important.
Ditto. I had a job lined up before graduation, and ended up living with my parents for 2 months before I started work. My parents were better off than yours, but I started pretty well myself. I had the money for the suits I interviewed in, a couple months of rent, some starter furniture, and my living expenses during that time.
Of course "post-college" is a key phrase. I wouldn't have been where I was if my parents hadn't paid almost all of my college expenses and bought me a car a couple years in. My mother had similar help during her college years, but my father didn't, and the two of them provided a similar boost to my 2 siblings, as well.
in my generation we grew expecting to bust our tails and make it in the world. Perhaps coming only a generation or two removed from the Great Depression put a different spin on things.
Even though my parents were doing very well there wasn't this concept of loading children down with gifts and such they clamored for because it can lead to disappointment later on or worse dependence.
When push came to shove I know more than a few who did a stint in the service to shore up finances, teach responsibility, and save up for college. Perhaps its a regional thing, but we never though of deserving more than the chance to try and succeed but recent generations come across as wanting it all now
> in my generation we grew expecting to bust our tails and make it in the world
I respect the attitude, but realize that times are different now. It's just not possible in a lot of situations to do this.
Since I don't know the generation you grew up in, I'm going to assume the 60s. Which means you would be getting started in the 80s.
In the 80s a "basket of goods" (CPI) was 3x cheaper. And that's assuming they haven't hacked the numbers to make that report seem a bit nicer. Meanwhile, wages have stagnated and college tuition has increased substantially. They are also dealing with obesity epidemic, never-ending war, and the impending doom of climate change.
So those kids are just not in as good a position to succeed.
>They are also dealing with obesity epidemic, never-ending war, and the impending doom of climate change.
I can picture it now. A cry echos from many basements in America: "MOM I CAN'T GET A JOB, CLIMATE CHANGE!"
I'm 27 and a high school drop out. I've supported myself since I was 18 and own my home. war, climate change, and obesity (I'm not a thin man) never prevented me from getting a job.
> I'm 27 and a high school drop out. I've supported myself since I was 18 and own my home.
Nice, that's not easy. And if it was 50% harder to do, you might have been able to do it anyway. But there is some threshold where you would not have been able to. It might be 200%, 500%, 1000%, but there's a line somewhere.
> war, climate change, and obesity
This was more to point out how different the world is now, not provide excuses for laziness.
I think America is in a state of flux in terms of society's perspective on the appropriate level of financial independence of young adults. For baby boomers it seemed like you hit 18 and were ''up and out'' and expected to make it on your own. If you didn't, you were looked down upon as lazy or a mooch. But looking back at history, that attitude is an extreme anomaly. I just finished reading a fantastic book about Winston Churchill's personal finances: ''No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money'' [http://fave.co/2gSQoYF]. Besides being like crack cocaine for any Churchill fan it is a fascinating look at the personal finances of successful families in Britain 1700(ish) through post WW2. Families were successful because of their ability to pass lasting, sustainable, income-producing wealth down the generations, where it seems to have been used, by the cleverest heirs, to pursue career opportunities that were closed to those without means. And of course this was considered totally normal and expected, and if you didn't receive assistance, you were at a relative disadvantage. It wouldn't surprise me if we are headed back to some sort of hybrid system like this where if in 50 years you live in a very expensive coastal city it becomes reasonable to assume that your family contributed the majority of the resources needed for your lifestyle. Housing prices in these areas in particular have become so expensive that it's hard to foresee another outcome.
Demographic change might be part of this. I told my wife (who is NOT American) that my plan was that our kid will be either paying us rent or out of the house after turning 18. She was horrified, coming from a culture where children kind of stick around their parent's homes well into adulthood. This behavior might be totally acceptable depending on the household.
What if your kid came to you and said they wanted to live at home for a few years after college to save up $? Presuming that you all get along and they are progressing towards mutually agreeable goals. Related to this is what kind of care you expect from children when you are very old and infirm (and to say you have no expectations seems unrealistic).
This. We are headed to a slow-growth society, in which existing wealth is much more important than new income (yeah, I like Piketty). It's not only in the US, also in Europe.
Agreed with the others here that your experience seems rather sheltered. You had luxuries that many, many others didn't have. It's incredibly unfair and borderline insulting of you to say that those parents "don't care".
