The kids aren't entitled, they're suffering
Not helping your own offspring is a psyop to keep your bloodline impoverished
"Family is not an important thing. It's everything." —Michael J Fox
A recent Tweet I posted sharing a story of wealthy parents who take no interest in helping their children went fairly viral (>100K likes, >10M views), so let’s talk about it. A troubling misconception has taken hold of the American populace: the belief that families should not receive any assistance from their parents and should "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" without support, at all times, no matter the circumstance. This attitude, classically propagated by the baby boomer cohort, is a form of cultural propaganda that is oblivious to the challenges faced by younger generations and ignores the very real structural disadvantages they are grappling with. Read the comments in the first link of this post if you’d like to see some of the oddest interpretations of helping your family even modestly. Something has gone wrong.
Rather than recognizing their offspring are struggling in a profoundly altered economic and social landscape, many instead lean into a narrative of rugged individualism, failing to see the harmful impact this has on their own families and thus society as a whole. Imagine a pre-industrial world where a family does not take advantage of surplus resource storage during good times to assist in success through bad. You would say that’s absurd, they aren’t going to make it very long. This is essentially what’s happening now. For this discussion let’s remove any notion of giving money to gambling or drug addict children, of course none of that should be enabled. We’re talking normal, hard working people just trying to survive, during the years this money has high utility. A book by Bill Perkins called Die With Zero explores this concept further, on how inheriting wealth upon death is really too late for it to matter. Why are we giving sums of money to people when they no longer require it, beyond biologically fertile years?
The rugged individualism myth is rooted in the idea that anyone can, and should, achieve success entirely on their own, relying on personal grit and determination. This might sound like an empowering notion, but it ignores the reality that no one operates in a vacuum. Everyone at some point has needed help from others be it emotional, financial, or practical. No one is fully atomized even in modernity, we must collaborate. If you value your own family, advantaging them at any point should be a goal, particularly earlier in life. One could easily make the case we’ve persuaded the middle class not to think like this, which basically ensures the rich/upper class easily retains their positions of power.
Skyrocketing housing prices, overwhelming student debt, stagnating wages, and precarious job markets are just a few of the hurdles younger generations are encountering, as the ladder continues to be pulled up on class mobility. It’s going to get much worse when AI replaces the need for many jobs across industries. The playing field is no longer level (if it ever was) and has tilted steeply against younger cohorts. It’s no surprise then that birth rates are declining. Raising children is prohibitively expensive and without the multigenerational support that was once more common, many young adults feel unable to start families. How broken a population to not be able to see across time and invest in the family, and it’s honestly an empty existence to want a vacation home instead of grandkids. Someone pointed out to me financially successful people aren’t having as many kids either: it’s true, because we have broken values in addition to financial hardship. We need to fix both.
It’s bizarre to think about the trend of withholding help someone could provide for their offspring if they have already accumulated more than they will ever need. When we stigmatize parents who financially or emotionally support their grown children, it slows progress, and in a society where most policies are biased to keeping the old in comfort at the cost of the young, things are compounded broken. Assisting your kids, particularly during their biologically fertile years, is not only natural, but rational. This isn’t coddling, it’s acknowledging the reality that for most of human history, survival and success depended on family units pooling their resources to get by. It is odd everyone has been gaslit against doing this.
The longest-running historic family dynasty in the world is the Imperial House of Japan, also known as the Yamato dynasty. In continuous existence for over 2,600 years, and they financially support their kids. Americans cannot comprehend this type of thinking. There’s actually nothing stopping any American family from doing this similarly at a smaller scale: it would be as easy as having coordination across generations for compounding and a plan to allocate liquidity for each generation. But again, few think like this.
There’s a good quote by Nassim Taleb that describes how an ideally managed society operates, at least in spirit: at the federal level → libertarian, at the state level → republican, at the local level → democrat, and in families and friend groups → socialist. This framework isn’t about any particular politician or policy today (so relax if you hate republicans or socialists etc, not meant to trigger you) it just recognizes that the closer relationships are, the more we should be inclined to help one another. Biasing toward our own families should be a core function of human cooperation and survival. “No one is coming to save you” should not be true, your family should always be there.
What is most concerning is the nihilism illustrated in the refusal to help one's children. This impulse to hoard wealth and die with the most money rather than investing in the next generation stands in stark contrast to a healthy civilization, which would hold ensuring your family’s success into the future in high regard. It’s almost as though we have entered a period of collective madness, where our obsession with individualism and self-reliance has led us into a spiritual desert. When parents are more concerned with preserving personal wealth instead of seeing their children thrive while alive, it speaks to a fundamental loss of meaning.
The way forward is simple: reject this nihilism and recognize supporting our children is not a weakness. It is an investment in the future, a continuation of the timeless human instinct to care for our own. Society must acknowledge that "rugged individualism" is a fiction. No one achieves anything alone, and those who claim otherwise are forgetting the help they received along the way. Helping our children succeed and move ahead faster is not just a responsibility, it’s a privilege and why we are here.
Bonus content: here’s a video by Scott Galloway worth watching by all that might help clarify the situation further.
As a boomer myself I find some of your statements perplexing and one-sided. When you talk about boomers hoarding wealth and clinging to more than they will ever need, are you talking about the 1%? Because a huge problem we are facing as a country, together with your valid argument that young people are facing a much more difficult environment than their parents, is that most Americans don't have enough retirement savings to survive, meaning that their "savings" will evaporate while still having many more years to live, and just when they will require expensive health care interventions like surgeries, assisted living and hospice care. In fact, 63% of Americans between 50-54 have zero (as in $0, zilch, nada) saved for retirement. When I look at friends in my cohort, I don't see many that fit your caricature of the greedy, self-absorbed boomer. Most of them are still working, and are planning to work well into their seventies and even eighties, in large part because they *are* helping their kids even at the risk of becoming insolvent themselves, and with no guarantees that their kids are going to be able (or even willing) to take care of them when they are old, sick and poor.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing man that no one is coming to save him. No man is an island. Modernity seems to have forgotten that.