My Silver Spoon has Fed Me Good

Boomers to the Rescue: The Parents Who Pay for City Lives and How They Do It¹ was New York Magazine’s February 10th cover story. It’s all about how many people in New York get money from their parents to live, and how wealth is transferred to incur the fewest penalties. “More than at any other time in New York’s history, parent money shapes our culture,” writes journalist Madeline Leung Coleman. The articles are both insightful and vindicating for a lot of people I know, proof of a nebulous thesis about how so many people afford their homes in a city that feels like it’s running away from affordability on a daily basis.

The magazine finds fourteen people willing to divulge their financial lives: how much, how often, for what.² Check it out, it’s a real cornucopia. One psychologist estimates her family has given her ‘over a million.’ A divorced man cashes his mother’s monthly $1,000 Social Security check, with her consent. Across the board, there’s a lot of guilt, anxiety, shame, some angst. Equity is brought up once, by a social worker, naturally. Another social worker whose family of four lives with her grandparents says the following:

Personal wealth is not what you’re worth—it’s what you can activate. That’s the word I use. If you have the button, what does it matter who installed it? If you have access to it, you have access to it. And if the people who put the button there give you the green light to push it whenever you want, it becomes harder to tell the difference between a want and a need.

Is this insightful, terrifying, or both? Both probably, we’ve all been privy to someone who mistakes their wants for needs, and thinks there is something magical about it. But it always matters who installed the button. Because they own you. For the record, this woman is in a complex living situation where she takes cares of her ailing grandparents. Her husband makes minimum wage. They live on Central Park. There’s a lot of private school paid for by parents.

There’s nothing straightforward about most of these arrangements, many are complex tethers to expectations, lifestyles and unspoken standards. There are some sad stories- a musician whose brother is a heroin addict for 25 years. “At some point in family therapy, he told my mom, ‘I’m never going to get clean if you don’t stop giving me money.’ And she never stopped giving him money.” And of course there are infuriating people, like the 29 year-old who mistakes her parents’ snobbishness and control for standards and care.

So much of our dominant culture is molded by people with money, they are the voices we hear the most, often in the media or some other role of influence. Maybe that’s why these articles feel somewhat redeeming, confirmation on what many of us know in our heart of hearts. Part of the slight of hand of wealth is the ability to hide your platinum card in your Carhartts, ideally the tool pocket.

My concern is that the reliance on family money creates something to protect that is not great for the rest of us, no matter how middle class some of these people think they are. I wonder how the future of this city and country will go with so many people who have parents pulling the strings of their bank accounts.

People vote with their wallets, even if they’re full. Especially when they’re full, because they’re never full enough. That is the life they are accustomed to. It would help if people understood how to talk about money more honestly, but that comes hand in hand with admitting that this country is not a meritocracy, that the people who get ahead financially didn’t necessarily earn or deserve it, they were handed it.

Ten years ago I was the cook on a privately owned island in Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. That job allowed me access to a beautiful, weird place I otherwise never would have experienced. The island was family owned for over a hundred years, a beautiful old camp. My employer’s grandfather bought it, she and her cousins spent their summers there as children. When I worked there, she, her cousin and their respective husbands, all in their 80s, were the main funders to keep the island running, no small feat. The caretaker had a salary, the boats needed tune-ups and gas, propane needed to be purchased, the septic upgraded, repairs were a fact of life. All of their kids were about my age, maybe a bit older, they’d all come and visit and stay for as long as possible, inviting friends and family to visit.

One evening, after dinner when the kids had run off to catch the last of the sun and the adults sat around slowly drinking, I heard a phrase I wasn’t familiar with from Bill, cousin Linda’s husband who created a company with his adult children after his retirement. “From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” he said in conversation, and when I asked what it mean he explained it: The first generation creates wealth through hard work, the second generation may build upon it but by the third generation there is no money left, it had been spent.

I marveled at this statement, its very existence. At the time, as Bill touched the cuffs of his own shirt to illustrate the point to me, I thought about how I like shirtsleeves, that it was strange it was a bit of a putdown.

The entire time I worked on the island I was in possession of my employer’s credit card to pay for all the food and alcohol brought onto the island for everyone to consume. Not just for a few days, for the entire month of people coming and going, upwards of 22 people. The kids rarely bought anything. Later that week I would hear this gentleman close on a condo in Philadelphia for his 60 year old daughter to live in. She was high on edibles her daughter brought from Colorado where they were legal at the time. I stand corrected. Someone did bring something to share on the island.

1. Mommy Buy Me a House

2. People with Parents with Money