Mine died before I finished my second year of college. Mother was a homemaker; father was a self-employed social worker. There was drug problems in the family. There wasn't much to divide between all of us. Grew up poor to begin with, and started working when I was 15. I'd work earlier if only I was allowed.
If parents can help - great, but I would not see this as anything but a real, amazing privilege to have. Honor it, and love you parents back.
You can thank the Feds for handing out gigantic, cheap, guaranteed loans to millions of kids, without regard for their future financial stability. Schools see this easy money, jack up prices year after year, and now we have an entire generation of people who are completely broke with shit degrees. There used to be a time when kids could work their way through school doing summer jobs. That time was before the federal government got involved. Sad really. Thankfully I was one of the few to land a good job before school even finished, and I'm still only just paying it off this year, 11 years later. I can't imagine the photo/art/liberal kids paying off my debt.
Making school affordable enough that students can actually WORK student level jobs to pay for it. If easy money wasn't being handed out, the schools would have no choice but to lower their fees.
I stepped onto the RIT campus as a freshmen in 1998, and total costs per year were north of $35,000. Expecting a clueless kid to understand what that means is insane.
The majority of comments in this thread so far are along the lines of "How is financial help defined in this context???" yet it's described in the article:
"The type of financial support varies substantially. Nearly 30 percent of those receiving help accept health insurance and approximately the same percentage welcome assistance with purchasing a home or renting. Auto insurance was another big contributor, with 26 percent of young people receiving help to pay for it, and 23 percent getting help with utilities."
Come on people, don't start typing out a response if you haven't even looked at the link. Especially considering it's like 10 sentences total and anyone could skim it in a minute flat.
Pretty much everyone I knew who wasn't an engineer has had their parents help them somehow after college. Between the cost of buying/renting a place and paying off student loans it seems that you need a lot of money to be financially independent and the job market isn't great for many college graduates.
Even as an engineer I needed a loan for relocation from my parents. My job paid to relocate me but it was just a reimbursement and I didn't have the money for a cross-country move up front.
While nothing beats getting an interest-free loan from your parents, this is something you could put on a credit card - especially if you're able to pay it back it back with your first few paychecks before any interest accrues. (Assuming, of course, you can get a card with a decent credit limit while still a student.)
Unfortunately, a lot of those kinds of expenses are precisely the ones that you can't float on credit as easily, and must have cash in hand (or in check) to cover. I've never rented anywhere that would let you pay a security deposit or first-month's rent on a card. Even things like movers often enough have worked on a cash or check basis, in my experience.
In 2010, when I graduated, it was still real hard to get a rental office to take a credit card. And $1500 + $1K in moving expenses + $1K in furniture would have been prohibitive on the $2K credit-limit card I was able to get as a college student.
I paid it back pretty quickly, because tech job, but I couldn't have floated it.
The quote is based on a UBS Investor survey of "affluent and high net worth" investors [1]. And the milleniums surveyed have 6 figure incomes. So a far from the average.
The actual break down of the top assistance assistance categories are Health Insurance, Buying/Renting, Auto Instance, and Utilities, so bills. The insurances are probably from being on their parents' plans. This is pretty consistent with what I hear from people I know. Their parents aren't paying for everything, but they do take care of 1 or 2 of their bills for their children.
Same doubt I had. My father lent some money so I could buy my house, but I paid back, and I had lent money to my sister some years ago, so it is more like a "family cash flow management".
That is absolutely help. Borrowing from the bank of Mom and Dad is something that was simply never an option for me, or most of my peers. Mom and Dad were struggling, too.
When you're poor, and your family's poor, a lot of options are closed off to you. I know some people who were given old cars by parents; I always had to buy my own. That's just a couple thousand dollars for a used car, but that stuff adds up when it's not just a car, not just a loan for a house, but everything taken together.
In my country it is quite common that parents first pay for a wedding and then help as much as they can with buying/building a house for newly married couple. It is considered parent's duty to help their children kick-start their own family.
And because that usually means that parents won't save enough money for their own retirement then the children are supposed to take care of them when they do retire. Most of the time that helps maintain strong family bonds, but sometimes it does exactly the opposite.
