Parental Support Laws (cont'd)

Next Sharon shared the story of her husband’s parents. In the early 1970’s her future father-in-law divorced her future mother-in-law while there were still three teenage children at home. In the wake of the family breakup her mother-in-law chose not to seek employment. Instead she lived exclusively on child support and alimony. Eventually when her alimony stopped, she remarried. And shortly after remarrying, she denied her son (Sharon’s eventual husband) temporary lodging despite having an empty bedroom and a house within walking distance of a new job he had managed to land during the terrible 1973-74 recession after months of unemployment. It was at that moment she said her husband realized virtually all sense of obligation to assist him from both of his parents had vanished forever.

When I asked Sharon to tie these events to the aforementioned parental support laws she smiled and said, “Decades later my husband and I kept our financial commitments to put both of our children through college.” She said both children also went on to post-graduate studies and were supported in those efforts too.

“Kids don’t ask to be brought into this world,” she explained. “Their parents choose to bring them into the world.”

Was this baby boomer somewhat bitter about being cut off financially by her parents while still in school? “At first I was shocked,” she admitted. “But without encountering those financial hardships then, we might have never adopted the necessary attitudes of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and a sense of thrift that shaped who we are today,” she explained.

Next Sharon offered her opinion on parental support laws. “I find it a bit presumptuous that any government, state or federal would dump a parent’s bills on their kids,” she said.

“Our parents established the precedent regarding family financial obligations,” she reasoned. “Those were legitimate decisions associated with their freedoms as parents,” she said.
“Why should wouldn’t those principles of freedom be applied differently now?” she asked.

For a brief moment during our discussion we wondered if mandatory parental support laws are actually constitutional. However, after recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court it has become pretty clear there are no constitutional protections from any cost shifting schemes dreamed up by big governments in America.