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In discussing Fingerman and colleagues’ fine paper on relationships between young adults and their parents (Chap. 5), we devote our response to a probe of the notion of young adults’ need for support from their parents and families. We wish to look at some of the implications for families of Settersten’s point (Chap. 1) that our culture treats the transition to adulthood as a “private trouble” for families to manage on their own. As a consequence, parents must figure out for themselves what emotional, practical, and financial assistance their adult children need and deserve. We consider the ambiguity surrounding young adults’ versus children’s needs for ­family assistance, the manifestation of these issues in policies for vulnerable populations of young adults, and some insights from Fingerman and colleagues about how families respond. We also offer some intriguing evidence about how parents’ perceptions of need are shaped by offspring behavior and the connection between parental assistance and broader family dynamics. Finally, we present analyses of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health; Harris, 2009) and from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH; Sweet, Bumpass, & Call, 1988).

Perhaps the most forceful insight emerging from the wealth of research on the transition to adulthood in the last 15 years is the importance of early adults’ relationships with their parents and families. As Arnett (2000) so effectively articulated, the lengthening transition brings an extended period of autonomy, independence, and freedom that allows many early adults to explore a variety of potential futures. Yet the longer period after high school and before fully adopting adult roles and responsibilities is also a time of limited resources, as young adults must make do without adult incomes of their own, without the emotional support of a spouse, and so forth. Thus, dependence on families continues throughout the transition to adulthood, as needs for various forms of support do not suddenly disappear, but only decline, more gradually for some young adults than for others (Settersten, Furstenberg, & Rumbaut, 2005).

Fingerman and colleagues begin with examples that illustrate this point well. These three young adults from very different circumstances all receive extensive and valuable assistance from family members. The importance of the support is especially vivid for Eleesha, who is aided by a former stepfather because her biological parents cannot do so.

Yet the continuing dependence of young adults on their parents can also be viewed in a less sympathetic light. As Fingerman and colleagues also note, the national media typically portray this extended dependence as a failure that arises either because over-involved parents are unwilling to let their children grow up or because young adults refuse to accept normal responsibilities.

Both perspectives on parental assistance clearly demonstrate Settersten’s point that, in the USA today, managing the transition to adulthood is a “private trouble.” Young adults and their families bear the primary responsibility of providing for the needs of daily life in the post-high school years. Various limited forms of governmental or institutional assistance can play a role for some, such as scholarships for college students or TANF for poor mothers, but young adults who must rely on that assistance are at a considerable disadvantage compared to their peers who have abundant family support.

Policy as a Window on the Transition to Adulthood as a Private Trouble

To get a sense of our culture’s (and our country’s) uncertainty about needs for parental support during the transition to adulthood, consider the contrasting and very explicit standards governing the parenting of children below the age of majority. Our laws about child neglect require parents to provide food, clothing, shelter, supervision, and education for their children. Though the specifics of how parents accomplish these things may be private matters, these laws make clear that failing to accomplish them is very much a public concern. Parents who do not adequately parent their children in these ways risk being found neglectful in a court of law and losing their parental custody. The state can then act in loco parentis, taking over the role of the parent. These legal standards were adopted throughout the USA in the early twentieth century (Whitehead & Lab, 2009), and their continuation shows widespread agreement in the USA that children have these needs and that parents are the ones who should meet them.

We have no such laws about parents’ obligations to provide for youth beyond the age of majority, much less what their needs would be. We suspect that the absence of such laws accurately mirrors the sentiments of the public and that there is broad agreement that parents should have no legal obligation to provide for young adult children. At the same time, the public appears to expect families to continue providing at least some support (Schwartz, 2009). Neighbors and friends would likely take a dim view of parents who kicked a son or daughter out of the house for good without another dime the day after high school graduation, especially if that graduate had not been particularly troublesome. There is also evidence of normative expectations for support in arenas such as the financial aid standards applied by colleges, which assume parents will assist at a level depending on their means. Of course parents may or may not choose to meet those guidelines.

