Parents are cutting the financial cord with their adult kids later than ever. They hope it isn’t awkward.
3 min
The parents have been paying the monthly phone bill and covering rent for far longer than in prior generations. Some are helping their children with down payments to buy homes. Others are putting a roof over their kids’ heads well into their 20s and 30s to help them save because they can’t cover rising costs of living.
That comes with a price tag. More than a quarter of parents who are helping their children financially said it caused them to postpone retirement, according to a recent Credit Karma survey . More than half had to cut back on living expenses and about a third took on debt.
Feeling stretched, they are negotiating the terms of separation.
Nancy Clark and her then-28-year-old son, Reid Clark, had just sat down to dinner in June 2022 when the conversation turned to when he would move out. The topic had come up before, but this time they decided to set a date one year later.
Nancy, now 60, said she remembers thinking: “I know that becoming financially independent needs to feel a little painful.”
Reid set off on his own last June. He ditched a job managing his family’s three ice cream shops in New Hampshire for a gig as the assistant to a professional ice hockey team’s mascot in St. Paul, Minn. He also works at an M&M’s store.
Nancy bought him groceries when he moved in and occasionally gives $50. By this June, Reid will no longer get any financial help if he’s short. He hasn’t needed to hit up his mum for rent money in the past few months. “I want to chart my own path in life,” he said.
Taking such a gradual approach and framing the conversation around gaining financial independence give it a positive spin, said Rocky Fittizzi , a wealth strategies adviser at Bank of America Private Bank. Telling your children you’re cutting them off suggests it is a punishment.
Many adult children are living at home, or moving back in, to save money. The cost of food and rent have jumped, and more college graduates are saddled with student debt. The share of 25-to-29 year-olds with student loans rose to 43% in 2022 from 28% in 1992. The rise was even bigger for those between 30 and 34, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center.
Some 20% of men and 12% of women between 25 and 34 years old lived at home last year, far higher than two decades ago, according to Census Bureau data.
During the pandemic, layoffs and money strains forced some adult children and their parents to live together and share finances, said Arne Boudewyn at Insights Squared Consulting Group, a family wealth consulting company.
Worries over losing the close bonds forged during those years may add to the stress of ending monetary help, financial advisers said.
“Letting go is often harder for parents these days because we need to feel needed as much as we want to feel wanted,” said Bobbi Rebell , the founder of Financial Wellness Strategies, which gives workshops for parents about how to teach their children to be financially responsible.
Pam Lucina still remembers the day about 30 years ago when her father told her she was off the payroll. She was in her first year of law school. Her parents had paid for her undergraduate education. Because she assumed they would pay for law school too, she had chosen a pricey school.
She graduated with $40,000 in student debt and couldn’t afford to contribute to her 401(k) for about five years.
“I know that my parents sacrificed to give me what they did and I’m grateful for all of their past support but I wish I had been more prepared,” said Lucina, 52, now an executive vice president at Northern Trust .
Lucina said the experience was a main reason she became a financial adviser. She has three daughters, and recently asked the oldest to complete her own college financial-aid form.
She tells clients that even if they have good intentions when cutting off their kids, it can feel to the children as if their parents are withholding money to punish them.
“Assure them that love is not contingent on finances,” she said.
There are times when financial help is necessary. With a health issue or addiction, parents often use a special needs trust, where funds typically go directly to the child’s treatment and recovery. Others may opt to help children temporarily after a layoff.
But financial advisers said parents need to set boundaries.
Ashley Kaufman ’s parents told her she would need to move out of their Manhattan apartment, where she was living rent-free, once she saved $100,000 for a down payment on her own place.
The cybersecurity consultant hit her goal by the time she was 25, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to move out right then. She enjoyed seeing her younger siblings regularly and playing with her family’s dog named Waffles, she said. Her parents encouraged her to go to some open houses anyway.
Kaufman, who is the stepdaughter of Rebell from Financial Wellness Strategies, is now 27. She bought her apartment around two years ago. She’s happy to be building equity in her place.
“I’m glad my parents gave me a little nudge,” she said.
—Julia Carpenter contributed to this article .
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AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
