Should parents be "paid back" for sacrifices they made when raising their children?

[FurtherShowers]

My sister's MIL expects to be paid back financially and emotionally for raising her (now adult) DS. She will openly say "I sent you to a good school, I made sacrifices" etc and believes it is the job of her adult children to support her financially. This includes paying for her holidays, credit cards for discretionary spending, paying various non essential bills etc.

My sister and her DH have two children and my sister is sick of family money being spent on her MIL's luxuries. MIL has another son who is single and gives her a proportion of his wage. I think it's crazy that MIL accepts this, she is young enough and for enough to work and does work part time and has more than enough to cover all of her bills. The money she takes from her children is purely for luxuries and it's upwards of £10k a year (at least).

My sister believes all their spare money (they have less than her MIL and many more outgoings) should be spent on their children, but MIL insists mothers should be financially "looked after" by their sons. To clarify my sister and her husband, and her other son, are financially less secure than MIL.

I am angry on my sister's behalf and want to support her talking to her DH who I believe doesn't realise this isn't normal, but first of all wondered if it is normal in some families and if people see it as the right thing to do?

That is fucking mental!

Gosh no. I would not be getting into that arrangement at all.

She chose to have children so presumably had a plan around how she would find their upbringing and education.

On a moral level if she needed help that's a different story but the idea of direct debits is madness.

I sometimes joke to mine that when they're rich and famous they can set me up in a wee granny annex in the grounds of their fancy houses! But I don't genuinely expect anything from them. Obviously if I was really struggling and they were doing well I'd hope they would want to help me, but I'd always help them too if it was the other way around. I just can't see why someone would want to see their kids / grandkids go without, while taking money from them??

Id at least want to see it balance sheet, a list of all the money they spent and the sacrifices they made, I might want some compensation for any genetic defects that they passed on to me, I mean why wasn't I taller with better teeth, they should pay me back for that shouldn't they?

It soon becomes obvious they don't have a leg to stand on!

Dear god no, I don't expect payback. What a ridiculous idea.

What. The. Actual. Fuck.

Ohh yes I've told mine that I expect looking after when they become rich. Not holding out much hope.

Who expects payback from their offspring?? That is fucking crazy!

Can they claim from her for therapy???

I would actually be ashamed to have to rely on my kids for handouts. ... ok my dad used to tap me up for a tenner to go for a pint when i was first working but he gave up work to look after mum when she had a stroke so i didn't begrudge him that!

What?!

I too am angry on your sister’s behalf! This isn’t normal, or the “right” thing to do. What a selfish broad (MIL). Your sister is right. MIL asking her adult children to fund her lifestyle means the adult children are taking away money that should be going to raising their own children. Funding Mom’s life means her sons are compromising their own retirements. Is that why they’re working? To cater to Mommy Dearest and her need for luxuries? When will they get to retire? Ever?

I will work as long as I possibly can and am saving my money specifically so that I don’t become a burden to anyone. I am funding my own retirement and won’t expect my children to use their own money for my use. This is not a quid pro quo, “Well, I did for you when you were children, now you have to do for me in my second childhood” kind of thing. That is not what the parent-child relationship is about!

Sounds like the mama’s boys are firmly wrapped around their mommy’s finger. I hope your sister can talk some sense into her husband!

I'd say don't be an arsehole, now, and we'll choose your nursing home carefully.

Nope

My job is to launch my child into the world and to do my best to put myself in a position of not being a burden on her in the future.

My DH worked for years in his dad's business every weekend and every holiday period he had (his work closes for 3 weeks over xmas) from about the time he was 14 then worked most of them but took some off until we had our first child.

He never got paid a cent ever and he sees it as normal, I see it as his parents making their money off their sons back. He borrowed a few thousand from his parents for his house deposit and had to pay back every cent, a deposit he could easily afford if they had paid him the hours that he worked, this he also has no problem with. His parents have lived rent/mortgage free in one of my DH's grandparents houses for the last 30+ years yet they always act like they are broke. We will never agree on it and I imagine your DS and her DH may be the same.

It is a pretty shite parent who takes money from their kids unless they are in dire straits in my opinion.

Apart from having no say whatsoever in the matter of their birth, it isn't some big selfish conspiracy among children which makes them decide that, instead of going to the effort of working for their keep, they're going to be parasites on their parents - they are not in the position to be able to work. Only adults work (yes, teenagers can do very limited hours in a very small range of jobs) and children are pre-adults, who spend most of their time directly or indirectly preparing for their lives as adults. This is common sense to the vast majority of people.

