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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]
It’s complicated because she is this way due to the way your parents have trained her to be.

If your parents CAN help her, it would be nice, though.

From another side, my parent (other parent died young) was well off, but would not help me at all because my step parent was so adamant that I learn to stand on my own two feet. This meant student loans for me, and when I graduated I worked my new job AND a non-paying night nanny job that gave me free board until I could save enough for down payments on an apartment. Parent would not help with dental treatment I needed in my early 20s at that time, and would not pay for plane tickets for me to come home for holidays, so I stopped going back and haven’t seen them for years. There were some other financial emergencies, for essential things, not luxuries, because I had really high student loan payments too, and parent would not help with any of those. Parent has a beach house and travels internationally with new family regularly. It has really damaged our relationship, and maybe I am ungrateful because I really did have a good childhood, I guess, but at the same time I am now planning to help my own child as much as I can, including with a nicer apartment, because I want them to live in comfort and not worry and stress all the time during a period in their life when I want them to enjoy, socialize, and meet people. So I guess I will be like your parents? It’s better than the alternative.[/quote]

I am curious.  Why did you expect your parents to pay for your plane tickets home for holidays if you were choosing to live so far away?   I am willing to help our 20 something with things like emergency dental care (and we fully paid for college) but I am not inclined to subsidize plane tickets home since DC has chosen to live across the country.     That's part of owning your adult choices.  We also have 4 kids, so it is not a precedent I want to set---we will fly home anyone who is in school but I'm not going to shell out $2K in plane tickets every thanksgiving and Christmas for those in the work world. [/quote]

NP. I had a different situation than OP, but we moved away from our hometowns after college. One set of parents are a plane ride away, the other are a long drive.

Parents who were a plane ride away took a similar perspective, that they were never going to subsidize our travel home, kind of believing that it was a poor choice for us to move away. The reality is that we lived where we needed to in order to launch our careers.

You couple that attitude with the fact that we had absolutely no money in our early years, partially due to some uncovered medical expenses they didn’t know about, and it really left us in a place where we didn’t feel responsibility to go into debt in order to see them. So we didn’t. Overtime, the relationship grew more distant. We’re 20 years into our relationship now and we go home about once every 5 years.

So, you’re free to take the attitude you want, but keep in mind that might mean your kids stop coming home. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you if you have 4 kids?[/quote]

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