In retrospect at least, the lack of guidance about parents’ support of young adult offspring did not seem so problematic in the 1950s and 1960s, when the transition to adulthood was quick, and well-paying jobs were available for high school graduates. Parents face a more difficult problem in the lengthening transition to adulthood in recent decades. What is too much or too little help when marriages and well-paying jobs have not arrived by the age of 24 or 27 or 30?

The nature of the disjunction between expectations for support of children versus young adults is dramatically apparent in our policies concerning vulnerable populations. One of us (Osgood) served as lead editor for a volume on the transition to adulthood for vulnerable populations (Osgood, Foster, Flanagan, & Ruth, 2005). The book focused on seven groups served by government agencies or programs as children and adolescents, such as youth in foster care, special education, or juvenile justice and youth with physical disabilities or mental health problems. Those government programs exist because as a society we collectively judge that children with those problems, and by implication their families, deserve assistance. Yet eligibility for that assistance ends upon leaving childhood, typically defined as reaching age 18 or 21.

The major theme emerging from the book was that this eligibility cliff is increasingly problematic as the transition to adulthood grows longer. The vulnerable populations all continue to face greater challenges than other youth through this period. Meanwhile, studies such as that of Fingerman and colleagues (Chap. 5) and Schoeni and Ross’ (2005) financial analyses of families’ assistance show that young adults without special problems typically receive very substantial support in many forms. Though the vulnerable populations have greater needs, they typically come from families with limited resources or families unlikely to provide support.

Interestingly, changes in policies for vulnerable populations suggest a growing recognition that the transition to adulthood is not strictly a private trouble. The first change was in the area of special education; young adults became eligible for educational assistance well into their 20s (Levine & Wagner, 2005). Notably, this is a domain in which middle-class parents have been effective advocates. More recently, federal and state governments have been revising policies for youths in foster care, an especially interesting group because the state has assumed total responsibility for their care (Osgood, Foster, & Courtney, 2010). Hearings on the topic show a growing recognition that a total termination of support at age 18 is not adequate fulfillment of that parental responsibility. Accordingly, various states are now experimenting with ways of extending support for additional years in ways that mix increasing independence for young adults with obligations to be productively involved with work, college, or other training.

How Do Families Manage the Private Trouble of the Transition?

Fingerman and colleagues offer a wealth of information about how families respond to the “private trouble” of their young adults’ transition to adulthood. They show that, fortunately, relations between parents and young adult offspring typically are positive and that they have relatively frequent contact. In fact, relationships become more positive as offspring move out of adolescence and into adulthood. Yet this age range also is especially characterized by ambivalence, with positive feelings accompanied by distress and concern, especially for parents of young adults who are not meeting with success. This ambivalence can be seen as one sign of parents’ continuing to view their young adult children’s success as their own problem as well.

Importantly, Fingerman and colleagues’ research also shows that families differ widely in the quality of relationships between parents and young adults and in the nature and amount of parental support. They find social class an especially important predictor, with wealthier parents providing more financial support, especially to pay for college, as well as more practical support. Because their children often are away at college, wealthier parents also have less direct contact and more telephone contact with them.

We took particular note of Fingerman and colleagues’ observation that differences in perceived need and support of parents toward young adults are not strictly a matter of differences between families, but also track differences among offspring within families. This suggests that we need to understand how parents form perceptions of offspring need and the consequences of those processes for relationships within families. We next turn to the possibility that young adults take an active role in shaping parents’ definitions of their need.

Grown Offspring as a Source of Parents’ Perceptions of Their Need

Past work has revealed both between- and within-family differences in the prevalence and amount of parental support of young adult offspring (Siennick, 2011; Suitor, Pillemer, & Sechrist, 2006). As Table 8.1 shows, among Add Health families containing similarly aged sibling pairs, and whether the measure of help is transfers of money or coresiding with offspring, approximately one-third of the time parents helped one grown child but not the other. Clearly, parents of multiple grown offspring sometimes treat each offspring differently. This suggests that they evaluate different grown children as having different needs. How do parents know what grown children need?