How is it difficult to understand that having children is a joy and/or a burden that you willingly take on. if you don't want that joy/burden, you simply don't have children in the first place.

You represented that joy/burden to your own parents and, in turn, your own children will take on the joy/burden of their own children.

Accepting kindnesses and a little extra assistance in your old age - financial and other - from an adult child who offers them out of love and can easily afford them without their own family suffering - is a nice, normal dynamic of a loving family.

Demanding (or even expecting) significant, guaranteed sums of money from your adult children which means that they, their spouse and their own children go without - is odd, selfish and completely contrary to the natural order of things.

Many would say that an adult who has lived for 60+ years and has/had the full necessary health and capacity to make themselves financially secure and provided for, yet has nevertheless opted to put themselves still in the same financial position as a young, dependent child who has not yet had those mature years available to them to enable them to become self-sufficient, is the very definition of failure.

Your sister needs to kick off about this pronto and give her dh an ultimatum. Granny gets nothing or she leaves.

He borrowed a few thousand from his parents for his house deposit and had to pay back every cent, a deposit he could easily afford if they had paid him the hours that he worked, this he also has no problem with.

Although, IMHO, it's churlish to expect the money back at all from your own child, if you don't actually need it and assuming that any siblings have been treated similarly fairly, I could see his parents viewing it as a valuable life lesson for him to learn, that you work to earn your way through life and don't expect handouts from anybody once you are old enough and able to support yourself.

However, any lesson of this sort completely crumbles to less than nothing of any worth at all if: A, the people who are benefiting from your labour are not paying you for it; and B, those same people are in fact actively and wilfully demonstrating that they DO expect handouts that they don't actually need in order to live their lives (and comfortable ones, at that); never mind lying about/denying that they do this.

Your sister needs to kick off about this pronto and give her dh an ultimatum. Granny gets nothing or she leaves.

Absolutely - or, otherwise, assuming that her parent(s) is/are still alive, they get a guaranteed equal amount given to them (ideally backdated to make it fair); unless he has a problem with this, of course....

That's crazy. We do help out MIL to the tune of a few hundred pounds a month BUT that's because she can't manage without it. We also pay her flights to come and see us because otherwise she couldn't afford it. We wouldn't help out if she didn't need it though! We didn't when she was younger and working.

I’d bet a pound to a penny he didn’t have a great childhood anyway with a mother like that.

I’d be ashamed to take money from my children unless they’d won the lottery or were millionaires and it wasn’t going to affect their standard of living.

@webuiltthisbuffetonsausageroll ...... did you miss the part where I said he worked for his parents for years and years on paying jobs while he himself got paid nothing? They would owe him over a hundred thousand dollars if they paid him the hours he worked.

My grandmother helped my parent buy their first house.
My parents gave me and sister deposits for our homes.
We've just finished putting our 2nd child through uni.

I think your ds's strongest argument is:

We need to save a deposit for a house and once we get our house then we can recess.

And of course have a few holidays for their kids.

I couldn't go on holiday knowing my grandchildren couldn't have a holiday - I'd be paying for every one.

Oh go on, play her game. Invoice her for the cost of any parental shortcomings. Emotional trauma £xxx, Therapy, years of it £xxx, not giving pocket money £xxx. Rack it up to ££££s and tell her the gravy train is over until it's settled.

@webuiltthisbuffetonsausageroll ...... did you miss the part where I said he worked for his parents for years and years on paying jobs while he himself got paid nothing? They would owe him over a hundred thousand dollars if they paid him the hours he worked.

Absolutely not - I 100% agreed with you. Apologies if it wasn't clear.

They can't have it both ways - either money has to be paid back/worked off or it doesn't. He borrowed their money and subsequently paid it back as they demanded; they're taking his labour, so they have no justification whatsoever not to now pay him for it.

I think your ds's strongest argument is:

We need to save a deposit for a house and once we get our house then we can recess.

And of course have a few holidays for their kids.

Of course, you are right, but I don't think she's the kind of person who listens to 'arguments'. They should just outright tell her that she's already had a load from them, at the expense of their own families, and that they are now going to follow the natural order of things whereby the older generation supports the younger one - everybody ends up 'repaying' what they were given (if they go on to have children), but to their own children and not to their parents.

I'd also be inclined to say that, because so much of their own money is being appropriated to keep her in a much nicer lifestyle than their own family, they are unable to 'make sacrifices' for their own children - as is the normal way of the world - so they are unable to 'bank' any 'repayment' for giving their kids a great standard of living, not that they would ever actually expect or want that.