Boomers are still bankrolling their adult kids — but not all are mad about it

The economic tension between younger and older Americans — millennials and Gen Zers in their 20s, 30s and 40s versus baby boomers and older Gen Xers in their 60s, 70s and 80s — has become Greco-Roman in scale.

From the younger adults’ perspective, much of their financial lives can be defined by what they lack compared to their parents: They can’t afford to buy a home, they feel like their wages have stagnated, they don’t feel “comfortable” with how much money they’ve got saved, they’re worried about AI obliterating their job prospects, consumer products aren’t quality anymore, all the furniture is cheap and, oh, right, they’ll be living through the more acute impacts of the climate crisis, explicitly caused by capitalistic oil boomers of the roaring 1980s.

For boomers, conventional wisdom says they resent millennials, that they think they’re lazy or entitled, and that, hey, maybe they could afford a home if they stopped shelling out so much on avocado toast. We imagine the average boomer as a wealthy, conservative, out-of-touch white suburbanite largely unsympathetic to millennial and Gen Z money troubles.

But new data challenges that assumption, and paints a more compassionate picture of boomers and Gen Xer parents as largely sympathetic to their kids' financial plight, and willing, sometimes gladly, to continue helping their kids cover financial odds and ends. At the same time, they’re worried their kids’ long-term dependence might jeopardize their own retirement, or even their ability to retire. Savings.com — an online coupon company that, yes, I recognize doesn’t have a classically prestigious-sounding name like The Johns Hopkins University, and I’m asking you to to challenge those frankly misogynistic assumptions about what companies with unserious names are capable of — surveyed 1,000 U.S. parents of adult children, specifically on how their contributions to their savings compared to their financial gifts to their children.

And in several anonymized survey responses shared exclusively with Salon, parents didn’t bemoan their offspring as being anything close to lazy or entitled. Instead, across all ages and incomes, parents showed “a lot more sympathy” for their adult children, as Beth Klongpayabal, analytics manager at Savings.com, described in an interview. 

“The respondents in our survey, I mean, they weren't rich people — they weren't all sitting around on their yachts replying,” Klongpayabal said. “A lot of what we're seeing is that these are people who don't want their kids to struggle the way they did.”

If one thing was made clear, it’s that there's a good reason these generations share a singular relationship. The survey found that parents providing financial support give an average of $1,474 a month, or $17,688 per year. Additionally, it found that working parents tend to contribute twice as much to their kids’ finances as they do their own retirement, and that half of the surveyed parents feel “obligated” to help their offspring with money. More than 80% of parents help pay for their adult children’s groceries; nearly half of the parents pay for their children's vacations. 

Granted, that $1,474 figure might be a bit inflated; most parents aren’t giving their adult offspring enough cash to snag a new MacBook each month. For adult children living at home, for example, the cost of what would’ve been their rent or mortgage contribution was included. Still, the figure crystallizes something we’ve all felt for a while — that boomers are giving more money to their millennial or Gen Z offspring than past generations. 

“Parents have never extended support of this scale and frequency before,” Dr. Michael Kane, a psychiatrist specialized in family medicine, told Salon in an email response to the survey.  

Despite providing unprecedented levels of support, though, most boomers weren’t resentful of their kids. Instead, they were rejecting a “kick the baby bird out of the nest” mentality, Klongpayabal said, that they felt was largely inflicted on them by their Silent Generation parents. “A lot of the parents are saying, ‘I had to struggle … and I don't want my kids to have to live through that the way I did,’” Klongpayabal said. “‘I didn't work so hard so that my kids could struggle. I worked so hard so my kids could have a better life.’”

Not all the responses were rosy. A 61-year-old father who pays for his Gen Zers' phone bill and college tuition described the dependence as “a burden.” And a 72-year-old woman who covers some of her 45-year-old’s discretionary spending described their current financial relationship as one in which her grown kid “constantly (asks) for small loans.” 

“I looked at her spending, and it was just her daughter apparently asking for money here and there,” Klongpayabal said. It added up to around $200 a month, she added. In the respondents’ additional answers that Klongpayabal described, the 72-year-old said she was in a lower-income bracket, and while she sometimes talks to her daughter about money, she’s still “knocking her door down.”

“She's exhausted,” Klongpayabal said.

Klongpayabal, 49, designed the Savings.com survey, and lives in Dallas with her husband and four of their grown kids — one a millennial and three Gen Z stepkids — all of whom went straight into the workforce after high school. “I am one of these people which I never expected to be when we started this research,” she said.

Part of her interest in the subject comes, naturally, from her own personal engagement with the material. And if the research shows this is a widespread reality among most people with adult children, it’s useless to subscribe to outdated expectations about what success looks like, she said — while also making sure you aren’t jeopardizing your own future.

“Equal isn't always fair when it comes to the children being cared for, or if their needs are different,” she said. “For all of my kids, as long as they're making progress toward a goal — as long as we're working toward that, and it's productive, then I think I am being successful in launching them.”

It’s not exactly an ideal time for boomers to feel like perennial bank accounts, though. An estimated 58.8% of them are delaying their retirements due to financial stress. In 2024, 60% of boomers became eligible for full Social Security retirement benefits, but only 10% were fully retired. More than half have less than $250,000 in retirement savings, according to a 2024 study from the Retirement Income Institute and the Alliance for Lifetime Income, and will have to “rely primarily on Social Security as a source of income.” Those benefits are expected to be around $22,000 a year, according to AARP. 

“Boomer parents often feel torn between love, responsibility and fear,” Melissa Cox, a certified financial planner at Future Focused Wealth in Dallas, told Salon. “On one hand, they genuinely want to help. They see their kids navigating higher housing costs, student loans and stagnant wages, and they remember how hard it was even when things were 'easier.'”

“But on the other hand,” she said, “many of these same parents quietly tell me they’re afraid their death has become their kids' financial plan — and that's a terrifying position to be in.”

To that end, some survey respondents set firmer boundaries. 

“In this economy, I can barely support myself,” one wrote. “All I can do is guide and give advice.”

“Unless there's an emergency, of course — I’ll always be there for emergencies,” they added, I imagine with a sweet, frenetic energy, the way I’d picture it coming from my mother.