Table 8.1 Past-year parental assistance received by close-in-age young adult Add Health siblings
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Perhaps parents, like many secondary data analysts, focus on readily observable indicators of offspring need. For example, studenthood, unemployment, and being unmarried are fairly concrete signals of offspring resources and expenses, and all three positively predict parental support and sibling differences in the receipt of support (Hogan, Eggebeen, & Clogg, 1993; Rossi & Rossi, 1990; Siennick, 2011; Suitor et al., 2006). Yet not all triggers of parental support are obviously public knowledge. Offsprings’ earnings predict support (Rossi & Rossi, 1990; Siennick, 2011). So do their health, drug and alcohol, and legal problems (Suitor et al., 2006). Grown children’s self-reports of their criminal behavior actually are more robust predictors of parental assistance than are their arrest records or conviction histories, which are more public proclamations of deviance (Siennick, 2011).

Mysteriously, the association between grown children’s problems and their receipt of parental assistance is not easily explained by our standard set of “triggers” of support. The left-hand sets of bars in Fig. 8.1 show the advantage in parents’ practical support enjoyed by young adults who have versus have not been in trouble with the police, according to their parents. The right-hand sets show the similar advantage in financial support enjoyed by young adults who have versus have not committed a crime in the past year, by their own report. For each data source, we present the bivariate (unadjusted) offender–nonoffender difference and the (adjusted) difference that remains when we account for family characteristics and several “child status” variables, namely, indicators of family formation, employment, and student status (in both data sets) and of offspring earnings, addiction treatment, and criminal conviction (in the Add Health data). These indicators do little to explain the gap in either type of support. To what else about these children might parents be responding?

Fig. 8.1
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Offender–nonoffender differences in receipt of parental assistance, with and without adjustments for offspring demographic characteristics and need. Note: Add Health analyses adapted from Siennick (2011)

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We see room for the useful integration of theories of intergenerational exchange and theories of the individual capacities that help youths to harness their environments in navigating this transitional age. As scholars we measure, and thus “see,” parents’ active scaffolding of young adults’ development, but we should not forget that young adults may play an active and evocative role in support transactions. Part of this role may involve shaping parents’ perceptions of their need. Kerr and Stattin (2000) and Stattin and Kerr (2000) suggest that parents know much of what they know about their children only because their children have disclosed it to them. Parents’ perceptions of need could be influenced by grown children’s proclivity to volunteer information, admit failures, or even complain, exaggerate, or lie about their circumstances. The more negative items on this list tend to co-occur with problem behavior (e.g., Warr, 2007), but the general implications need not be negative. Students, who we know receive more support, express more willingness to ask for support in the first place (Amato, Rezac, & Booth, 1995). Perhaps offspring disclosure and sharing are part of why physical distance and parental divorce reduce the odds of parental support (Amato et al., 1995; Rossi & Rossi, 1990). Is what looks to us scholars like parental responsiveness really just as much a reflection of offspring control (cf. Cook, 2001)?

We have much to learn about the actual transactions that underlie our common measures of parental support. Qualitative and mixed-method approaches may be especially helpful for examining who initiates support transactions, the extent of offspring input, and the content and emotional valence of these kitchen table conversations. Such research also could shed important light on the personal qualities or techniques that help young adults activate their latent safety nets.

How Are Parental Transfers Viewed by Other Family Members?

