One of the clearest moments I've ever had of not realizing my privilege was a conversation with someone who, once they started earning money, had to give money to their parents to support the household. Embarrassingly this absolutely blew my mind. I grew up with my parents as providers and even today if my life collapsed around me I know I still have them as a safety net if I needed it. I've been able to capitalize on so many opportunities because of that.
I do this, but my parents don’t expect it. I just make 10x their income and would never let them buy their own ticket to come see me, or not help them change the car when needed. But my parents never want it. Never implied I had to. I just do it because l am where I am because of their own sacrifices. Now I have to convince them to have some fun in life because all they know is work.
(For perspective, I’m low income in SF).
I'm not discounting what you do, but having to support a household as a child is materially different to what you do for your parents. It sounds like if you don't chip in - no one will go to bed hungry, and bills will still be paid.
I have done both. And any time my own expenses go up or their expenses go up and I don’t feel like I’ll have enough to send my stress spikes.
What I was trying to say was that there are cases of selfless parents out there that don’t want any money back. My parents have gone without eating to feed me. We’ve struggled to pay the bus fare to go to school, but they never asked for anything in return. That doesn’t mean I don’t help them.
Were they Asian by any chance? I’m Asian American and it’s a cultural norm. We have a saying for the money we give to our parents (“family usage” in direct translation). It’s quite a financial burden for some of my friends. Some parents expect their kids to buy them a house and you can imagine how brutal it is in the current housing market.
>>Some parents expect their kids to buy them a house and you can imagine how brutal it is in the current housing market.
Yes, but you left out that in most Asian-X cultures, first generation immigrant parents typically sacrificed almost everything they had, including in many cases the parental-filial relationship, to provide the children with enough education to claw their way out of their current situation and give them an extra leg up into a higher socioeconomic circumstance.
My parents had this expectation, and my wife and I gladly and willingly obliged on both sides as only children. This expectation/obligation became even more poignant when we had our own kids and realized belatedly just how much our parents had sacrificed for us. Whether driven by cultural norms (or not), we appreciate what our parents did for us so that we can "pass it on" now that we're on better footing than either side ever was.
While not always convenient or logistically possible, multi-generational housing (where one or both sets of parents live together or very close by) can go a long way to addressing astronomical housing costs at least until they need more intensive daily care due to aging.
Kudos to you if you appreciate the moves your parents made in their lives and you have achieved a working relationship with your parents.
But I don't think this is a fair expectation from the parents' side, at all. As a child, you did not ask to be burdened with this. If this is a contract, it was signed not by you, but by your parents unilaterally.
Until a few years ago, I thought the same. They made that decision, not me. I shouldn't have to burden myself with any obligations and should get to just reap the benefits for me and my children alone.
But something changed somewhere.
I now see my parents in a whole new light.
There is a book "Factfulness", in which the author lists a matrix for four income levels. My parents started at level 2. I still remember their parents houses: the makeshift kitchen with dim lighting, the four walls and the hole they named a bathroom, the leaky faucets at the ends of pipes ran across the house and exterior to the uneven, unpainted walls.
The sacrifices they must have took to change their socioeconomic standing and subsequently my own can never be requited. I now fit somewhere along the fourth level. I can't help but feel immense gratitude when I see them now. I now try to give them all that I can so they enjoy the time they have left. And I wish I had the foresight in my earlier years to tell them how I appreciate their efforts but then again, those stubborn bastards loved to argue then.
I don't know what I wanted to communicate saying all this so excuse me while I text my mother.
Thanks for sharing. I saved your comment because it’s something I can see myself coming back to.
I can definitely relate to your story. Child of first generation immigrants. We had to move back to Hong Kong when I was 9 because my dad died and it was too difficult for a single mom in a new country to support us. When I was 18, I took advantage of my citizenship and moved back.
The constant pressure to find a way to take care of my mom has always been difficult for me, especially because it sometimes feels at odds with pursuing personal truths. I can go work for the bank, make sure mom is taken care of, but lose my own life. In my twenties, I spent some time living an “alt” lifestyle, working as a musician, and hanging out with B-listers in Beverley Hills. But I could never really enjoy it, not just because it was vapid, but because finding a way to truly secure a future for my mom was always in my mind. It was like wrestling with two sides of the American Dream. And no one around me could relate.
As I’ve gotten older the balance between “serving the parents” versus myself has become fuzzier. It’s obvious now that making sure my mom can enjoy the rest of the time she has is the right thing to do. But in turn, her expectations of me have relaxed. She understands that she’s raised a free, independent adult, and in the culture we live in, that’s a virtue.
It’s all so complicated, as I’m sure anyone who has had a similar upbringing would know, and the details are so specific to each person. But it’s good to know that it’s a common human experience.