Were you lent money at a better interest rate than you could get otherwise? If so that sounds like financial help.
That said I agree with the overall point that the term is so vague/broad it's basically meaningless if not clearly defined. Does living at home after college count?
There's a list of what was counted: Health insurance, Home buying/renting, Auto insurance, Utilities, Spending money, Vacations, Large purchases, Online accounts (e.g., Netflix), Taxes
I'm one of those 1 out of 4... because I am successful enough to not need it.[1]
My father did offer to help with the house but he wanted to charge an interest rate that would have made it cheaper for me to take private mortgage insurance so that is what I did. After all, I benefitted from the record low interest rates.
But my brother, who is not a millennial did get help with his house and his small business from my father when he was my age. And I think I am the only one of my friend's who has a house that didn't get some assistance from their parents (or my wife's parents).
But I'm an exception not a rule. I don't think any less of the 3/4.
[1] By successful enough I mean I make a reasonable (but not great) salary and work hard. So does my wife who is at least as successful as me in her engineering career. Unfortunately I have yet to have an app or company of mine sell for millions yet :)
I'm careful using the word "Millennial" these days and increasingly skeptical of online articles with the word "Millennial" in the title. Thanks to shows like Adam Ruins Everything[1], I am more informed on a variety of topics. (I learn visually and prefer to watch his videos instead of read an article).
I'm more interested in the secondary statistic that they gathered, that being that "two-thirds say they couldn’t get by without their parents’ help." That's easier to quantify.
There's a list of what was counted: Health insurance, Home buying/renting, Auto insurance, Utilities, Spending money, Vacations, Large purchases, Online accounts (e.g., Netflix), Taxes
Some could argue that counts as "spending money", but I don't think it would count unless it was a recurring thing.
I am not a millennial, and I have not collected any inheritance.
The value of having a multi-million-dollar safety net, (Or even someone to pay for a bus ride home, and a room to live in), however, cannot be understated.
I was surprised it was that high. Really? 3 out of 4? I mean I know college loan expense is much, much higher now than it was when I went to school, and current graduates have a really bad deal. But don't hardship deferrals still exist and other options for low-income graduates? Don't people get roommates anymore to offset rent? I had crushing (6 figure) student debt after grad school, but it was really only crushing my ability to save--not crushing my ability to eat and get a roof over my head.
They also included being on the parents' health insurance policies, which with ACA is a no-brainer for many young adults. It's far cheaper for them, at a modest cost to the parents. Even if they pay their parents back the cost they're still saving versus paying for individual coverage (most of the time).
The definition, then, of "financial assistance" is very broad and covers more than just literal cash.
Yeah this statement doesn't seem very far off from "100% of children receive financial aid from their parent or guardian."
I too am impressed that as much as 25% don't get anything at all (I guess the definition of financial aid could change this, does buying you a few meals count or is it specifically dollar transactions?)
But then, my wife's parents are definitely not well-off (unlikely to ever retire) and they still sent us small "just because" gifts occasionally when we were young and poor.
And I literally don't know anyone with a kid and a non-terrible (not even necessarily good) relationship with their parents who hasn't received a lot of free child care. Parents -- even those who have to work hard to make ends meet -- find time for the grandchildren.
So if the definition was "any amount of cash/any service for a reason other than birthday/holiday", then I kind of have to agree with your parent.
So I definitely agree that having parents who can work and take occasionally vacation and have any amount of disposable income is definitely a huge blessing. But I don't think it's particularly rare in the US, either.
At the same time I'm tired of being lumped into the "privileged white male" group when being white is literally the ONLY advantage I've ever had. I've never gotten a single penny handed to me from anyone, related or not, since turning 17.
That was my thought exactly, by the articles loose definition babysitting the grand children would be considered "helping" financially by the reasoning that day care costs money. Thus an article that implies a criticism of millennials that have been "helped" seems rude to me.
Most seemed to have taken your comment at face value rather and as criticism of parents vs. criticism of the article re: its loose definition of 'help'...
Are you equating parents helping their kids with "privileged life" ? I'd certainly agree that people who have no parents have a harder life, but simply having parents doesn't seem to rise to the level of privileged that you imply here.
