Should you give money to your adult child?
Freeloading kids, or the mother from hell?
The column we’re discussing is Slate’s Pay Dirt, Jan 08, 2025, titled “I Finally Asked My Son Why He Keeps Me Away From His Family. I’m Shocked That the Answer Involves My Wealth.”
It’s a point of pride for all advice columnists that they never respond to letters from people who invent problems so as to trick them. So in the early days of AdviceObsessed I asked, at the end of each post, whether the column I’d just discussed might be based on a fake letter.
I gave this up when one of my kids pointed out I always answered the question the same way: that the letter, unfortunately, was probably real.
But for the letter we’re discussing today, I’m bringing this practice back.
The letter-writer is “a financially comfortable but lonely widow.” She’s all but estranged from her one child and his wife. There was no wedding, and she has never met her seven-year-old granddaughter. She never complained, not wanting to be labeled an “abusive monster.”
Finally, when they spoke on Christmas, she asked her son why she was cut off. His answer “shocked” her: He and his wife thought she didn’t care about them, because she never “helped them financially.”
Her next two paragraphs are extraordinary.
The first is an account of the young couple’s financial position, which includes surgery for their child after birth, which they’re still paying off; college debt; a small apartment; no vacations; no pets, even; a bad public school in which they feel trapped; and their inability to afford the second child for whom they long. All this, though they both work in “decent” jobs.
The second is an account of her own position. It includes “only a few years” of employment; a five-bedroom house; a three-bedroom beach house; two “precious French bulldogs, who each cost more to keep healthy than a typical child;” a new car every other year; and one or two cruises a year. She never has to touch her principal.
She’s “shocked” that her son and his wife would resent her rather than ask her for money. Not, she writes, “that I necessarily would have said yes.”
So it sounds like her son read her right, doesn’t it?
Meanwhile, her daughter-in-law “comes from a poor immigrant family, yet they have a very close relationship with her parents.”
Please notice the “yet.” This couple is close to her parents, even though they’re “poor immigrants”!
So what’s the LW’s question for Pay Dirt? She asks if she’d be “rewarding my son and daughter-in-law for being greedy and materialistic” if she helped them out, “in return for more-frequent calls and the occasional visit? Or should I just write them off and leave my estate to the church?”
Pay Dirt zeros in on the emotional side of this story. “Money holds symbolic value for all of us,” it writes, “and to your son and his wife, financial support could be tied to emotional support, care, or even love.”
She urges communication: “Ask him why he didn’t reach out to ask for financial help. Ask what that help would have represented for him.”
This goes on for two long paragraphs.
AdviceObsessed’s answer to the LW is shorter: She should tell her kids she’s been stupid and blind, then write them a really big check. She should give them a key to the beach house and invite them to use it any time. She should bring them along on a cruise!
Also, she should ask the “poor, immigrant” in-laws to dinner.
My answer to Pay Dirt is even shorter: Sometimes what money means is money.
Really, this is shooting fish in a barrel, which is why AdviceObsessed wonders if it’s a real. But as I’ve said before, about letters that might be fake, it actually doesn’t matter, because the letter is only half the shocker. The other half is the answer.