Ideally,parental financial support should be joyous. What greater pleasure than helping your children onto the property ladder? But the downside is increasingly showing up in psychotherapy and counselling rooms. My colleagues report three perilous psychological themes:inequality,power and conflict.
One described the effects of inequality:young clients are experiencing deep feelings of envy and jealousy towards friends who have parents who can help. It’s poisoning their self-esteem and those relationships. “It’s a class issue,even though we don’t like talking about class differences,” he said.
The flipside is parents feeling like shameful failures because they’re unable to financially assist their children.
Another variation is when financial support between siblings is unequally distributed,spawning resentment. In one case,the youngest child felt she should receive special treatment because her older siblings were already married and owned homes. The older siblings,however,viewed this as a sense of entitlement typical of youngest children. Needless to say,the parents were in a quandary and Sunday family lunch hasn’t been quite the same.
A second presenting problem cluster is the abuse and manipulation of power by holders of the purse strings. I’ve heard cases where parents were asked to sign on as guarantors for an adult child’s loan. Their response was positive,but only if they had the final say on what was purchased and where. Another parent presumed management in their adult offspring’s purchase because “he’s not good with money”.
The problem is that these manipulations can perpetuate inappropriate parent/child dynamics. The parent maintains unhealthy control over the child,hindering their growth towards independence. And the child gets locked into feelings of obligation,and its toxic emotional cousin,resentment.