Exactly! In my opinion, one of the implications of this fact is that you cannot make trades like "I am sacrificing x now, so you will buy me a house/whatever when I am older" with your unborn children.
How about "I am sacrificing x now, in the hopes that you will buy me a house/whatever when I am older"
Or what about "Sorry, kid, I technically provided you with food, water, and shelter. You can walk to soccer practice, as I have no legal obligations in this matter"
For some people, the answer may rest on whether the child is younger or older than 18.
That said, I don't think people from collectivist and individualist cultures can ever agree on what the obligations a child has - if any - to their parents and extended family.
I don't think it's strictly an Asian thing. A lot of first generation Americans have this expectation. It's very common to see their parents remunerate money back their parents in foreign countries.
It isn't. This is typical of most 1st gen immigrants. Growing up in NYC I have friends who were Sri Lankan, Polish, Italian, and Guyanese who's parents came here and worked their asses off to provide a better future for their kids while sending money back home.
That much is complicated. In the SF Bay Area, predominantly South Bay, I knew Asian families (all of them well-to-do, because South Bay), whose parents and extended family helped the new grads buy a house after a few years out of college.
Then those kids were expected to help the next generation, when the time came. It was like a multi-generation, extended-family economic collective of sorts. I didn't know what to make of it. On one hand I admired the effort, on some level. On the other hand, I think it really gimped the kids as far as pursuing entrepreneurship goes.
But hey, at least they can afford the "rent" in South Bay, I guess? I have never wanted to live there, so I can't say I envy the arrangement.
>One of the clearest moments I've ever had of not realizing my privilege was a conversation with someone who, once they started earning money, had to give money to their parents to support the household.
This was a ubiquitous practice in the circles I grew up in - Once a child was old enough to work they were expected to get a job and help the family with the bills. Coworkers would talk about it at every job I worked at as a teenager and my parents talked about having to help their parents out with the bills as a teenager.
It was so common I felt pretty lucky that I got to keep all the money I made.
There's a substantial difference between "once you're making money we treat you somewhat like a boarder" while you're living at home and "you remit a tithe to your family every month for your life".
The second, if done well, can be incredibly powerful, however. If the family is strong enough and trusted enough, you can get outsized economic benefits from it.
> The second, if done well, can be incredibly powerful, however. If the family is strong enough and trusted enough, you can get outsized economic benefits from it.
That is also how you cultivate nepotism. It feels powerful if your family does it and others don't, but once everyone starts doing it, it's a caste system and everyone's worse off.
For what it's worth, I do this, and don't particularly see it as being a handicap. By contrast, it's a sign of a healthy family where everyone chips in for the common good.
As a man I feel that my first duty is to provide stability for myself and my family, both upwards and downwards.
The real handicap is when family members are degenerates, i.e. absent parents, feuding, self destructive behaviour, etc. That's harder to climb out of because even if you escape, you now need to build a new structure by yourself.
no most indians that come to US are from middle upper strata of indian society. They don't "have" to send money to parents for sustenance, maybe for luxuries.
Not true, many of those middle to upper strata parents sell significant assets to send their kids abroad. Middle and upper class is much different in India than the USA
There’s an unwritten expectation for the kids to reciprocate.
Definitely untrue. Like everywhere else it's a wide spectrum. You'd be surprised how many Indians come to the US from modest means. Parents sunk their savings into educating their kids and sending them abroad. It is not uncommon for these parents to now rely on their foreign resident children.
A lot of Indians (and I am sure it's true for other nationalities) owe a lot to the Tech industry for absolutely transforming their standard of living in the last 1-2 generations. Tech was also remarkably egalitarian since anyone with the inclination could learn it with a relatively modest investment in a computer or even unimpeded access to a computer at school.
I wonder if future generations will see the same lifestyle transformative effect. Or perhaps the new bar is access to an H100 GPU.
That depends. Indian parents, even from the upper middle class don’t always save enough for retirement. They’re fine while they work but a significant number rely on their kids once they retire (with the exception of pensioners and entrepreneurs).
I would say a good 80% of Indian immigrants I know send money back to their parents every month.
If you come from Africa, this is just the reality. Makes it hard to get ahead, or take risks, but it is what it is. Most of my generation's goal is to end it, and not have to pass that burden to our kids.
And it’s because poor countries provide virtually no safety net for retirees and pensioners, so parents have little choice but to depend on kids for survival.
The solution to this issue is good governance, which translates to good economies and better social and welfare systems, but that’s kinda a pipe dream for African nations at this point.
The irony of it is that in a few decades, you end up with sub replacement fertility rates in all the societies with good governance and social and welfare systems, resulting in those social and welfare systems (eventually) failing.
While I am not suggesting eliminating financial/logistic independence between generations within a family, but it is an interesting side effect.
