What Do Grown Children Really Owe Their Loving Parents?

What Do Grown Children Really Owe Their Loving Parents?

by Patrick A. Coleman Updated: May 23, 2023 Originally Published: Jan. 29, 2019

Children once owed parents labor and a legacy. Today, intergenerational debt is harder (and more emotionally taxing) to calculate.

Wondering what we owe our parents, whether emotionally or financially, is a modern philosophical luxury. Historically, children provided an early return on investment, working family farms, picking up industrial jobs, or, at the minimum, helping to raise other children. But much is given and little is expected from most children raised in 21st-century America.

For the most part, we do not ask kids to marry into alliances or assume titles or even, sadly, take over family businesses. This likely constitutes progress, but it confuses the ledger. Where the calculation of what was owed used to be a fairly simple, pay-it-forward list of social norms, modern arithmetic has become complicated, specifically for grown children, who are expected to live independent lives but also to demonstrate some fealty to their forebears.

With more independence and fewer expectations, what we owe our parents or our children’s grandparents is now calculated in man-hours and long-term investments. Do we owe them a call? Do we owe them Thanksgiving? Do we owe them weekends? Do we owe them end of life care? Do we owe them financial support? Do we owe them grandchildren?

Or do we owe them nothing?

The answers to this endless litany of questions seem to arise ad hoc, influenced by different ethnic, economic, and interpersonal experiences. We all find our own way. But, now, researchers and psychologists seem to have found some consistency in how people arrive at their answers that speak to a broader, emerging understanding of what is owed. Americans seem to believe that parents, by dint of being parents, deserve a relationship.

The question often becomes what kind of relationship. Modern philosophers have attempted to solve the conundrum by classifying four theories of what they call filial obligation: Debt Theory, Friendship Theory, Gratitude Theory and Special Goods Theory.

Debt Theory posits a simple if sometimes emotionally fraught transaction where children provide caring for parents only to the extent that they were cared for as a child. Friendship Theory suggests adult children only owe parents the same amount of care that they would owe a very good and close friend.

Gratitude Theory suggests that children care for parents because they are motivated by gratitude for selfless and benevolent child-rearing. Finally, Special Goods Theory suggests that children are obligated to offer only what they can uniquely offer — love or specific care in most cases — in direct exchange for what the parent has or currently offers (think: inheritance), but unlike in Debt Theory, this transaction is constant and open-ended.

Modern arithmetic has become complicated, specifically for grown children, who are expected to live independent lives but also to demonstrate some fealty to their forebears.

At the heart of all of these theories of familial obligation is some kind of emotional relationship. Whether it’s a feeling of closeness or obligation, this implies that these are not straight economic transactions. Transactions and economic reasoning may underpin parent-child relationships, but logic doesn’t crowd out emotion.

An interesting way to consider how emotional and economic reason can tangle is provided by the empirical economists Gary Becker and Nigel Tomes who created an economic model of wealth transmission based on the idea of capital investment.

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