U.S. parents made history recently, but not in a way they anticipated or likely celebrated.
In its third year of reporting, the study tracked 1,000 parents of adult children across the nation.
That financial support doesn’t come cheap. The study estimates that parents pay, on average, $1,474 per month to support their adult children. That dollar amount is up 6 percent from the 2024 Savings.com study.
- Eighty-three percent of parents help cover their adult kids’ monthly groceries, 65 percent help with cell phones, and 46 percent pay for vacations.
- Parents do include qualifiers with regular payments to their kids. The study noted that 77 percent of parents attach conditions to their payments.
- Approximately 50 percent of U.S. moms and dads have “sacrificed their financial security to help their grown kids financially, and most supporting parents feel obligated to help their kids with money,” the report added. Additionally, working parents who support grown kids “contribute over [two times] more money each month to their adult children than they do to retirement funds.”
- Groceries, cell phone bills, college tuition, housing, and health care top the list of areas covered by what Savings.com refers to as the “Bank of Mom & Dad.”
- Condition-wise, parents are tasking their adult children to get and maintain a job, pursue an education, and contribute to household bills (when living at home) as payment qualifiers.
Why Parents Feel They Have to Step Up
While parents have every right to financially support their adult children, the larger question is why they do so and why they risk their own financial futures."It’s a mix of love, pressure, and economic reality,” Melissa Cox, a financial planner at Future Focused Wealth in Dallas, Texas, said by email. “Many parents genuinely want to help because they see their kids facing tougher conditions, soaring housing costs, student loan debt, and stagnant wages.”
Yet beyond that mindset, there's often guilt and fear. “Parents don’t want to see their children struggle, even if that means sacrificing their own retirement goals,” Cox noted. “Unfortunately, it's become a quiet crisis where helping has shifted into enabling without an end date.”
Economics has something to do with the issue, as well.
“The underlying issue is that, for the first time in American history, older parents are wealthier than their children, and often by quite a bit,” Brandon Blakeley, co-founder at Mirador Living, a senior care company in San Jose, California, said via email. “Wealth hasn’t grown from one generation to the next and that’s a major shift from the past.”
Additionally, rising housing costs, student debt, and wages that haven’t kept up with inflation have made it much harder for young adults to reach financial independence. “Parents are stepping in not just out of generosity but because the economic reality has changed radically,” he added.
Downside risks come in the life lessons department, too.
“The upside is parents are showing generosity and love, but the downside is, if not managed carefully, kids may learn dependence instead of resilience,” Cox said. “Worse, I often hear parents worry that their passing will be the financial plan their children are counting on. That’s heartbreaking. Helping is meaningful, but the healthiest families are the ones that help while also fostering accountability and self-sufficiency.”