Edit: to respond to vkou’s comment below, I don’t see any empirical evidence for this to be true. For one, the work involved in supporting old, disabled people is highly undesirable (meaning high prices for labor). And second, I do not see automation advancing quickly enough to change all those bedpans.
Also, the more resources a country spends on healthcare and defined benefit pensions (far and away the most expensive part of caring for old people), the less resources a country has to spend on other stuff (that benefits younger people).
This is evident in the fact that nursing facilities cost $10k to $20k per month for round the clock care, and the common adage is you don’t want to be stuck in a $10k per month facility.
There is, of course, truth to some of the productivity surplus being eaten by rentiers, but from what I can tell, nowhere near enough to make up for the economic boost that fertility rates of 4+ give.
Given productivity gains in industrialized society, there is no reason for why high QOL can't be sustained with a smaller percentage of the population working at any particular time.
The demographic implosion narrative is just a nativist distraction from the investment class eating all the productive surplus.
This is the most succinct description of the boom bust population pyramid realized and the economic system first exploiting and now in fear of the go forward I've read. Well done.
It’s succinct, but it says nothing of how to get there from where we are. It doesn’t talk about the constraints of the status quo and its inertia, let alone how any approach plays with the human psyche.
What I’m saying is that sure, I think I agree with GP that there is much getting in the way of us doing more with less. Namely inefficient, greed, and inertia. But how do we get out of this trap?
Actively engage in politics and realize the problem will take decades to incrementally solve, while taking tactical action in your life to protect yourself from current state. What the latter looks like is a broad conversation depending on what your potential trajectories are, what you're optimizing for, and what you're defending against.
Put the metaphorical oxygen mask on yourself first before you try to help others, and then, if you so choose and are able, defend and empower others as your sphere of influence (a function of time and resources itself) grows. Defend and empower the human, broadly speaking.
I say nothing about how to get from where we are to where we should be, because there are many solutions. Each flavor of political system claims to have one.
For a list:
* Shift some of the tax burden to profits and rent-seeking, and away from income.
* Front-load elder care costs by setting aside a bigger share of productive work done today for pensions.
* Aggressively reduce costs and waste across the economy. Cap student loan amounts. Mandate what % of tuition has to go towards instruction. Make medical school free, make doctors pay it off through X,000 hours of service.
* Deal with supply shortages for inelastic goods. Housing is a major one. Tax-advantage denser developments. Or turn cities/states/provinces into developers themselves.
* Fix low-hanging fruit in public health. Make vaccination free. We lose more economic output in sick days than we do from people not getting a flu jab.
* Fix waste in medical-adjacent spaces. Mandate that eye exams provide a pupil distance measurement. There should be no reason for why I can't get an eye exam, and then directly plug those numbers into an online glasses retailer, that will ship me a pair for $30.
* Wild-ass stretch goal: Make public transit/biking/walking/scooting preferable to car ownership wherever feasible. The societal cost of universal car ownership is huge, even if we only measure in dollars, and disregard all the other negative externalities.
* Reduce spend on zero-sum and negative-sum industries: Ban gambling, tobacco, alcohol advertising.
Or, you know, if you don't like any of these active-involvement ideas, another alternative is to shrug your shoulders and pray that the free market will sort things out before you get bread riots and a revolution.
Or, shrug your shoulders and just import more young immigrants. Preferably with skills that we need, other countries can spend their resources on training their youth, and we'd poach them once they are in their prime productive years.
All of the active-involvement ideas come down to 'There's a pit somewhere in our economy that we shovel endless amounts of money into, that is not efficient at producing material goods that people need to live. What can we do to reduce the fraction of the economy that is wasted in them?'
> I've been able to capitalize on so many opportunities because of that.
This is so true for me as well. I started and ran my own business for a number of years, and I've resigned from jobs multiple times before I had something else lined up. Being able to take those risks has absolutely helped me in my career, and there's no way I could have taken them if I didn't have an implicit safety net beneath me.
Talking about one's own privilege is a form of self-defeating nonsense that serves no purpose. It only harms your future potential. There's no reason morally to frown on having more potential from your starting point versus someone else.
At best it's a form of "humble brag" that just makes you look silly.
I mean it'd be reasonable thing to do even outside parent-children relationship. If someone helped you, you may want to pay it back in same proportion when you have a chance and means to do so.
Now the west so rich and govt support for old/retired folks is very-very decent it does look totally out of way to support parent's household expenses.
Yeah, I had to drop out of school and work fulltime from 15 to support my family.
It's an absolutely devastating burden. I am currently in the top 1% of my socioeconomic cohort but I'd trade all that hard work, effort and application of intelligence over 20 years to have started in a slightly better cohort.
I've mostly untangled myself from that period of life but it's taken far more work, self discipline, sacrifice and willingness to live in degradation and homelessness just to sidle up to an easy peasy upper middle class peer group.
