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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]
Anonymous wrote:

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.

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, [b]partially due to some uncovered medical expenses they didn’t know about[/b], 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]

I would be more willing to help out with plane tix if I felt like DC was choosing to live where they are for career reasons.  But DC hasn't been responsible post-college in terms of delaying any self-gratification in order to build a stable adult foundation.  Extremely picky about looking for jobs in their field of study; unwilling to relocate in order to get a good starter job.  Instead, it's all about living in a party location, drinking a lot and smoking a ton of weed, and a series of minimum wage jobs.  And being resentful that their parents won't just subsidize their living expenses, even though we've been clear that we would subsidize further education/training.      As opposed to DC's younger sib, who just graduated and got a good "starter" job in their field of study, albeit not a particularly high paying one.  I am much more inclined to offer holiday plane tix to younger child, who appears to be wisely using the advantages they received (fully paid for education, car) because I don't want to subsidize what I view as imprudent choices by elder DC.   I also don't want to feel like I have to bribe our kids to come see us.  I chose to live a plane ride (or 9 hour drive) from my parents, also for career reasons, and I paid for my own travel home to see them, because I loved them and realized that they had already spent a lot in getting me to adulthood.   Part of having 4 kids is evaluating the precedential value of each parenting decision.  As this board frequently demonstrates, subsidizing the financially irresponsible just eventually leads to resentment by the adult kids who make responsible choices.

Why didn't you tell your parents about the medical expenses?    It doesn't seem fair to resent your parents for not helping with travel expenses if they didn't have a clear picture of what your circumstances really were.  [/quote]

Thank you for the follow up post. It makes sense why you won’t pay for the kid who moved away. Although it sounds like you’re dealing with a whole other set of problems vs just a kid living in a different city. I am sorry you’re dealing with that.

We didn’t tell them because that wouldn’t have changed anything. They wouldn’t have helped, or they would have twisted what was happening to fit their narrative, which was that moving away was a dumb idea.

At their core, they are unhappy and profoundly judgmental people. At a certain point, we needed to draw a line in the sand. We may have only been in our very early 20s, but were self sufficient adults, and adults deserve privacy. We were dealing with a lot at the time, and weren’t going to direct the first spare $500 we could get our hands on towards hauling ass across the country to visit them. It was time to move on from trying to please people who will never be happy. [/quote]

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