Probably, for what it was worth the seller took back a second mortgage, my in-laws loaned us $10,000, we sold all of my Intel stock (about 500 shares), and dropped down to exactly $500 in our checking account to make that work. The interest rate was 12.2% on our mortgage (adjustable) which only adjusted every 6 months by at most 1.5pts and was tied to the LIBOR index. My wife and I are both engineers and were both working (pre-kids) so we made it work and ended up being able to pay off the loan from the in-laws and the seller after just over 2 years (28 months to be exact). But its true, I was only three years out of college and my wife and I lived in a house the bank owned but would let us keep if we kept paying them on time :-)
If by help you mean financially and aren't including help using their time/talents, then yes. I know a lot of people who would be much better off if their parents could help financially, but their parents could not afford such assistance. Assistance of time/talents is possible too, but not reported on here.
It is a spectrum that is for sure. I expect everyone has an internal barometer where financial help flips over from ordinary to extraordinary. If you give your child graduating from college a used car. Is that privileged? Even if that child has $100K in college debt? Or if you pay their air fare to come to Thanksgiving two times after they are out of college, is that privileged? How about you pay their bail to get them out of jail, is that privileged.
I disagree with the idea that any financial support means your children are privileged but do agree that there is a level of support at which they are so. In my personal definition I draw the line at things like subsidizing their rent or paying their gas or insurance bills. I would consider someone whose parents supported them to that level as living a privileged life.
But as I said, I expect that line is in different places for everyone.
It's a little disturbing that being a functional, supportive family is labeled as "privileged."
But I can't argue against the reality that having two parents who stay married, are not abusive to each other or their children, and are generally functional human beings is something of a luxury.
>having two parents who stay married, are not abusive to each other or their children, and are generally functional human beings is something of a luxury.
"Functional human being(s)" is the key there. Lots of people who were raised by a single parent, divorced parents or occasionally abusive households turned out fine.
I think it is. All that privilege requires is the existence of the non-privileged or disadvantaged.
To give an extreme example, the majority of people in the US don't have to deal with what those who live on reservations have to deal with. That means that the majority of people in the US are privileged in a way that those on a res aren't.
I've always thought of the discussion about privilege to be a very American way of talking about human rights. We can't possibly talk about having enough food, housing, safe interactions with the law, etc. as rights, and thus those who don't have that are being denied their basic rights, so instead we talk about those things as privileges that are denied to a segment of population.
I would much prefer talk about these things as rights, personally.
> We can't possibly talk about having enough food, housing, safe interactions with the law, etc. as rights
For housing/food, sure - in the USian context it doesn't make sense to talk about such things as "rights" because they'd have to be provided by somebody else [0]. The existence of life's basic necessities is actually not guaranteed and it is worthwhile to remember that. (However this framework says nothing about the idea of distributing surpluses to people who couldn't otherwise afford it, just that it does not constitute a "right").
But inverting the sense and labeling their presence "privilege" is a completely regressive zero-sum framework, ultimately promulgated by political shills that are more concerned with bolstering their followers rather than actually fixing problems.
This is especially clear when talking about things that are rights, like say simply not being murdered (eg by the police). By labeling as "privileged" the people who are just not having their rights violated, the tone is set that they are the exception. The "privileged" group then checks out of the conversation (as they're being told that the problem does not directly concern them), while the ire of the "unprivileged" group is harmlessly directed at the "privileged" group instead of their actual oppressors.
[0] It's the distinction between saying whether a "right" to Internet access implies a free basic monthly service, or merely disallowing the possibility that one could be banned from the Internet via governmental action like an explicit law or "private" "three strikes" system.
Well, sure. Someone getting help from their parents are privileged compared to someone not getting help.
The term isn't normally used in this relative sense, though.
The oxford dictionary says that privilege is 'a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group'. Something the majority enjoys is not a privilege.
I don't understand your comment. The term is always used in that relative sense, even in the examples that Oxford gives: Someone who is very rich is privileged compared to someone who is not.
Further, no part the definition you quoted restricts a privilege from being enjoyed by the majority.
Pretty poor excuse for journalism in my opinion.
EDIT: see my response for toomuchtodo for my actual perspective here, once again I've been schooled in how written communication is so different than face to face conversations. Added to my favorites list as a reminder to contextualize, contextualize, contextualize ...