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To fully understand the concept of requiring adult children to care for their parents requires an understanding of the beginnings of filial responsibility laws and their historical ebb and flow in the United States.
The legal duties underlying the relationship between parents and minor children have been quite settled for some time. However, the reciprocal legal duties, known as filial responsibility laws, of the relationship between adult children and their parents are far from settled. They have troubled theologians, philosophers, and legislators for most of the world's recorded history. Aristotle believed a duty existed on the part of adult children towards their parents based on a theory of reciprocity. Traces of filial responsibility laws can be seen across the teachings of many religions from around the world, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Confucianism.

Filial responsibility remained solely a moral duty before it finally began to make its way into various statutes. The origins of our modern filial responsibility laws can be traced to Roman law. In 1601, England enacted the Poor Relief Act of 1601, requiring the "father and grandfather and the mother and grandmother, and the children of every poor, blind, lame, and impotent person" to support that indigent person as much as possible. During colonization, these statutes made their way to the United States. It became the backbone of early welfare systems and the later filial legislation that would be passed in the United States.
When Medicaid originally came on the scene in the twentieth-century, it was viewed as an alternative to requiring family members to support each other. Individuals favored the new Medicaid program because that took the responsibility off them and put it on the federal government. More and more dependence was put on the government. As the baby boomer generation failed to adequately provide for themselves in their elder years, the financial burden became greater and greater for the federal government. Medicaid planning began to be used by families as a way to protect inheritances at the expense of the government. Some elderly choose to transfer some of their assets to other family members in order to fall within the parameters of eligibility for Medicaid. Others convert their assets from the types that do weigh on the eligibility for Medicaid to the types that are not considered in determining eligibility.

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