The above speculation highlights the possible role of offspring’s personal qualities in intergenerational exchange, but this exchange typically is studied as a between-household transaction rather than as a dyadic transaction. That strategy has advantages; after all, transfers increase children’s total household resources and decrease parents’ total household resources regardless of which parent does the transferring (Amato et al., 1995). However, a household-level approach may gloss over differences between the multiple interwoven dyads within the family. If young adults’ need is subjective and defined in part through observation and interaction, then might not different relatives arrive at different evaluations of that need? And given Fingerman and colleagues’ finding that parental assistance can lower the well-being of the assisting parent, could this assistance have broader implications, even for relatives who are not directly involved in the transfer?

What transpires between two family members, and the extent to which those events are coordinated with the needs of other family members, may well influence broader family dynamics. In divorced and blended families, not only may dyadic relations become more numerous and more complex, but also one biological parent typically ends up shouldering most of the burden of supporting grown offspring (Amato et al., 1995). In intact younger families, spousal disagreement over childrearing practices predicts marital conflict (Cui & Donnellan, 2009; Cui, Donnellan, & Conger, 2007). By our calculation, 20% of young adult Add Health respondents who live with two parents and received past-year parental transfers say that only one of their parents gave them money. What do the other parents think of these transfers? Are they even aware of them?

Parental support also has implications for recipients’ relationships with siblings. In childhood, siblings’ acceptance of parental favoritism may depend on whether they perceive legitimate reasons for the inequality (McHale & Pawletko, 1992). Do grown siblings who receive different amounts of support share parents’ appraisals of their relative neediness? Even if parental support of grown children is not a zero-sum exercise, and increases in support of one child do not necessarily mean reductions in support of another, unequal treatment still may inspire jealousy between siblings (Brody, 1998; McHale, Crouter, McGuire, & Updegraff, 1995). Adults who report current and historical maternal favoritism in their families feel less loved by their grown siblings (Suitor et al., 2009). By differentially supporting “needy” offspring, do parents unwittingly set the stage for negative relationships among their grown children? The bivariate association shown in Fig. 8.2 suggests that this may be the case. Unequal parental assistance is associated with less supportive sibling relationships, especially in the eyes of the nonrecipient sibling. Siblings also report having less supportive relationships with each other when neither is supported by their parents. By studying parental support within its broader relational context, scholars could enhance our knowledge both of young adult development and of family relations during an important part of the lifespan.

Fig. 8.2
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Individual siblings’ reports of sibling supportiveness, by receipt of financial aid from parents. Notes: Range  =  0–4 (never – very often turns to sibling for help); all mean differences are significant at p  <  0.10 or lower

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Conclusion

Treating the transition to adulthood as a private trouble presents all families with the problem of determining whether young adults have “enough” or need additional support. Multiple family members may be stakeholders in these transactions, and assistance to one young adult could mean that less is available for another or for parents’ retirement accounts. Furthermore, the example of vulnerable populations shows that the stakeholders go beyond immediate relatives to society at large. It is in society’s interest not only that vulnerable groups succeed, but that all young adults succeed. But meeting needs comes with costs that the citizenry appears reluctant to pay in the current political climate.

What does public angst about young adults being overly dependent on parents’ support tell us? In our view, it indicates a problem with contemporary norms about young adults’ needs and parents’ obligations, and we see two likely sources of this problem. First, traditional norms are out of synch with the reality of the transition to adulthood because the available opportunities do not allow young adults to provide for themselves at the level traditionally expected. Second, in the face of the lengthening transition to adulthood, agreement has broken down about standards for self-sufficiency versus dependence on parents. What works for some families is unacceptable to others. What some young adults feel they need, their own parents may view as inappropriate and undeserved (perhaps even while providing it). All of these factors make relations between parents and young adults a fascinating intersection among social change, social structure, and the agency of the parties involved. It remains to be seen whether and how these norms, our policies, and the lives of young adults will evolve in coming decades.

Acknowledgment

Funding for this research and resulting publication was provided in part by the Florida State University Council on Research and Creativity through a First Year Assistant Professor award (to Siennick). This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by Grant # P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due to Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health Web site (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from Grant # P01-HD31921 for this analysis.