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Parents have a few obligations to their children: they must feed and clothe them, provide shelter for them and love them, and they must be able to allow them to grow into responsible and mature adults. However, some parents expect their married children to help them financially. Some parents do not expect anything at all. The question of married children helping their parents financially can be answered and viewed through culture.

American culture appears to have a definitive rule that exists between children and parents. Many American parents and their grown children are alienated, perhaps because the American culture encourages that alienation. For example, when two married people are both working 40 hours a week in order to provide for their own children, they may not find it appropriate (and neither may their parents) to contribute to their parents financially.

This culture can be differentiated from others, mostly because the emphasis on family in the American culture is about self-sufficiency. In this culture, it may be more appropriate to think of one's self as self-sufficient, rather than depending on one's children (or anyone else) to contribute to one's individual responsibility for one's self. Perhaps this may be a little far-fetched, and perhaps it only touches upon small segments of the population, but the evidence for these observations is in the way American parents, in general, soon become physically and even mentally out of touch with their married children.

To provide a contrast, the Filipino culture shows otherwise. Many Filipino parents will live with their grown and married children, and many of them actually do expect something from their married children, including financial assistance. This does not imply that the parents are putting more pressure on their children on purpose. Native cultures have this exquisitely complicated relationship between parents and children, wherein the children are always considered "respectful" if they also help their parents and other family members in need. This fact does not mean that the children are servile in any way; it is of moral value, and even social value, that they help their parents who, in their younger days, also helped them. The obligation is mutual. In other words, the parents had a choice to leave their children when their children were young, and that was a moral choice. Similarly, it is also a moral choice for an adult to assist his or her parents in any way possible.

Consequently, it is a choice to help one's parents financially even when one is already married. However, that choice is largely affected by culture.

Learn more about this author, Joan Inong.
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